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Selling out over Generations - morality squandered
Selling out - 1960s and 2006. Morality is known to all but ignored by most due to the addiction to being sucessfull.
Date: 7/29/2006 2:07:33 PM ( 18 y ) ... viewed 1524 times
I remember being in school in the 1960s and thinkg that "boy, when my age group gets into power, we are going to cahnge a lot". I was probably thinking of pot laws, and how cool it would be to smoke a joint legally, without the paranoia of getting caught.
Then I saw some of my peers going into the corporate culture, essentially "selling out" their ideals so they could make some money. I didn't critisize them directly, I tried to understand their needs and let them make their own choices - after all, that was one of the main points about things I wanted to change in our culture was freedom to make up our own minds.
Now, I wonder if they were free to choose their careers. Some had kids allready, and they neeed to be cared for, no doubt about that being justified. Others had reasons too, mostly about pressures from things outside their own lives. There was also the larger picture - "progress" - we needed to keep growing, we need to create more jobs, we need to encourage investment.
I didn't swallow any of it for myself though, I stuck to my morality. I tried to make sure I didn't get into any traps that would mean I had to have a steady income - I had the same fear of addictions. I had a recurring nightmare where I was sticking a needle in my arm every day, maybe from the "reefer madness" films we were shown.
To me, drug addiction and "the need to have stead income" are no different. They can both make us do immoral things. I feared them more than anything else. I learned to live out of a tent, I learned how to survive on my own in the wilderness too. I learned how to avoid conflicts, and how to keep conflicts from escalating into violence... and I allways walked away from violent people and situations if I could not end them another way. Was I chicken, or was I being courageous and strong?
When my own brother became head of a major oil corporation, and was denying global warming and any harm from fossil fuels emissions, proving to me that he was brainwashed by industry %¤#&!§-, I had the opportunity to really know what happens to people to get this way. He didn't have any addiction, he was just driven to succeed. No kids [yet], nothing but a need to prove his worth [which is very high in his case, as he has considerable talents and intelligence]. Perhaps some insecurity was behind it all, in his case, an insecurity about self-worth that was driven into us all in school, at home, and mostly from television and other media.
And so over the years, almost every one of my school aged peers had sold out. Respect for the most successful ones followed, and that respect is very encouraging to the next generation to do the same thing.
We have also lost the opportunity to pass along our moral values - how can we teach our kids morality when we have forsaken ours?
Now, our children are the next crop about to be plucked for service.
Here is a link to a story about how the CIA is recruiting the Gen Xers:
http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/review.cfm?rtype=4
The GenX-ers don't even know what "selling out " means. They have no idea what a hippy was all about. Pacifists and athiests and non-materialist are choices they were never offered, never heard about. Now, they are faced with CIA propaganda and much more media control than in the 1960s, as corporate monopolies have concentrated the media ownership in so few people's hands.
Its not as if my generation had parents who were in the know about "the grand conspiracy of political industrial military minions". We, in the 60's, had media telling us about what was going on. Now, media didn't even cover 100,000 people marching on Washington to protest the invasion of oil-rich Arabic nations with American military and corporations. No matter where you switch the channel to, you only get one side of the story, and that message is completely controlled by the Elites of our society.
And it doesn't help that parents today are not telling their kids about me, and what my reasons were for rejecting the normal route to success. Or, that the GenX has parents who sold out and, without speaking a word, is showing them the main route, the only route known now, to selling out.
The Gen X-ers won't even have to sell out, they don't seem to have any morals to betray. They have not heard basic morality - the sanctity of nature, of the gross violation of morality from killing humans, of the hypocritical betrayal of our own principles in not allowing other nations to live as they choose thru democratic vote. No, all that is lost on them partly because they have seen so much killing in video games, so much destruction of property in movies and on TV, of the violations of humans that is shown on the news as normal behavior.
Mostly though, it is the lost idea that we all know right from wrong even as toddlers, and that they are not being encouraged to allways act on the right and not ever the wrong. More and more our leaders, like GW Bush, are showing the kids that it is okay, even patriotic, to be hypocritical: that it is okay to violate human rights as long as it is claimed to be "in self defence", even when self defence becomes aggressive and overtly offensive, even to the point of invading foriegn nations who had nothing to do with 9-11, and then lie about it that it is not about the oil there, and the lie about it that it is about the oil but we have to defend our "energy security" too.
And so we are selling out to bigger ideals, selling out for our personal needs, selling out because thats the only game in town. Its different now, but it is still selling out, just as it was in the 1960s.
K
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