Most Selfish Generation?

Tom Brokaw wrote a book a few years ago praising the Greatest Generation - those that fought and won World War I. He argued that the sacrifices they made turned history for the better, and I agree. They fought, died, and worked until we won that war, at great personal cost both home and abroad. They deserve respect.

But what happened to their children? Coming home from the war in the mid-forties our veterans got busy (ha!) at starting families. These war children hit college twenty years later in the sixties and promptly turned on the same establishment (the U.S. government) that had controlled their parents' lives. Declaring a constitutional right to be free, these flower children promptly turned on every rule they could find in an effort to discover a new way of living that might allow them to avoid the same sacrifices that the Greatest Generation had made.

But the summer of love burned out in a hurry. The flower children woke up after four years of partying only to realize that they had headaches and no prospects. The path to independence that this generation sought through rebellion, they now realized, was much easy to find in capitalism. Making money would allow them to indulge and have a say in politics, so they slowly faded into corporate America to follow a new dream: control wrestled from the inside of the existing power structures.

The seventies brought more partying, but with much nicer (at the time) cars, homes, and clothes. The eighties took this higher, as materialism became the new cool. Rebellion was officially dead, and Wall Street was the home of power. But innovating and working hard was never part of the plan. This now-entrenched, cash-rich flower generation had surfed a wave of economic expansion that they had little control of. But they did control something valuable; every major corporation, organization, and branch of government. The nineties would be their time to shine. The world was their playground.

To be continued...