The freedom to choose their own future

Sort of political Monday Tueday
My prediction is that we'll start seeing more people attacking the Millennials. The New York Times has already published a piece by William Deresiewicz pondering the issue (his answer is that they are too nice). Cracked magazine has done a satirical take. The reason this is happening of course is Occupy Wall Street has turned out to be the most pointless, ineffective, and downright embarrassing protest ever. If you support the general thrust of the protest, that is if you are on the left, this is a huge problem.

And it gets worse if you consider the history of left-wing youth protests. There have been hundreds if not thousands of these since the 1960s and never before has one fizzled quite so badly as Occupy Wall Street. Faced with that, there are only two possible conclusions,

1. either the era of effective protest is over, or
2. there is something really wrong with kids these days.

Not surprisingly, some are picking option number two.

So what went wrong anyway?

Well, a little pull back first. It isn't just the Millenials. This has been coming a while now. There was an odd glimpse of it at the Remembrance Day ceremony here in Ottawa last Friday. The Chaplain General of the Canadian Armed Forces, Karl McLean was speaking. One of his key points was that we honour those who died fighting for our country by honouring the values they fought for. So far so good. But then he said that one of those values was that we should maintain a country where young people have, wait for it,

... the freedom to choose their own future.

I wonder in what alternative universe people ever got to choose their own future? It certainly was not the world that those who fought and won two world wars and endured the depression grew up in. They lived in a  world where sacrifice and service were not only required but pretty much defined life. And, as anyone old enough to have known that generation can testify, they did not fight in order that others should be able to choose their own future. When I was a kid, members of that generation hammered home the importance of sacrifice and service relentlessly.

They certainly believed that you should try to be happy but they tended to phrase their belief more along the lines of, "Suck it up and make the best of what you've got".

So how did we get from there to where we are now? How did we get to a place where the the chaplain general of the armed forces can stand up on a solemn occasion and spout not just nonsense but nonsense that betrays what the veterans who won two world wars really fought for while pretending to honour them?

You might, and I know people who have, blame the world war two generation themselves. Mose Allison did that in his song, "Young Man's Blues":

Well a young man
He ain't got nothin' in the world these days
I said a young man
Ain't got nothin' in the world these days

He's got nothing in the world but the chance to live in peace and freedom in a time of great economic growth that was purchased by the blood and sacrifice of others.


And it gets worse. In the second verse, Allison gives us a taste of the violent arrogance of the gangbanger:

In the old days
When a young man was a strong man
All the people stepped back
When a young man walked by

In other words, give us respect or we'll hurt you. Allison taught the lesson and the Who and other rock bands and later rap artists passed it on to millions of others.


The Occupy protestors do indeed have an over-developed sense of entitlement and a disturbing tendency to see others as full of hate while they themselves are acting destructively but they didn't invent that crap, they learned it all from their parents from the "peace" and "love" generation.