Then and now

I saw a political cartoon that made me laugh but it also made me sad.  It guess that makes it an excellent political cartoon.  It was a split screen "then and now" cartoon with a father and daughter in the left panel and a father and son in the right panel.  The father and daughter were both dressed in fashions from the 60s, and the father and son were dressed in modern clothes.  In the 60s panel, the father said "if we don't do something about the horrible decline in our education system, we are going to fall like the Roman Empire."  The daughter said "oh daddy…"  In the modern panel, the father said "if we don't do something about the horrible decline in our education system, we are going to fall like the Roman Empire."  The son said "what the %*&@ is the Roman Empire?"

I have been reading a lot about "The Greatest Generation" lately.  Seems they are dropping like flies.  If they were in their twenties during the forties, they are just running out of steam.  This is the generation that threw the Nazis out of Europe, built superhighways, invented transistors, and shifted America from an agricultural based economy into an economic powerhouse that evolved into the last Superpower. 

Of course, they fucked it all up.  They smoked like burning buildings.  They drank, had unprotected sex, didn't use seatbelts, ate red meat, wouldn't know an anti-oxidant if it bit them in the ass, and didn't obsess about germs in their environment.  In short, by today's standards, they were cavemen destined to die before they were thirty five.  So why are they all dying at ninety now?

Sure, they were a tougher people then we are.  If an old lady had poured boiling coffee on herself in the forties, she would have cussed a bit, they would have taken her to the rest room, rinsed it off, and sent her home with some nice butter to rub on the burn.  There would have been none o this rushing-to-the-emergency-room-while-speed-dialing-the-lawyer-to-start-the-class-action-lawsuit bullshit we have today.

I wonder, however, if The Greatest Generation could survive today.  Not as beaten, ignored Senior Citizens trying to survive on pensions and Social Security stolen from them by corrupt politicians and CEOs, but as young vibrant citizens in the workforce, ready to go out an confront the world.

They wouldn't last a week. 

30% of them would be arrested the first day for child neglect because their kids were out riding bikes without wearing helmets.  Spankings and corporal punishment of their misbehaving children would account for jail terms for thousands in the first week alone.

Another 30%, at least, would be jailed for beating the hell out of people that got up in their faces for eating meat, smoking, wearing fur, or any of the twenty thousand little things that Special Interest Cocksuckers feel compelled to harass you in public about.  The Greatest Generation would have never put up with it.  A punch in the nose and a kick in the ass would be their response.

At least 10% of them would drop dead with shock from grocery stores.  If the prices did not get them, the food label warnings would.

I guess we have to consider that the entire generation of people would be fired en masse for failure to conform to employee conduct in Corporate America.  Politically Correctness was not a high value issue with The Greatest Generation.

All in all, I think that a young, vibrant Greatest Generation, not destroyed by decades of programming by television and media, not cinicised by the ninties, not crushed by the realization that the dream of a strong unified nation is a sad joke would have one result.  They would promptly march to Washington and tar and feather every politician and lobbyist they could get their hands on.

Dr. Sneaky's Time Machine is now on the drawing board.