You've heard the saying that if you're not a liberal in your 20s you have no heart and not a conservative by your 40s you have no brain? That's how things used to be.
It was true for me. I was ridiculously idealistic in my 20s. I railed against my parents and grandparents and their 'racisist ideology.' I wanted equity, didn't think it was 'fair' for some people to have so much and others to have so little. I thought welfare and social programs were good and necessary. It frustrated me that I had to work to get the things I wanted.
None of that remained by the time I was in my mid 30s.
The older I got, the more conservative I grew. Watching money come out of my paycheck for taxes was a wakeup call. Working in a service industry allowed me to see another side of people. Selling cars and renting furniture to low income families woke me completely up to the realities of that community. Take, take, take, take. No respect for anything. Give them a new home and it would be trashed within six months. Those are broad stereotypical strokes, but I saw it every day, multiple times a day.
Sweating in a low-income apartment, making $8 an hour while I battled waves of roaches to install a washing machine, I heard Ethyl Lee tell her 16-year old daughter that she either had to have another baby or find her own place to live, they couldn't "get by" on their checks without it. Her apartment was filthy, stank of roach droppings and stale grease, every counter was slimy, the floor was gross, the carpet was nasty. But she drove a nicer car than I did. My furniture store supplied her with a big screen TV, VCR, stereo, washer, dryer and other furniture -- things I couldn't afford working for a living. She paid for all of it (occasionally when we forced her to) through government checks. She didn't work. Her mother never worked. None of her daughters worked. They sat home, had babies and collected checks. None were or had been ever married. Ethyl herself had six children. All of her daughters over the age of 15 had at least one, most had two or more. Sadly, Ethyl Lee wasn't an exception. I saw that pattern repeated over and over and over and over and over. More than anything, those experiences changed my world view.
Things have changed today. Too few kids work like I had to (like my generation did). Parents give anything and everything. Kids aren't exposed to the realities and by the time they get out of college (far too liberal), their worldview is so skewed they have no concept and it's difficult to change. It's hardened into idiocy that no amount of logic and practicality can overcome.
Girl who worked for me is a prime example. She bemoaned the existence of capitalism and promoted socialism from her parent's $800,000 home while she drove the $50,000 car she'd been given and wore clothes I could never afford when I was her age. She wants to destroy the system with no real understanding of what that would mean to her.
I could never get her to understand that the reason "people like me" (I checked all her indignation boxes by being white, educated, and male) made more money than "the workers" was because I took all the risk. It was money I made and saved over years of work that allowed me to have enough to invest in the businesses I owned. It was my risk. If it didn't work out, "the workers" could find another job. That wasn't the case for me. If it doesn't work, I lose much more than just "a job." She never could figure out that without my saving and investment, "the workers" wouldn't have the jobs, the insurance or any of the other benefits they enjoyed. She couldn't understand that if you remove the risk-reward opportunity, no one would have an incentive to work hard, make more or take that chance to make a better life for themselves, their kids - and by extension the people who worked for them. Nope. I was a "greedy, cis, white-privileged capitalist" for wanting more.
I heard an older guy say recently "this generation has never suffered. They've never been poor. The prospect of real war is a distant memory. Diseases are all but eradicated for the young. They don't know what it means to sacrifice."
He's right. There's no adversity. Our kids and grandkids are soft. Without the struggle to just survive like our parents and grandparents faced, these pussy ass morons have nothing better to do than contemplate their private parts, and rage over imagined slights.
We're soft and we're stupid. Our political system is corrupt beyond redemption. We're allowing elections to be brazenly stolen. We're allowing the very fabric of our nation, the principles on which it was founded, to be discarded. We're rewriting history to serve an agenda, not to view it as it actually was and learn from the successes and mistakes. It's not progress. We are ripe for being overrun.
As Tony Soprano once said "I'm getting the feeling I came in at the end. The best is over." I keep thinking there's hope that we can find our way back to sanity/truth but I'm losing that hope.
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