2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Some final thoughts on the primaries from a millenial. [View all]Waiting For Everyman
(9,385 posts)And if you think you can do without stable, sanely and representatively governed nation-states, you will end up with a one-world totalitarianism (or widespread anarchy which will eventually be the same thing), sure as shit.
But it isn't really my problem, it's yours, because thankfully I probably won't be around to see it. Your aspirations are too similar to the anti-government right for me. But to each his own. In this country, fortunately, we have a right to be wrong. We each have our own responsibility (to ourselves and the future) to think for ourselves and come to appropriate and correct judgments. If we don't, we pay for it that's all. There is a price-tag to being wrong, and it's high. But that's the way reality is too, isn't it, and there's no way to avoid that by enforcing our own supposedly correct beliefs on others. Constitutional democracy is a mess, but better than all the alternatives.
You're bright, you're articulate, and you're thinking. That's all wonderful. Someday (if you're fortunate enough to live long enough) you'll see things a lot differently, is all I can tell you. The situation isn't at all the way you think it is now. As a young person, that is unavoidable. It isn't at all what people blithely suppose it to be. Real vision doesn't come easy and it doesn't come quick, and it isn't common knowledge.
The main quality lacking, as far as I can see, is gratitude. You stand on some very tall shoulders, which you don't seem to recognize, let alone understand, the value of at all. That is a huge mistake. Self-hate, even collectively, does not lead to anywhere on the sanity spectrum. It's a chronic neurosis, which I have seen too often used as a very effective lever to lead people into some very dangerous cults (a major blight of the current time... there's a very good book on the cult phenomenon btw called Snapping by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, everyone today should read it), and other manipulative, predatory relationships.
I couldn't agree more with what you've said about HRC though.
Good luck out there in the world, to you, and to all the millenials. You'll need it. Keep educating yourself and learn all you can about what happened before your time, and the cons that have been pulled before -- because the same ones are always pulled over again with a new generation who haven't seen them before, you'll be shocked at how true that is. I believe it's your only hope. (I mean "you" collectively, of course.) It's what each new generation has had to realize and then learn to do.
Life is not a John Lennon song. Too many people seem confused about that. Ask yourself, who does internationalism benefit... everyday people? or the mega-rich?
13 generations of my family went into this place, I sure hope those after us don't lose it once us oldsters are gone. But as I said, I won't be here to see it. I'd like to think this generation won't be the first one to fail as caretakers of what was given them.