I remember where I was when President Kennedy was assassinated. I remember his idealism, and then our eager long haired years when we said “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” We, and those coming after us, intended to keep our idealism for good citizenship as we all aged… striving, seeking and never yielding. The world was going to be “new and improved.”
Mark Manson, successful blogger, is 36. This morning, (Monday June 1) I received my usual Monday morning e-mail from him. (footnote) At the risk of thereby misquoting or misrepresenting him, please let me present one great paragraph out of what he sent. I have broken it up into smaller paragraphs, for cosmetic reasons, all the better fit computer screens. His swear words are idealistically chosen for effect.
QUOTE
I am thirty-six years old. Despite crippling problems with health care, education, gun violence, immigration, climate change, stagnant wages, income inequality, and racial inequality persisting for my entire adult life, I have never once seen my government help with or resolve any of these issues.
For as long as I can remember, it has been: tax cuts, war, tax cuts, bailouts, tax cuts, bailouts.
I have never seen things get better in this country. Only worse. I have never seen anything substantive from my leaders, Democrat or Republican, that makes me proud of voting for them. I wasn’t alive for the moon landing. I am too young to remember the Berlin Wall falling. I don’t give a flying fuck about Saddam Hussein.
My introduction to my nation was 9/11, followed by hearing about friends and classmates being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, followed by graduating into the worst economic collapse in 86 years, followed by thirteen more years of absolutely fucking nothing changing.
Forty-five years of no real wage growth for the middle and lower classes? Nothing. Kindergarteners being shot at school with assault rifles? Nothing. Eleven million bankruptcies due to a corrupt and dysfunctional health care system? Nothing. Black people being repeatedly murdered by police, live, on camera? An entire generation of young people saddled with over a trillion dollars of debt just to go to school and then told to stay home and not work as soon as they get out?
UNQUOTE
As Manson credibly related the ongoing frustration of his peers to the current protests and riots... something occurred to me: At age 36, Manson has never known a world without Reaganomics.
It is instructive to compare the 40 years between the war and President Reagan’s changes, with the 40 years until today. In this comparison, reagonomics loses out.
While Mark and his friends take it for granted that a federal government should be mainly concerned with stockholders, and a business solely concerned with stockholders, that was not the case when I was young. In my day, every successful businessman knew there were other valid concerns beyond stockholders.
Some wise guy: “Ya, but the money will trickle down!”
Me: “Really? How’s that working out for you?”
For you Canadians, I suppose this doesn’t apply, except, after the international border reopens, if, say, a U.S. citizen is sincerely asking you why all the other developed nations believe in socialized medicine, and why they nearly all, including Canada, declined to participate in the invasion of Iraq, and then declined to join the occupation “to instil democracy”…
After you heave a sigh and say, “It’s not coincidence,” you could suggest your American friends might just possibly, maybe, perhaps, debrief on how reaganomics has worked out. I tell you, the previous economic model was good enough for my grandfather, my father and I.
And for my final angry word (And Lord, how I want to swear!)
In war time? A tax cut in war time? Only under something as ugly as reagonomics, back when America was supposedly needing all available money and troops for the war—desperate for troops— “all of us in this together,” when all of us were supporting some of us to fight overseas, could there ever be a tax cut… which the servicemen and their families would never see.
Sean Crawford
Calgary
June 2
2020
Footnotes:
For Mark Manson’s June 1st letter:
Promoting Mark’s regular Monday letter:
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