TALKING ABOUT YOUR GENERATION:
Well, this is going to offend some good people, but it has to be said. In trying to figure out what’s wrong with current culture, I stumbled on an easy answer: it’s because of my kids. Not them, per se, but their generation.

My generation, such as it is, is sandwiched between the “Me” generation of the Sixties and the Reagan kids that are a bit younger than me. I consider mine to be a miscellaneous generation that essentially accomplished very little and has no notable identity. But I can say proudly of my generation, “at least we did no wrong.” Unless we’re counting giving birth to my kids’ generation.

The screwy generation of my children may have been sired by my generation, but they were raised under the guidance and feelings of the Sixties generation who were running the schools and the television programming back then. When one examines the fact my kids were given “good try” grades instead of letter grades and that everyone got a trophy even if their team stunk, it’s directly attributable to our current condition of a hysterical sense of fairness. This ultimately devolves into the government interpreting “fairness” into taking a larger portion of wealth from the producers and sinking it into Obama phones, solar energy boondoggles and PBS.

I'm not opposed to fairness, per se. It just gets kind of muddled when fairness is confused with equality and that equality of outcome is considered fairness. The notion that all people should have what everyone else has, whether earned or not, is far different than everybody starting out equal. I'm familiar with the notion that not everyone's born in an advantageous situation. However, the most common way to correct that problem under a fairness argument is to bring those with advantages down to the level of those who are starting with socioeconomic hardships. That route may sound really nice and really fair in an After School Special, but I'd rather make sure the barriers to successful starts are eliminated so achievement is easier for everyone.

There is also a belief in this generation that those with handicaps or social differences who have a modicum of success are stories to be on, well, an After School Special. It's the old "Good Try" theory come full circle in which the country decides to support a team like Louisville in the NCAA Basketball Tournament merely because a player averaging 3.5 points a game suffered a horrific, freak injury. Or look at the accolades Oscar Pistorius had bestowed upon him, along with a free pass to be a caveman, followed by surprise when he turns out to something of a flawed man.

We don't vet people beyond the length of a Twitter statement and nowhere is this more true than our current president. In this politically correct world, this may seem tactless, but Obama was elected based on the color of his skin and white guilt over centuries of racism by our long dead relatives. It certainly wasn't based on weighty votes in a brief and obscure Senate career or his occupation of being a community organizer. Sure, he had great 10-second ad hominem, but the vacuity of what we could learn about the man and his designs for the country appealed to emotion and kept their distance from reason. Likewise the entire debate on gay marriage under review by the Supreme Court is based on fairness and not on the limits placed on the Court that states have their own rights. Certainly this generation would need a collective sedative if the Court ruled gay marriage unconstitutional. It doesn't seem to occur to them that nine imperfect people in robes make bad decisions, too, starting with the Dred Scott decision that kept slavery alive and led to a civil war, or in Korematsu in which the Court declared it was legal for President Roosevelt to lock up all Japanese Americans in internment camps, or even Plessy v. Ferguson, which kept segregation lawful until Brown v. Board of Education until 1954. Relying on the courts as an end-all demonstrates the generational impatience of big societal change. Demanding the balance of the population get there, and get there now by virtue of five Court votes, is like asking mom to demand equal playing time for their loser of an athlete kid.

This generation doesn't get that sometimes the seal pup with the broken flipper bites. Much better to do an After School Special on saving the baby seal instead of considering how much money could be made off the fur. Logic seems to always be trumped by feelings. And so it should be no surprise that a few million people change their Facebook profile photo to the marriage "equity" flag in the misguided view that the sheer emotion of the empty gesture will be picked up by the Court where Justice Kennedy will say, "Wow, if that many people changed their Facebook profile photo, I need to vote with the sentiment and not the law!"

I’d love to hear from this tatted-up, pant-sagging, backward-hat-wearing, bi-sexual, un-shaven, t-shirt, sweater-wearing and tight-leged pant wearing, pierced up, Lulu-Lemon, social-networking generation and tell me where I’m wrong. In the meantime, stop fucking up my country. That feels much better…