We’re gearing up for the NetSquared Conference this week, so instead of actually composing a blog post, I’m going to let John at Dymaxion World do my speaking for me.
Like me, John was shaking his head with incredulity at Hillary Clinton’s latest strategy, which is apparently to pander to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce by attacking young people.
Perhaps assuming that America is panting for a leader with the courage to take on the omnipotent Big Youth lobby, she told her extremely wealthy audience that young people these days think work is a four-letter word, and that a deluge of toys like iPods have sapped them of their willingness to delay gratification.
Some have pointed out that she sounds oddly like the same kind of crotchety old bastard who used to rail against Clinton’s generation. John, however, goes straight for the soft, flabby underbelly of the boomer generation, and sinks his teeth in:
Every generation – no matter how pampered they were in their day – always think that the next generation can’t measure up.
There is, however, something uniquely offensive about baby boomers lecturing any subsequent generation – i.e., those born about or after 1970 – about hard work. The baby boomers really did grow up in a remarkable time: the “30 glorious years” of Keynesian economic expansion. It’s fair to say that no generation has ever had such wealth created in advance for them to take a share when they reached adulthood. Not only was more wealth created, but it was more equitably shared than any previous industrial economic expansion.
And then, the baby boomers started electing Reagan, Thatcher, and in this country Mulroney. Not all boomers by any means, but the bulk of their electoral support did not come from the elderly or the young adults of the 1970s and 1980s. The electoral support of the neo-conservative revolution overwhelmingly came from the baby boomers.
This same neo-con revolution of course has ended the rapid, sustained economic expansion of the previous era, and replaced it with anemia and speculation in equal measure. Public infrastructure has been allowed to decay, and the public education system has yet to be rescued from the assaults of the 1990s.
I want to like Ms. Clinton. Really, I do. Must she make it so damned difficult?
