and this was the timeframe of Reagan, which is where I think it all started truly manifesting. Up until then, it'd been the talk and planning over dinners at nice restaurants and meetings in smoky rooms. The R's had truly been trying to break the Democratic Party since before FDR. They detested everything they stood for, which was directly opposite from what the R's believed. It really isn't a difference of an agreed upon end goal, which differences in only the way we get there. What has been growing more and more is an ideological difference between the members of both parties. There is no way to compromise, because there is no compromise to be had. What is the compromise between feeding a child and letting it starve? Between kicking grandma out of her house, or helping her to afford to live there as long as she is able? We're talking such deep, moral and ethical differences that I see no way a bridge can be made between the two ideologies. A third party is simply going to end up combining the worst of all worlds in an amalgam of chaos.
The "Greed is good" theme is when I think we truly lost the young people of that generation. I was just out of the Air Force and looking to go into college. I knew I wanted to major in Psychology, but everything had changed over such a short time. Everything was centered around "business" and "finance" and MBA's. I thought maybe by the time I graduated, the world would have shook itself awake again and see how far from a civilized society it had strayed, and maybe people would be important again by then. Boy, was *I* wrong!!! I got my degree, but I didn't bother with a Master's in it, as I'd planned. Instead, I got into the ground floor of tech workshops and taught myself the ins and outs of computers. That was the only thing that allowed me to survive and raise my daughter... even though it was at a much lower salary than my male coworkers.
But everybody jumped on that MBA bandwagon and everything was centered around money, money, money.... we never recovered from that, in fact we just grew more enmeshed in "things" every year that passed. And, I believe, to the everlasting sorrow of our soul, because I sure don't see it changing anytime soon...
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