Previous generations have been labeled for the difficulties they faced or the accomplishments they owned. But now, ours is being titled by some as the “gimme” generation based on the severely misled sense of entitlement that has infiltrated our era. And now, society is watching as millions are making the sluggish transition from being snobby children to unconstrained adults.
Last week, Fox News interviewed an economics professor from Valencia College in Orlando, Fla., Jack Chambless, who had recently conducted an experiment in his undergraduate classes asking his students to spend 10 minutes writing an essay about their perceptions of the American dream and exactly how they expected the government to be a part of their future achievements.
A slim 10 percent of the students claimed that they wanted freedom from overzealous governmental regulation. But the disturbing consensus manifested itself when the remainder of the students said that they wanted and expected free healthcare, paid tuition, money for down payments on houses, to be given jobs and for the very wealthy in society to be taxed even more to allow for better living conditions for everyone else.
Chambless believes that the fault for this generational fallacy of expected entitlement goes beyond the crummy high school history teacher who neglected John Locke and his claims to life, liberty and property. Instead, he places blame in the parents’ hands. He expressed that parents should have been the ones to teach where our toys and products came from, and the peaceful self-interested pursuit of profit that created the means to provide such goods.
I decided to call Chambless myself to understand more about his distress concerning our generation of entitled historophobes.
“You’ve been taught that if you lose every soccer game, you still deserve a trophy. You deserve a passing grade. I don’t know if it was Barney, or the parents, but something happened. It went from my generation where everything was earned, to parents of the 60s convincing children that they are so special that they deserve everything.”
And if these unofficial classroom surveys don’t provide enough evidence of the nationwide self-swelling, look at the main complaints of those involved in the recent Occupy Wall street and offshoot movements. Signs sprawled across city halls express expectations of full student loans; rallying cries from makeshift podiums demand lowered or nonexistent down payments on homes.
How starkly this contrasts to my parents (and most of yours, I presume) who saved for and paid the 20 percent down payment — the 1989 average according to USA Today — on the purchase of their home, because no buyer nor rational lending institution two or three decades ago expected a person to buy a big house with little or no money down. The current greed-driven housing meltdown, fueled by funny money mortgages and fanned by speculation of quick profits, has created a whole generation with different thoughts.
The same goes for student loans, another expectation on the “gimme” Christmas list. When our parents were going to college (go ahead, visualize them, in their high rise jeans and feathery mullets), no one felt entitled to government aid. You were lucky to get some kind of scholarship, or you worked your way through school. But now, astronomical borrowing is the norm and skyrocketing debt for college graduates is the sad reality.
This is shaping up into quite a recipe for success. Combine nearly one in six Americans currently clinging to government assistance, according to CNN, some steaming hot historical ignorance and a dash of President Barack Obama’s appeal to the youth calling for government handouts and a redistribution of wealth and ding! One order of Gimme Gimme pie, coming right up.
Many economists and academics speculate that this sense of entitlement and dip in the traditional American work ethic, coupled with unbridled growth in government size and spending, will lead our generation to being the first in history that is poorer than the previous one. Retired baby boomers, high debt, high taxes , increasing regulation and Federal bloat and overused welfare will leave us susceptible to falling behind the rest of the world and crumbling to the ground like Rome.
But there is something undeniably American in the desire to be at the top. Whether it’s that soccer trophy, or being a global powerhouse, we as a country long to be exceptional. Chambless advises that this younger generation snaps out of this trance and take a quick look around.
“Look at what people in India, China and Eastern Europe are doing. They’ve had poverty their entire lives and now they’re pursuing education, jobs and personal responsibility. They are hungry and we are spoiled. And that’s your competition.”
It’s time that we look at what the rest of the world is doing, elect politicians that encourage individualism and responsibility, and recharge some of our innate American grit.
