Why Did America Lie to My Generation?

America lied to my generation. America lied about a lot of things. America lied about discrimination. America lied about diversity and still does. America lied about how it valued experience and still does. America lied about economic security and it still tries to, though the lies are becoming more transparent every day. America lied about competition and still does. America lied about what it valued and still does. These lies are embodied and promoted by political correctness and enforced by the Politically Correctness Police.

This is not a condemnation of any presidential administration or party. It is not a condemnation of America; the United States is still the greatest country this planet has ever seen. It is, however, a comment on how we, as a people, lie to ourselves and, more to the point, how segments of the American society lie to each other. It is a prediction of the penalties we will pay for those lies. It is something that I cannot possibly address in one article, so there will be more to follow.

When I first began my career, we were told we could count on cradle-to-grave employment. There were good things and bad things about that. The good thing was that we were more secure, were able to avoid the stresses that we deal with today, and planning for the future was relatively easy. The bad thing was that people sometimes got too secure, and tended to get arrogant and lazy. That drove employer costs and product prices up while driving productivity down. So we all understood when things began to change, that life by definition is not static. The cradle-to-grave concept faded away, and that was OK.

We were told we could count on the social security system, and now we are told that that may not be the case after paying increased amounts of money into it for all these years. That’s less OK, but in and of itself, bearable.

We were told that we would all be living longer, and, in general, we do because of the excellent health care system we have here in the U.S.A. Then the prices went up, and we were told that we would need to pay part of it. Some of us couldn’t really afford the higher cost of that excellent health care. When we retire (or are retired prematurely) many of us can’t afford the cost of that excellent health care, which remains excellent only as long as we can afford it. The consequence is the current national health care crisis that will play a role in determining at least the next two or three presidents of the United States. This is not OK on many levels.

Government has 3 missions: to protect its citizens from wrongdoing from outsiders, to protect its citizens from wrongdoing from one another, and to provide a stable and viable currency to facilitate economic transactions. Health care fits it where? It depends on how you define wrongdoing, but by my definition – nowhere.

We were given 401K plans to take the place of the traditional pension and social security. How is that working out? Not that well.

The result is a huge number of boomers that have lost most or all of the traditional pension they were promised, may lose much of the social security they were promised, and have had inadequate time to make their 401Ks and IRAs robust enough to make up the gaps. Despite these lies, we have tried to help out by resigning ourselves to working longer. We are not anxious to begin draining the social security system and bankrupt it for our children, and since as we have been promised that we will be living longer, why not work longer? I’ll tell you why not. You won’t let us.

There is now age discrimination in the U.S. toward the generation that worked so hard to eliminate all types of discrimination. I’m not saying that we solved it all, but we did a lot to make the situation a whole lot better. We did much more than enough on that score that we don’t deserve this treatment.

The result of this is that our children, not us, are causing the draining of the social security system prematurely, and will bankrupt it for themselves. The laws of mathematics demand retribution for the lies of any discrimination. We learned the lesson early in our lives. The current generation in power seems not to have learned it yet. The options in dealing with age discrimination are to let us contribute and help you save the future or bankrupt your own future – your choice. More to come.