Well I’ve bragged about having the best member base on my website before. My chat boards produce worthwhile conversation almost daily. Here’s what showed up yesterday:
“Everyone has this perception that things are worse than they’ve ever been. There is this sense of ionized, misrepresentation that we are indeed hanging by a thread and the world is going to hell and Bush is at fault and the world is downright awful.
Well, I don’t mean to be the contrarian of the group here but we (my generation) are so fucking blinded by our sense of entitlement that we forget that this is the GREATEST we’ve ever had it. Period. End of story.
Don’t believe me? Tell me how many votes Obama beat McCain by going to wikipedia.org, searching by county, drinking a milkshake while doing so with a wireless mouse over a wireless internet connection and then remember that in 1804 it took 8-11 WEEKS for news to travel across the Atlantic.
Complain about the Constitution being shredded and your rights being trampled. By all means, complain about your lack of 1st Ammendment right of dissent and how bad you’ve got it while you dial up your brand new porno video (something you couldn’t do 30 years ago).
Do you realize that for the better part of the last 2000 years the vast majority of the human population never left an area further than 100 miles? Do they realize that it was only 100 years ago when 12-year-olds were working for a dollar a day whilst living 8 to a room to help pay family bills? I read a story from a therapist on CNN (go figure) who said that teens of today are menstrating and maturing earlier now due to the increased pressures of adolescence in the new millenium. Well, I’ll be striped ass ape. Doesn’t that beat all? Yeah, teens today have it sooooo fucking rough, don’t they? Trying to decide between a Blackberry and an EnV. Boy, that sure as fuck sounds a hell of a lot tougher than my grandfather having his face blown off over Italy at the age of 19 fighting the fucking Nazis. I could see how life today is tougher on kids–especially since they have to get up at 8 and go to school for 9 monthes–compared with 80 years ago when 75% of America was agricultural and work began and ended with sun up and sun down. Life today is so much harder than the 14 year olds of the civil war who couldn’t decide between North or South.
I’m sorry but somewhere along the way we’ve completely fucked up our belief system. We can thank the baby boomers for that. We had the world at our fingertips after WWII and guess what? They squandered it. Yep. Cut and fucking dry. These people rebelled in the 1960s over well, Vietnam (which was probably a worthy rebellion), segregation (again, kudus) and……….basically the status quo. What was the status quo? It was the most prosperous time in any country’s history in the history of mankind. Basically they bitched about how rich they were. And they had kids who complained about how rich they were and well, you can see where it goes from there.
Baby Boomers ran up a deficit and sold my children’s generation off for their own comforts. Don’t believe me? Google the Austrian Pengo and then talk about deficits and hyper inflation. Do that and then decide whether or not you think we should be bailing everyone out. But that’s okay…we will endure. We can do anything we put our minds too.
I’m so sick of people with a bleak outlook on things. You make something out of nothing by claiming that nothing is something terrible. Gas prices went up!?!??! OH MY GOD!?!?! Did you happen to notice that it was only 80 years ago that half of the country didn’t even have a car? Books have only been around for plebes for 400 years.
Then there is this whining about Hurricane Katrina. A perfect microcosm of how far we’re removed from the real world and how much we expect. Everyone was whining that it took 48 hours for the gov’ment to get water to the Superdome. Let me just put this in context for you. ONE WEEK before Katrina hit, my mother was in Houston and she said, there is a huge storm coming, I am going to leave. She did. 6 Days before the storm hit I heard weathermen say, “This is going to be a terrible storm, leave now”. 5 days. 4 days. 3 days. “It’s coming, you better leave.” So finally it hit. And what happened? Everyone who stayed used it as an excuse to violate the second ammendment (the mayor took everyone’s weapons), steal, bitch, whine and complain that they didn’t get the proper warning from Bush’s FEMA. John Kennedy once said that every American ought to be able to walk 50 miles in 24 hours. You OUGHT to be that healthy. And he did it while Prez to prove the point. Now, if I do my math correctly, in 7 days, I could be 350 miles away from the storm–I could be in fucking Kentucky when that fucker hit. And I know what everyone is going to say, “These were old and sick…they couldn’t walk” Well, from the pictures I saw they looked more like, well, fat people. Fat Americans complaining about how bad they had it, no doubt it.
