Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize and the Triumph of the Boomer Generation

As a late boomer myself or perhaps because of it, I have very little respect for the generation. A more self-serving, self-important, sanctimonious, and vacuous lot, there has never been. From their youth, they have sought to instruct the rest of us on how to live, all the while plucking the fruits of the system they so abhorred.

This a generation that came of age at an opportune- excepting Vietnam- moment. They graduated from colleges, which they attended without having to mortgage their futures, with their liberal arts degrees into a wide open marketplace at a time when homeownership did not require the pledging of parts of one's anatomy. For this they were not grateful. It was only their due.

This sense of their own superiority, coupled with an unfortunate tendency to mindlessly hop on the nearest bandwagon, led them to take a country which functioned on principle-religious, civic, and moral- into the morass of relativism where anything goes except traditional values.

Without the underpinnings of guiding principles, such as respect for authority, our society has devolved into one characterized by cynicism and arbitrary judgement. The President of the United States, whether Republican or Democrat, is not to be believed and fair game for personal attacks. The propaganda of some totalitarian regimes, however, is swallowed, hook, line and sinker. Despite unheard of amounts of money, still not enough for some, thrown into schools, only 22% of students in Michigan graduate high school. The figures for other metropolitan areas are equally as dismal. A teacher complains and Junior doesn't get the beating he deserves; Mom hires a lawyer. A student with over a hundred stitches in her face from a razor blade attack sits in a biology class down the hall from her attacker whose rights cannot be violated.
The contradictions and absurdities abound.

These founders of the environmental movement have overseen the explosion of the McMansion and the rise of the even more eco friendly SUV. They have presided over the death of factual reporting and the emergence of mainstream tabloid journalism. They have made a religion of conspicuous consumption and a consumer staple of consumer debt. They have birthed the infant nanny state: telling us what food to put in our bodies, what not to smoke, what to wear in our cars, what kind of windows we can put in our homes, and what values we should teach our children.

I am the first to know that the world of my childhood contained much injustice, but as I look around at the fruits of the boomer generation, I am not impressed. As far as I can tell, their only significant achievement was in combating racism. And now it looks like Hilary, who never worked up a sweat in her life unless it was cutting sugar cane for Fidel Castro, is going to be President and Al Gore has won the Nobel Peace Prize for bruiting science that may or may not hold up to the test of time. Vanity, all is vanity. Or is it dada?