To the ‘Youth Vote’

From Larrey Anderson at American Thinker

America’s young people helped elect Barack Obama. Way to go kids! This article is for you. Let’s take a look at your future.

We won’t need a time machine. We will just need to visit Europe and talk to the youth of France, Italy, and Greece. Don’t worry. They won’t mind. They have plenty of time to talk. They don’t have jobs.

Young people in Western Europe tend to sit around, smoke Marlboro cigarettes, drink espresso (and Coca Cola), and (at least until this election) bitch about America.

They have been taught, since their first day in school, that capitalism is evil — that the government can, and should, provide health care, employment, and eventually, guaranteed retirement benefits for everyone.

In their leisurely conversations when they have finished condemning capitalism, they go on to praise the idea of socialism. They do not praise their own countries. They are not stupid. The health care stinks. (Young people don’t care much about that.) There are no jobs. (But there are unemployment benefits.) And the retirement systems are bankrupt. (But old age is way, way, way in the future.)

So, they argue, in the next election they are going to replace the loser socialists who currently run their countries with some real socialists — politicians who will finally keep their promises. I heard this discussion in France thirty years ago. I heard it the last time I was in Italy. It is taking place in Greece right now.

The last time I was in Rome I listened as a very bright young man explained to his friends, over lunch at a sidewalk café, what was really going on: Most European countries have become, essentially, plutocracies. The socialist governments give lip service to wealth redistribution but they are tightly interwoven with the “old money” in the banking system and in big business.

This came as no surprise to his educated friends. Their response was (same as it always is): Of course the system is corrupt. We will throw out the old socialists and put in some new ones. It played in their minds like a broken record. I have heard it for years and years and years.

The only thing that stopped the conversation from becoming a perpetual loop was that one of the conversationalists eventually proclaimed, “Ah. But at least we are not America!” The Marlboros got lit up. The espresso and Coca Cola were sipped. And they got back to the serious business of bashing capitalism.

The rest here: http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/11/waltzing_on_the_titanic_1.html

I know exactly where Anderson is coming from when he talks about the Europeans. During my Army career, I was stationed over there three times. A fine example of socialist mentality is the hell that got raised when it was suggested that Germans go from a 28 hour workweek to 40 hours. You’d have thought the apocalypse was at hand.

There’s a similarity between the youth culture in Europe and the American youth in liberal college campuses, coffee shops, and Bohemian neighborhoods. All of them have been inculcated by left-over 60’s radicals who now fill the ranks of academic intelligentsia.

They’re gonna change the world, to hear them tell it. No more evil, rich corporations exploiting the poor, and best of all, no more war. Everybody’s gonna hold hands and sing Kumbaya. The angry batshit crazy muslims who rail against the great satan because American imperialism pushed them into killing 3000 people on this soil, will put away their bombs and ignore the passages in the Koran that tell them to kill all infidels in name of Allah.

After these children grow up and have to live and work in the real world, we’ll see how they react to the Obama-inspired system they helped create.