You can tell a conservative from a liberal by those things each
worries about. Conservatives tend to worry about things like
creeping socialism and socialist creeps, while liberals worry about
what their great-great-great-grandchildren will hate them for.
Conservatives couldn’t care less about such things. After
all, we’ll be dead. Even our kids, conservatively speaking, will be
dead. Do you think the ghosts of Cortez or Buffalo Bill Cody give a
damn what we think about them? (They would probably think we were a
bunch of softies, and in the main they would be right.)
But for those who do care, if only as a thought
experiment, here then — according to this “think
piece” in the Washington
Post — is what our ungrateful, smug, condescending
descendants will condemn us for:
Prisons, feed lots, nursing homes and the
environment.
Really? That’s all they got on us? Compared to past
generations with their pogroms and lynchings, slave trading and,
lest we forget, disco music, I’d say we look pretty
good.
Anyway, I’m not at all clear why we would get
blamed for these things. It’s not like our generation invented
prisons. Or nursing homes. I suspect that feed lots have been
around for a few years. So has the clear-cutting of forests. Just
read Jared Diamond’s account
of the collapse of Easter Island.
What’s more, I happen to think the jailhouse a fine,
albeit old fashioned, institution. The author, however, doesn’t
believe non-violent criminals should be locked up. I disagree. When
thieves are behind bars they aren’t smashing my car windows and
stealing my GPS device. He believes in alternatives to prison —
not alternatives like public shaming, which might hurt a convict’s
self-esteem — but alternatives like probation where the criminal
is set free to smash my car window just as soon as I replace the
last one he smashed. Apparently, the author considers loosing
“non-violent” criminals onto an unprotected society — no doubt he
opposes gun ownership too — the “moral” thing to do, which tells
me his moral compass must have been stepped on by
elephants.
Factory farming seems another odd choice. His biggest
gripe is overcrowding. Not overcrowding in our cities, our schools,
or even our emergency rooms, but in feed lots. I guess the
livestock the author knows just aren’t living la dolce
vita. As a guy who is chained to desk in a fabric-covered cube
nine hours a day beside a fat guy with gastro-intestinal problems,
I have little sympathy for the living conditions of
swine.
And why pick on those Baby Boomers who ditch their ancient
relic of a parent in an (obscenely expensive) nursing home? Has the
author never heard of karma, the circle of life, Nietzsche’s
eternal return of the same? Soon enough those selfsame Boomers will
be taking mother’s place at Delmar Gardens. After all, what comes
around, goes around.
I DON’T DOUBT that future generations will be better
stewards of the environment than we are. We are better stewards
than were our grandparents. Water and air are cleaner today than
fifty years ago because of legislation and technological advances.
These advances will continue. For our great-great grandchildren to
feel smug because they’ll be born in a time of greater innovation
is like me calling Aristotle a simpleton because he was wrong about
the theory of gravity.
The author takes for granted that our descendants will be
uber-compassionate, vegan liberals and not gun-owning,
meat-chomping conservative-libertarians. This is by no means a
certainty. (Apparently he has never seen A Clockwork
Orange.) But don’t take my word for it. The idea that we are
becoming more liberal and compassionate will be overwhelmingly
refuted in next week’s election.
My generation — Generation X — may not have lived
through the Great Depression, defeated communism and fascism, and
made America the greatest nation on earth, but we haven’t really
done much in the way of global destruction either. That’s because
we are at heart a bunch of slackers, and prefer to gaze at our own
navels or play video games, which is why we were the wrong
generation to get behind the Bush Doctrine (spreading democracy to
undemocratic countries), and explains how we managed to run up a
$13 trillion debt. (Four in ten Gen Xers say they’ve got too
much debt to consider investing or saving.)
Therefore, if a few future-scolds want to condemn us for
nursing homes, prisons, and crowded feed lots, I say we respond in
true slacker fashion: with a collective “whatever.”
