Motivation
 

Do you ever wonder how much more our generation could accomplish with drive? We are really a coasting generation, we are living on the things laid down by our parents. We lack the ingenuity that characterized previous generations who had to struggle to actually survive, now you have to actually try to not get help from one or more organizations. What will come of us when we are the ones in power? How much are we going to screw things up for the next generation?

(Several of my buddies now have children and most are married or getting married, I think I've spent too much time around thier squidlings.:sweatdrop )

Seriously what organizations are you talking about? Does one of them force you to accept their help with like, dental insurance? Cause I've got two cracked teeth that I'm "coasting" on getting fixed cause I don't have fucking dental insurance. Oh hey is there another one that pays off your fucking student loans? Cause I've got a shit-ton of those cause I'm living on my decision our parents' generation "laid down" to take free public universities and, instead of free, make them ridiculously goddamn expensive (THANK YOU RONALD REAGAN).

Seriously what is the point of this thread?

Wait, you have no dental insurance? If your teeth are any sort of actual health risk you can just go to the dentist, get them done and apply to the state for debt forgiveness. That will either make it free or reduce the cost insanely. This of course hinges on you not making too much money, like 15-17k a year (I think).

There are social groups and government programs for just about everything. That isn't the point I was talking about though...

Why don't you have dental insurance? Is there any reason you cannot have it? Would a part time job solve any income problems you have with getting the insurance? My point is that previous generations would do what it took to take care of things that needed to be taken care of. And yeah they screwed things up, how well do you think our generation is going to do when comparitively we were born with a silver spoon in our mouths.

This is general, I'm bringing up something to talk about... It was on my mind, especially with a bunch of my friends procreating.

Except that this isn't at all true, in any way whatsoever. I mean hell, you do realize our parents were the Baby Boomers, right? They didn't even proverbially have it rough.

You mean aside from insulting an entire generation based on what you imagine to be their fuckups?

I actually don't think we've given recent generations enough credit when it comes to what we have accomplished. I mean forty someodd years ago we were still pre-Civil Rights, women were still locked and chained to their kitchens, and now all the sudden our prime Democratic presidential contenders are black and female respectively.

I mean I'm just saying Baby Boomers accomplished quite a bit. I think our generation is accomplishing a lot, too. I don't really agree with our generation's general stance on gay marriage -- I won't get into semantics -- but there's no doubt that our generation has significantly changed the debate. I mean in the last decade alone we've seen homosexuality gone from less than 30% support in the U.S. to over 50%, more and more people are accepting homosexuality and younger generations have a lot to do with that.

In the last forty or so years our society has begun taking gigantic steps in the right direction. In the last decade voting percentages have jumped. The internet's leading to a new era of discussion on issues the "common folk" previously never bothered to be terribly knowledgable about. We're a generation who's watching Al Gore's climate-change documentaries, engaging in debates regarding the legitimacy of the Patriot Act, and compared to -- say -- fifty years ago -- we're challenging the government's official stances on issues like we never have before.

On the right we have evangelical Christian groups and libertarian groups and anti-tax hike groups and on the left we have enviornmental groups and gay rights activists and feminists and all sorts of folks protesting Bush.

(By the way, believe it or not, evangelical Christians -- yes, evangelical Christians, like Sam Brownback -- are promoting a lot of good causes around the world these days. Not just neo-con "we hate everybody who doesn't worship on Sundays" stuff, but promoting an end to world hunger, that kind of stuff.)
We have a far way to go, and a little more political participation and civic activism probably couldn't hurt, but I'd say our generation -- and the generation before us -- and the generation before them -- have done fairly well for ourselves. Maybe I'm optimistic, but I see things actually getting better. We have independent bloggers on the internet, the media's beginning to splinter off and represent everyone's viewpoints and instigate real debate, young people are getting involved and expressing their opinions and donating money to combat AIDS in Africa. We're talking about Darfur and Iraq on message boards and we're lobbying our leaders more than ever before.

Of course I'm biased because I'm working now for the Peace Corps, but there I listen to stories about young people going off into every corner of the developing world -- Mongolia, Thailand, Madagascar, Lithuania, every sub-Saharan African country imaginable -- and it's just exciting. I hear stories about young kids helping program infrastructural software for county and provincial governments, I hear stories about Mongolian agricultural production jumping because some Midwest farmer goes abroad and helps, I hear about arrests hampering the sex trade industry in Thailand. The Peace Corps program in Mongolia, which I may join myself in a year or two, is going to increase by a good two-hundred individuals in the next three years. After the tsunami the United States chipped in financially on a global level that was unheard of. Our administration may be glaringly unpopular, but you'd be surprised just how much common everyday Americans -- particularly the younger generations -- are well-regarded around the world. We're seen as capable of instigating the real change necessary to bring the U.S. back into the global arena.

I hear this and I think, go us.

And damn I sounded so much like a liberal just there. Yick. This Peace Corps job and what I'm learning there is really not jiving with my conservative ideology. I need to go back and read some Gingrich or Buchanan and get my bearings straight.

The expectations their parents had of them were completely different from what we have now, they were brought up by values that don't really have much of a place in today's society.

Compared to them we still have the silver spoon. I mean, they were the baby boomers, they are also the ones who set us up for where we are. I'm not saying you specifically or even myself, I'm talking about the kids driving around on Daddy's credit card in the new SUV's, spending as much as they want and not having to take responsability for themselves until they get out of college and their parents finally get sick of them. These kids going to business school who will turn into CEO's and then turn to public office and really have a chance to fuck things up. That is what I worry about. So much of what we have comes without having to work very hard for it, and that kid driving the new SUV who will be inheriting Dad's spot on the board scares the shit outta me.

^ that class has always existed though, but I do think this generation may have more of that than before.

I hear what you're talking about from my teachers quite a bit, and how our homework and stuff is really easy comparatively, and how we aren't really learning as much because we don't have to work as hard. I think this has to do with the improvements of technology and what we can do with it. I imagine this debate went back a few generations too, "Oh look at him with his cotton gin. The youth these days..."

I don't think we can really screw things up too badly yet unless we lose the support we have in technology.

I just don't get the usage of "we" here. Just speaking for myself, I drive the same used Honda Civic that I've had since three years ago when I traded up from my used Dodge Neon.

I mean I hate spoiled rich pricks as much as anybody, it's just that the percentage of spoiled rich pricks is a tiny, tiny percentage of the overall age cohort. Paris Hilton and the cast of Laguna Beach: The Real OC do not in fact comprise our entire generation.

I don't know about you guys but my parents got free university education while I'm slaving away 20-30 hours a week simply to pay my university fees.
There are some very rich people but they only a small minority. They just have lots of coverage.
And who can seriously afford a car these days? Petrol way too expensive. I have to bike/bus/walk everywhere.

My mom (thankfully) had to pay her way through collage even though her brothers got free collage. She is just as pissed off as anyone else of the new collage prices.
Let’s not forget about the Government Tests. Where I live the tests are the only thing the teachers worry about. So a kid in my class that’s a total moron can pass this test because they only teach us on how to pass this test. Did I mention that the teacher’s paycheck is influenced by this test? Its like what Umbridge does in Harry Potter and the order of the phoenix.
They are teaching us how to pass the test and not what we need to learn. The stupid students can pass the tests without even thinking they just jump to the questions read it and the answers and do the test passing steps. Meanwhile the smart ones are bored out of there minds because the can see that we learned this in elementary but would get in trouble if they turned the test in before the first break. So we are not screwing ourselves. The generation before us is screwing us