I saw brave American Soldiers, white and black, diving into shitty water to save 400 lb. whales. And what did they get? They were branded as bigots by Jesse Jackson because they were SAVING the black people!!! YEAH! Go figure. And, I’m sorry but, If you think that little of your body that you let it go to that extent were you are 300 lbs., call me heartless, maybe you don’t deserve to live–maybe that’s Darwinian evolution. Even if you’re old and you can only walk say, two miles a day (hell, my 90 year old grandma walks 4 a day), well, hell, you could have walked the 14 miles north to get out of the way of the storm! Why should Joe Taxpayer have to pay for your FEMA when you’re too fucking lazy to get off your ass and leave? Then there were the lovely groups raiding and robbing stores under the banner of, “We need us some Pampers”. Well, fine. Maybe you should have been ahead of the curve. Maybe you should have STOCKED UP on them before the giant fucking monster of a storm hit. Plus, I didn’t see a lot of Pampers being stolen, I saw beer, stereos and TVs being snagged. In fact, it looked a lot like Watts in 1968.
And the war in Iraq–that’s the real whopper. Here are a bunch of vocal minority entitlement, academic assholes telling us all that they were mislead and they were lied to and blah blah blah. Even representatives of Congress are complaining about how they voted! First off, I don’t see how defeating the fourth largest army in the world in under two months with under 5,000 casualties could EVER be construed as a failure but hey, I’m just an asshole, what do I know? Second, everyone has the balls, the utter fucking gall to complain about how the war is affecting them. It’s not like you’re being asked to buy war bonds for your country at a lower rate of return like your grandparents did. It’s not like you’re asked to ration your meat so that our troops can eat better. I don’t see these “We support the troops” people going door to door on scrap metal drives to help make the armored plates to help keep soldiers in Humvees safe. It’s not as if your being asked to grow your own food in a victory garden so that others on the front line may eat better. What do we complain about? Bio-Diesel? Drilling in ANWR? You tell me.
All you hear on TV is, “The planet is warming up and we’re all gonna die and…” Well, while I agree that the planet is warming, I would also say that it’s been warming more or less for the last 10,000 years–that’s what climates do, they fucking CHANGE!!!! And this also strikes at the heart of the balls we as a people have. We believe that we can harm earth. We are that arrogant. I got news for the Al Gore/Cameron Diaz/Leonardo DiCaprio’s out there–when earth gets pissed off at us, it’ll wipe us out. It won’t be tomorrow–it’ll be a few hundred thousand years from now and well, even the yoga, tai-chi, “I’m gonna live to 100” crowd will be really busy by then.
Just the other night I was marveling at how wonderful life truely is. Think about it, especially if you’re an American. It was midnight in the middle of a giant snowstorm. I left my house–which, incidentally is about 10 times the size of my great-grandfathers farm–walked to my car, turned a key, started it and drove the 1.5 miles to grab a burger.
And then I remembered that soldiers during the Revolution couldn’t make it home for the holidays because they were camped 5 miles away.
I don’t have to worry about having an animal to slaughter to feed my family. I don’t have to worry about whether or not a warlord will rape my wife. I don’t have to worry about a king pressing me into service. The only problem I have is, “Paper or plastic?”%
Life today is nothing short of remarkable. And the notion that things are worse or terrible or whatever else you want to spin is a slap in the face to all of the generations who endured REAL problems and not only endured but gave US an easier path. And that’s the problem. You give a kid an inch and he wants a mile. That’s what we are. A bunch of whining schoolchildren complaining about the fact that we got milk when we really wanted gatorade.
Life today is beautiful. I’m sick of people who are fatter, richer and happier than they’ve ever been complaining about how bad they’ve got it and how they NEED more. Needs? Or wants. Anyone remember John Kennedy asking “Not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country?” I guess I’m pondering the same thing today.”
- soprismb
- Hard as a Rock
- Posts: 866
- Joined: Fri Sep 19, 2008 4:00 am
- Location: Aspen, CO
