By ART LAWLER
June 18, 2008 11:18 am
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I don’t know whether to believe this e-mail or not.
It’s supposedly written by late night talk-show host, Jay Leno. But it could very well have been written by you, or Charles Manson, or Karl Rove.
Briefly, the text talks about the 69 percent of us who polls say are not happy with our current president.
Leno (or his impersonator) is not much of a fan of the president, either.
Still, he thinks the big problem is us, not the president.
“We’re spoiled. We’re ungrateful, and we should be perfectly content to live in the most wonderful country on earth.
In a sentence: stop whining and gloss over the bad stuff.
For reasons that some smart shrink would have to explain, we love nothing better than berating each other, especially our offspring.
We love holding ourselves up as somehow superior to those who live next door.
The rest are unappreciative, spoil bratted, morally compromised Americans, especially our neighbor’s kids.
My baby boom generation was scolded for not being more appreciative of what Tom Brokaw has now labeled The Greatest Generation.
So now we’re scolding our own kids for not being greater than we are, which they probably are.
Like most everyone else, I tip my hat to the Greatest Generation. They were my parents, and they were faced with a depression and a World War.
They came out of great adversity to achieve unheard of material success.
What’s not to love?
Just this. You don’t have to trample on the next generation in order to lift yourself even higher.
Boomer have their faults. Nobody will argue that point. Spoiled. Absolutely.
And why?
Did the Greatest Generation spare the rod and spoil the child?
And have we continued to do the same with our own offspring?
Look at the I-Pods, the Blackberries, the wide-screened televisions and virtual reality games, just to name a few. Computers have reshaped our universe.
The question isn’t so much, what’s wrong with kiddos having so much.
The question is, who invented all that stuff that enables us to spoil our children, and ourselves?
Was it the Baby Boomers, who used the good educations their parents helped to provide, their terrific minds and their willingness to work like no other group of people on earth, that made those things happen?
Lazy? Look it up.
And isn’t the X-Generation and the Y-Generation (what are they going to do when they run out of letters) who are continuing to improve the so-called quality of life.
Baby boomers have integrated the schools the Greatest Generation left segregated.
We’ve fought amongst ourselves to give civil rights to minorities, to women, to people who were ignored and harassed by the Greatest Generation.
At least they were ignored until it came time to build battle ships and fight the Nazis.
Then those who made it home were ignored and trampled on again when the soldiers came home.
Here’s my theory. Every generation is the greatest generation. But every generation does not face the same challenges.
What would the Greatest Generation have done about the terrorists — about the absence of a front line, or an identifiable enemy?
Would they have handled it better? I’m not so sure. A lot of those guys were running things during Vietnam.
Every generation is full of wonderful people, and every generation is full of horrible, ghouls, freeloaders, murderers, rapists, pedophiles, white and blue collar criminals and spoiled, spoiled brats.
Every generation also has its generous souls, people who fall on hand grenades so others can live.
Last week we lost one of the heroes of my profession when Tim Russert died suddenly of a heart attack at just 58 years of age.
He was not only the best television journalist I’ve ever watched, he was also apparently one of the nicest men, kindest fathers and appreciate family members you’ll ever find.
He was a Baby Boomer.
We Åmericans are not unhappy perse. We are unhappy with the direction the country has gone under the Bush administration, and we have every right to be.
We were lied to about weapons of mass destruction. Our children were asked to fight a war in a land that had no terrorists until we arrived.
We failed to put our resources into capturing Osama Bin Laden for reasons most of us still can’t comprehend.
We’ve lost 4,000 of our very best, who have died mostly because of an incompetent administration of an ill-chosen war of choice.
And we see our leaders bringing our kids home with missing limbs, shattered nerves, and not getting the support they need to start new lives.
Yes, we pounded our chests when the president flew onto that ship and stood there like John Wayne under a sign that said, “Mission Accomplished” in his fly suit.
Four thousand unnecessary deaths ago. No panty-waist diplomacy for us. No sir. Want to arm wrestle?
We’re unhappy because our best paid with blood and pain in a war foolishly managed and foolishly continued because of a few foolish men without military credentials, who hung on stubbornly to their foolish pride and stupid tough-guy mentality.
You don’t trade U.S. blood for overstuffed egos.
This generation, and any U.S. generation will fight to the death for this country.
But our leaders have failed us.
We will right that ship in November, like all good generations of any era have done in the greatest democracy on earth.
Copyright © 1999-2008 cnhi, inc.
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