Mike Wittmer

intergenerational warfare

I don’t agree with everything in this Washington Post essay, but it aptly depicts the frustration of young people with their parents’ generation. Others reported last week that the median net worth of retirees is $173,000, while people in their twenties have only about $3,000 to their name. It’s unlikely that these underemployed young people are going to want to pay taxes to support their parents’ Social Security and Medicare.

For years I’ve heard that children whose peers were aborted may return the favor and push euthanasia on their parents. That seemed like rhetorical excess at the time, but I’m beginning to see how that scenario might become plausible.

Posted

in

,

by

mikewittmer

Tags:

Comments

5 responses to “intergenerational warfare”

  1. Bill Samuel

    Is the issue generational? Paterno is not of the writer’s parents’ generation, but a much older generation. A lot of those supporting him were 18-21. There are a huge amount of failures in our country, but they seem to cross the generational lines.

    We are lied to by politicians aged from the 20’s to the 90’s. Young and old politicians sell out to the monied interests. Almost everyone refuses to think long-term. It’s the whole culture of our society. It’s not a particular generation.

    The church needs to be radically counter-cultural because our culture is sick and dying. It is build on false premises, and it should not be surprising to anyone who reads either history or the scriptures that it is crumbling. By every right, it should crumble.

    The society as a whole needs to confess its sins, repent and turn to a new way.

  2. Gary

    Thomas Day’s article is wrong on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to begin. His reasoning suffers from–to name just a few–gross generalizations, guilt by association, and even something as simple as a faulty view of economics. I might add that his expectations derive, in part, from a not-to-subtle form of idolatry, namely, placing all of his trust, hope, and expectations in faulty human beings. But to say that he can find no leaders among his parents’ (and my own, I should add) generation is simply untrue. Perhaps it’s because he’s using the wrong criteria to determine who qualifies as a true leader.

  3. Jonathan Shelley

    Mike,

    The great thing is that we don’t have to foot the bill for our grandparents’ retirements and long term care. We can get a government bailout to cover the costs and have our grandchildren pay for the debts our grandparents left us. Why solve a problem when you can pass it off to someone else?

  4. Deof Movestofca

    Land of Confusion”. I’ve heard Thomas Day’s song before. It’s just the same song, different chorus.. The problem is, no matter how many generations tell themselves that “We Won’t Be Fooled Again, we keep finding out that when we meet the new boss, he’s the same as the old boss.

    (Just hoping those HTML tags work right here or otherwise this reply is going to look ugly).

  5. Deof Movestofca

    Ack! I somehow messed up that first tag. It’s supposed to be to the lyrics of “Land Of Confusion” by Genesis. If you know the song (or google it), you’ll see what I mean. The first line of the post should have been “This is just the ‘Land of Confusion’ all over again” (or something like that).
    Note that “Land of Confusion” was a 1980’s song, and “We Won’t Be Fooled Again” (IIRC) was a 1960’s song. I wouldn’t be too surprised if someone found a 2000’s song that proclaimed that the “new generation” was going to come in and clean up the mess created by the old generation.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: