Diary: Bad Moon Rising

[degringolade]

 
Last winter

I think that folks need to start cutting boomers more slack.  Not because they caused the problems we are looking at hard, but they, in their search for the American Dream weren't really sophisticated enough to be able to understand the long term implications of the belief system that the United States government and industry promulgated in the period 1960-2000.  

Those times were built on a fib.  Actually, they were built on a unique set of circumstances that won't be repeated for quite some time.  We had a geographically isolated industrialized base controlled by a semi-socialist government that had somehow managed to co-opt the industrialists in order to pursue the unintended (?) destruction of competing industrial states.  This forced a mostly-willing cohesion of the country toward a specific goal (dressed up as saving the world) and the postwar period through around 1965 were the counties fruits of this endeavor.

There were lots of things going into the mix for this golden age, most of them involved one-time occurrences.  Folks forget that the US accounted for 60+% of the worlds oil production in 1940.  In 1950, the US held 60+% of the world's manufacturing base and production. In 1950 66+% of the worlds gold reserves were under US control (physical ownership being 9/10's of the law).

Taken together, these simply meant that the spoils of Europe and Asia landed here and we cheerfully helped ourselves to the largess.  

But, like 90% of any nouveau riche we pissed away the money and the grandkids and great-grandkids are feeling all butthurt because they aren't getting the loot that folks a couple of generations before enjoyed.

Same sad story, just on a societal level.