i don't doubt any of that, but the fact that folks from your generation are failing at parenting indicates that, for whatever reason, their parents failed to teach how to parent. perhaps they were too strict, causing a rebellious backlash... perhaps they placed too heavy on being a hard worker, causing baby boomers to sacrifice their family for their work...
Its not nearly that linear. Every generation gets an opportunity to break the cycle. My parents broke the cycle of rampant alcoholism that ran through both their families. When one becomes an adult, their
choices become their own and nobody else's. That many refuse responsibility for their choices doesn't make it right.
While there are certain things known to cause harm, and certain things known to be positive, simply avoiding the bad things and doing the good things doesn't guarantee a result. You can be a vegetarian, work-out religiously, and still drop dead at 40 of a heart arhythmia, be diagnosed with cancer, or any number of other diseases/illness. There are variables nobody can reliably control because each child can be so dynamically different in sensitivity, disposition, personality, emotional or psychological progress, etc.
There are many families with three or four responsible adult children and one who is a useless chronically unemployed pot smoker. Its not just the home that helps 'mold' children, but the culture of their surrounding environment, and that includes 'stuff' they pick-up or are exposed to at school, in the homes of neighbors, friends, and relatives. But as generalizations go...
As I alluded to earlier, and better articulated by
the short essay linked to by
Ornery, if the Greatest Generation can be faulted, its that they erred on the side of spoiling their children too much and permitting them to live extended childhoods with little responsibility well into their teens (and beyond). This facilitated the rise of a purely self-indulgent 'youth culture' that never existed on its scale before; except in the most affluent social circles, whose children were so infamous for self-indulgent and maladjusted misbehavior that 'spoiled little rich kids' were popularly the subject of satire and denigration (as they are today). So the cultural maladies of the affluent few became the cultural maladies of the many.
But if the Greatest Generation can be faulted for being the first to so widely give their children the freedom for purely self-indulgent pursuits on such a large scale, the error of their ways did not escape them for long. It is the Baby Boomers who can be credited for not only failing to acknowledge their faults, but refusing to characterize them as faults altogether, indeed working tirelessly to paint them as the antithesis of 'faults' and promoting their mass-adoption into the fabric of American cultural 'normalcy'.
That's not to say this 'youth culture' didn't have some upsides. We got a lot of great music from this 'cultural revolution', as the Baby Boomers love to think of it. We also got rampant drug experimentation, sky-rocketing teen pregnancy rates and single mothers, sexually transmitted diseases in 30% or better of the population, a divisive 'cultural gap' which often puts children and their parents at bitter odds, among a host of other societal problems.
So it would seem some great music came with a disturbingly great cost.
oh yea, considering he was a student, he had no right to morally object. better to take the high road like bush and cheney and just duck it all together.
Right, because learning to pilot 1960s-era jet fighters in the National Guard was
soooo much more safe than smoking pot in your dorm and criticizing your country.