The Modern American Believer!!!

My good friend, Steve Levin forwarded this article to me. I believe it is one of the most important offerings for Americans to study in some kind of depth about the modern American personality….a skill, unfortunately almost totally lacking among the folks described by Stephen Moore in his article.

Almost all of my clients and many of my friends are very comfortable in their living space and grasp of contemporary “Truth”. They are college graduates, unread, unaware of anything resembling history, but champion gay rights, anti Christian collectives, anti American “leadership” in anything, are devoted to Vitamin D or Vitamin C , have discovered the equinox and believe CO2 is a pollutant. If they have kids…many were sent to Breck or Blake. All go on to university, and have all sorts of discomforting complexes about being American. And they, relative to my standards are very, very financially comfortable. They are intellectually comfortable also. They are free of religion, and never bother to think about important matters. But, they know what they feel.

They adore Obama and refuse, REFUSE, to find a blemish upon him. They all hated GW. Mainly, in my view, because he was a sincere Christian, a person who had humbled himself before his “maker” to help straighten out his life. And he did so. To be a sincere Christian is to be Neanderthal according the rules of belief of the contemporary American college graduate. An insincere one is okay, for these liberated Americans laugh at the idea either Bill Clinton or Obama ever have been Christians. The Bible talk of each simply was a clever ruse to con believing conservatives to join Liberal causes…a shrewd political move.

They find no blemish because they never learned anything “American”. Attorneys, business people, the early retired, therapists, psychologists, professors, financial advisors, many financial advisors, builders, bankers, these are folks who cannot explain in any accuracy, the construction of the Federal Constitution, the reasons for separation of powers, the separation of powers itself, the struggles throughout American history of politicians, long dead, to act according to the principles of the Supreme Law of the Land, in otherwords to behave lawfully! These modern Americans feel superior. They are wealthy, confortable, and achieved all while shedding God. Their children go to the best universities.

They are not evil. Most are even very likeable. They are high enough up the contemporary financial stratum to decline discussions with anyone beneath their style of thinking or worship, something they would find contemptuous. To be safe they avoid any and all discussion and assume we all think the same if we are “worth while”.

The ignorance of these “professionals”, outside their immediate employ, is magnificent and complete. They read the New York Times. They sincerely believe in global warming, or whatever their leftwing, antiChristian Obama heroes want to call whatever new climate crisis might come along, fair or foul

When I read Stephen Moore’s article, I picture many of my friends and clients. I have to believe our Prager friends will recognize these characteristics of the “Modern American Believer”, for these folks are today’s Left, the “Modern American Believer.”

“THIS BOOMER ISN’T GOING TO APOLOGIZE”

By STEPHEN MOORE
Last weekend I attended my niece’s high-school graduation from an upscale prep school in Washington, D.C. These are supposed to be events filled with joy, optimism and anticipation of great achievements. But nearly all the kids who stepped to the podium dutifully moaned about how terrified they are of America’s future — yes, even though Barack Obama, whom they all worship and adore, has brought “change they can believe in.” A federal judge gave the commencement address and proceeded to denounce the sorry state of the nation that will be handed off to them. The enemy, he said, is the collective narcissism of their parents’ generation — my generation. The judge said that we baby boomers have bequeathed to the “echo boomers,” “millennials,” or whatever they are to be called, a legacy of “greed, global warming, and growing income inequality.”

And everyone of all age groups seemed to nod in agreement. One affluent 40-something woman with lots of jewelry told me she can barely look her teenagers in the eyes, so overcome is she with shame over the miseries we have bestowed upon our children.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that graduation ceremonies have become collective airings of guilt and grief. It’s now chic for boomers to apologize for their generation’s crimes. It’s the only thing conservatives and liberals seem to agree on. Mitch Daniels, the Republican governor of Indiana, told Butler University grads that our generation is “just plain selfish.” At Grinnell College in Iowa, author Thomas Friedman compared boomers to “hungry locusts . . . eating through just about everything.” Film maker Ken Burns told this year’s Boston College grads that those born between 1946 and 1960 have “squandered the legacy handed to them by the generation from World War II.”

I could go on, but you get the point. We partied like it was 1999, paid for it with Ponzi schemes and left the mess for our kids and grandkids to clean up. We’re sorry — so sorry.

Well, I’m not. I have two teenagers and an 8-year-old, and I can say firsthand that if boomer parents have anything for which to be sorry it’s for rearing a generation of pampered kids who’ve been chauffeured around to soccer leagues since they were 6. This is a generation that has come to regard rising affluence as a basic human right, because that is all it has ever known — until now. Today’s high-school and college students think of iPods, designer cellphones and $599 lap tops as entitlements. They think their future should be as mapped out as unambiguously as the GPS system in their cars.

CBS News reported recently that echo boomers spend $170 billion a year — more than most nations’ GDPs — and nearly every penny of that comes from the wallets of the very parents they now resent. My parents’ generation lived in fear of getting polio; many boomers lived in fear of getting sent to the Vietnam War; this generation’s notion of hardship is TiVo breaking down.

How bad can the legacy of the baby boomers really be? Let’s see: We’re the generation that spawned Microsoft, Intel, Apple, Google, ATMs and Gatorade. We defeated the evils of communism and delivered the world from the brink of global thermonuclear war. Now youngsters are telling pollsters that they think socialism may be better than capitalism after all. Do they expect us to apologize for winning the Cold War next?

College students gripe about the price of tuition, and it does cost way too much. But who do these 22-year-old scholars think has been footing the bill for their courses in transgender studies and Che Guevara? The echo boomers complain, rightly, that we have left them holding the federal government’s $8 trillion national IOU. But try to cut government aid to colleges or raise tuitions and they act as if they have been forced to actually work for a living.

Yes, the members of this generation will inherit a lot of debts, but a much bigger storehouse of wealth will be theirs in the coming years. When I graduated from college in 1982, the net worth of America — all our nation’s assets minus all our liabilities — was $16 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve. Today, even after the meltdown in housing and stocks, the net worth of the country is $45 trillion — a doubling after inflation. The boomers’ children and their children will inherit more wealth and assets than any other in the history of the planet — that is, unless Mr. Obama taxes it all away. So how about a little gratitude from these trust-fund babies for our multitrillion-dollar going-away gifts?

My generation is accused of being environmental criminals — of having polluted the water and air and ruined the climate. But no generation in history has done more to clean the environment than mine. Since 1970 pollutants in the air and water have fallen sharply. Since 1960, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh have cut in half the number of days with unsafe levels of smog. The number of Americans who get sick or die from contaminants in our drinking water has plunged for 50 years straight.

Whenever kids ask me why we didn’t do more to combat global warming, I explain that when I was young the “scientific consensus” warned of global cooling. Today’s teenagers drive around in cars more than any previous generation. My kids have never once handed back the car keys because of some moral problem with their carbon footprint — and I think they are fairly typical.

The most absurd complaint of all is that the health-care system has been ruined by our generation. Oh, really? Thanks to massive medical progress in the past 30 years, the chances of dying from heart disease and many types of cancer have been cut in half. We found effective treatments for AIDS within a decade. Life expectancy has risen and infant mortality fallen. That doesn’t sound so “selfish” to me.

Yes, we are in a deep economic crisis today — but it’s no worse than what we boomers faced in the late 1970s after years of hyperinflation, sky-high tax rates and runaway government spending. We cursed our parents, too. But then we grew up and produced a big leap forward in health, wealth and scientific progress. Let’s see what this next generation of over-educated ingrates can do.

Mr. Moore is senior economics writer for The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page.

——————————————————————————–
Download the AOL Classifieds Toolbar for local deals at your fingertips.