Greedy little bastards

Remember the 70's? Some of you do. It was a green time, a sharing time, a time of communities and organized hopes, aspirations, a time when many of us believed that it was better to work together for the common good than to push to the head of the line or strive mightily for the advancement of the Almighty Me. We thought, naively, that most intelligent people agreed on this. That all came to a screeching halt when a strange new breed started coming out of colleges in the early 80's. They had a fondness for 3 piece suits, spoke a new language of bottom-line and cost-efficacy, expressed a strong fundamentalist belief in Reaganism, and walked all over people who didn't see the world as they did. Those who said "Wait a minute, you can't do that. . ." weren't shouted down, they were dismissed with the supercilious smiles of the newly-powerful young, dismissed as doddering fools (even though at 35 we dodderers only had a few years on these new androids.) They were, in fact nothing more than greedy little bastards, confirmed by the new conservatism in their naughty, schoolboy selfishness. Sound familiar? Georgie B. really should have been born in the 60's--history repeats itself because our memories are limited to the last trip to the grocery store. 

A few weeks ago a putative candidate for Obama's Secretary of Education was interviewed. He said one of the first things he would do is summon all the deans of the business schools at Harvard, Cornell, Stanford, etc. and read them the riot act, tell them they needed to show the country immediately what they were doing to instill a sense of ethics, fairness, and lack of greed in their students. Those deans of course are the Greedy Little Bastards of the Reagan administration and they have been busy teaching a whole new crop of GLB's to grab what they can and to mess up the country and our lives. They can be preached at and roundly condemned, but they are not going to change. Their attitudes have been the norm now for 25 years. So far I don't see Obama really seeing the problem, otherwise he would have looked a little harder to his own roots where under rocks and in caves are still living a whole tribe of forgotten organizers, community-oriented, unselfish people who perhaps now should be given their chance to make the rules. Of course the simple-brained fundamentalist conservative shouters would call most of them terrorists, but maybe we need to find our earplugs and start to ignore all that ranting--we've been too nice, too polite and attentive, letting the ranters have their day. Time to duct tape their mouths for awhile. Will it happen? I doubt it, because almost everyone, even the most community-oriented, is very stuck on their own creature comforts, the state of their 401-K, lost in meaningless little things like being the first on the block to own a hybrid car. The cave-dwellers are no longer welcome, their hair is too shaggy and their message too fierce--it upsets the nice suburban liberals.

When my generation was small, paper towels had not been invented. In those days no trees were cut to wipe up wine spills. Now the young pride themselves in buying only the Fair Trade Renewable Fiber Unbleached Super Wipe for $2 extra at Natures or Trader Joe's. That is why we have a problem.