"Anthem for Doomed Youth"

[quiller]

One of the better (and exceedingly well-written) "issues columns" is Richard Fernandez's The Belmont Club. This is from his "Anthem for Doomed Youth"....

The last decades have been hard upon the Western youth. They have little prospect of employment. In Europe youth unemployment is nearing 25% in places.   Some have no choice but to linger in their parents basements into middle age and beyond.  Each additional dollar of deficit is another dollar they have to discharge in order to pay for the bills of the Boomers.

The Obamacare goal to recruit fill at least 40% of its ranks with "young invincibles" is nothing but a requirement for young to pay for the old. It may have ever been thus, yet never so cleverly spun.  George Orwell's vision of the future was "imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever." Today's  is "imagine yourself waiting at a table — forever." For some people that will be literally true.

The men at the Head Table have taken future the future of the young. That would be bad enough; worse the current generation of leaders has taken their youth. Youth is more than a bodily state. It is a condition of the mind. It was the once birthright of the young to dream about what lay over the next range of hills; it was their unquestioned heritage to gather in cheap cafes to plot a new world.

But that is no more.  Even childhood has been taken from them. The children we profess to love are drugged against ADD, hunted by pedophiles who are unaccountably more numerous than before. For play they have rubbery health and safety things, in place of things like climbing trees or discovering their neighborhoods. It means being enclosed in "schools" some of which can't even teach them to read their names yet require they stay in place when some nutcase comes a-gunning for them, without even the protection of their elders, who are curiously disallowed the means to defend their charges, maybe for the first time since humanity emerged.

The youth are less their own selves than the object-playthings of ancient and evil men. Is the Red Guard comparison really hyperbole?

http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/05/04/anthem-for-doomed-youth/