I can understand where it would be frustrating to hear some variation of "you young people need to work hard like I did," which is such a common attack these days. Or a backhanded insult like the President harping over "some people have lost faith in the American Dream." Well, yeah, the American Dream turned out to be a big lie, so isn't it just terrible that the rising generation is smart enough to have figured that out? Unfortunately, nobody has yet figured out what to put in its place.

What worries me is the people who think we just need to re-enable the economics of Conspicuous Waste to promote economic well-being. One of the things some of us Boomers used to worry about was the environment, and how we were trashing the planet in our pursuit of More Stuff. Along with everything else, that concern was ignored as the country entered the doze of "Morning in America." It's funny to compare the early 70's and now, so many things that were Important then are starting to be Important now. Shame that in the interim we did fuck-all about them.

I think we need a radical rethinking of the idea that Everybody Must Work, Everybody Must Produce, Everybody Must Consume. Unfortunately, that's radical. And I am a pessimist, ultimately. I don't think we're going to change anything until it's too late. It's not nice to fool with Mother Nature. Mr Malthus believed that population would increase and use up resources until resources were insufficient to sustain the population, and then things were going to get... ugly. I am very afraid that things are going to get very ugly, and sooner rather than later.

-- Mal