Press Leak

Published on Sunday, November 30, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
Hope You Die Before You Get Old

by David Michael Green




Here's a small excerpt from the above article posted over at Common Dreams and it is a fair example of the scathing indictment that the Boomer Generation has got to face up to:


You'd almost think we lived in a Stalinesque dictatorship of the most repressive sort, given our disinterest in using the tools readily available to us to replace or even stymie a government gone insane. Who would think, looking at the mass violent crime called Iraq committed in our name, and using our tax dollars - a crime that we stood by and watched happen - that we actually had the power to do something about this? Who would think that we live in country where a president can be impeached for as little as lying about getting a blow job? And yet we did nothing. Shame on us. My god, shame on us.

We could go on and on here. How broken is our educational system? How obscenely twisted is that corporate business enterprise masquerading as our healthcare system, a beast only incidentally concerned with keeping our country well? How messed up is American foreign policy in the Middle East, not even counting Iraq or Iran? How bankrupt are our societal values when everyone knows who Britney and Brad are, but probably not even one in ten could name the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court? How jive is our commitment to equality of opportunity (let alone actual equality), when we fund our schools through property taxes, with absolutely predictable results? How dishonest can one society be, when it deploys more mercenaries than soldiers, woefully abuses the National Guard and the Reserves, hides the bodies coming home in caskets, avoids a draft, cuts taxes and deficit spends, all to prevent citizens from having to think about a war that would instantly be massively unpopular in the absence of such ruses? How breathtakingly paranoid are we, and how devoid of the most basic skills of diplomacy, that we spend more money on ‘defense' than every other country in the world - about 195 of them - combined? How fundamentally deluded at the wholesale level are we that it would be effectively impossible for an atheist to be elected president? How shamefully lazy are we that - even in 2008 - a third of us still didn't bother to vote, and the rest of us tolerate an electoral system frequently designed to suppress turnout?

And so on, and so on. Like I said, we could go on and on here.

I recommend you take 10 minutes and read the full piece, even it makes you feel guilty (as it should).