"THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN"

Speak up, ‘Boomers’!

“It is easier to fool people than it is to convince them that they have been fooled.”

If you’ve spent any amount of time on the internet, you’ve undoubtedly seen this quote pop up in every form of media the internet can provide. The quote has been attributed to everyone from Lincoln and Jesus to Santa and Satan. Mark Twain is the name I’ve seen attached to this little chestnut more often than not but in all honesty, I have no idea who the originator of this quote is and the internet completely lost my trust in it’s factual authenticity around the time MySpace was consumed by Facebook.

Oh yes, dear reader, I’m older than Facebook. In fact, I predate the internet, cell phones, and color TVs (at least in my house in the early 1970s). And as time keeps marching on, the list of culturally important technological gadgets I’m older than has become Wikapedic™ in scope and size. In simpler, twenty-first century zeitgeist terminology, I am a “boomer”.

Now, I am quite aware of the current cultural perspectives towards “boomers” and our thoughts and opinions about literally anything. Apparently most humans born after 9/11 have universally agreed to adopt the same attitude towards people they will listen to that Leonardo DiCaprio has towards prospective “love interests”; no one over twenty six need apply.

However, it is my hope that I can prove to those of you who didn’t “swipe left” as soon as you read the words “older than Facebook” that age is far more than just a number to be avoided at all costs. The truth is, there are some benefits to surviving more than a couple dozen trips around the sun. Not the least of these benefits is access to a wellspring of insights, experiences, and wisdom that can ONLY be acquired with age.

For example:

When I was twenty-years-old, I bought my first brand-new vehicle; a 1989 Ford Ranger. I meticulously mathed out my personal income/outgo ratios and concluded I could (barely) afford a brand-new pickup truck payment. Armed with this mathematical knowledge, I sprinted to my local Ford dealership to make my new truck dreams come true. It wasn’t until after I had signed the paperwork and paid my down payment that I was told by the dealership’s finance guy of my legal obligation to acquire full coverage automotive insurance on my brand-new truck. And so I was very quickly (and painfully) educated on two subjects I knew absolutely nothing about at that time; new vehicle sale requirements and state auto insurance laws.

I sure could’ve used someone with experience in retail automotive processes and procedures to share that info with me before I signed my life away.

Yeah, boomers can be boring, cranky, surly, and just plain mean. News flash: so can non-boomers (aka; young people). Boomers can also be a perpetual fountain of vital information, experience, and wisdom that simply cannot be gained without logging some significant hours on this planet. It is a wise person of any age who understands the necessity of taking full advantage of the cache of experiential treasure found all over the world.

Unfortunately, “wise” is not a word any sane person would use to describe western civilization in the 21st century.

As I write this in the post-presidential-election days of 2024, I find myself in a strange and unique place in my personal journey. Speaking as an individual who has circled the sun well over fifty times, I can honestly echo the opening lines of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

“The world has changed…”

We may not have the elven ability to “feel it in the earth” or “smell it in the air”, but we definitely have things Tolkien’s ethereal woodland creatures lacked - namely 24-hour news channels and social media. And thanks to these technological “advancements”, we are main-lining information in unprecedented quantities and at speeds that would’ve melted my War Games-era 2400 baud modem back in the day.

And yet, with all of the information literally at our fingertips, the level of observable ignorance about our basic human reality is reaching culturally suicidal levels.

Yeah, I know. Hyperbole is a poor way to start a relationship. But, I don’t believe it is hyperbolic to express concerns about the patterns of behavior that are leading to cultural devastation across the United States. To paraphrase Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2 - Judgment Day, “It’s in [our] nature to destroy [ourselves].”

And one skill I have definitely learned in fifty-plus years of life is self-destructive pattern recognition. With great access to information comes an even greater responsibility to learn how to accurately discern between fact and fiction. Because as this article’s opening quote correctly observes, we have a surplus of gullible people whose open-mind philosophies guarantee they will absolutely fall for anything.

For example:

• There are people living on the Earth right now who are thoroughly convinced the planetary globe they live on isn’t a globe at all.

• There exists people in the US who believe with all their hearts that America’s six moon landings were all faked.

• A growing percentage of my fellow humans apparently believe centuries of immutable mammalian gender biology is no longer based on scientifically concrete chromosomes but is now as fluid and unpredictable as an Australian Olympic breakdancer.

And that’s just the beginning of the head-scratching theories and beliefs that have somehow gained traction and inexplicable levels of credibility in our cultural conversations.

At no point in my lifetime, if not America’s entire existence, has the need for discerning adults to participate in these conversations been more necessary. Many of the cultural changes currently sweeping across Western civilization in the name of “progress” aren’t just observably absurd, they are suicidally dangerous. One only needs to read up on the fall of empires like Babylon, Greece, Rome, and the Third Reich to see recognizable patterns of self-destructive behavior currently on full display in the United States of America.

At the risk of potentially insulting a growing percentage of my fellow Americans, I have to say one of the more obvious and troubling changes I have witnessed in my lifetime is the cultural destruction of critical thinking and common sense in American culture.

What I am about to say is not popular. In fact, some of the following commentary can get me “canceled” right out of the gate. But I have learned some things; things I’ve often learned the very hard way. One of the things I’ve learned is this: the hardest truths are often the ones we need to hear the most.

For example:

1. Emotions are the absolute worst foundation to base permanent, life-changing decisions on.

2. Passionate zeal is a poor substitute for educated reason and dispassionate logic.

3. You couldn’t fill a rowboat with the number of people under the age of thirty that understands the first two points in this list.

American culture has a lot of problems. One of these problems is the type of characteristics we choose to reward with wealth, power, and fame. The number of books, blogs, articles, editorials, psychology research papers, YouTube videos, and entire websites dedicated to educating humanity on the growing narcissism epidemic in Western civilization cannot be accurately counted. In spite of this surplus of information, Western cultures are more eager now than ever to lavish praise, glory, power, and riches onto the most self-centered, egocentric, psychotically narcissistic humans in our midst.

Only in America’s backwards-thinking culture can America’s military veterans live in homeless squalor while self-centered people like the infamous “Catch me outside girl” are rewarded for fully embracing our “it’s-all-about-me” culture with a million-dollar net worth.

These are just some of the cultural observations I’ve made over the last few decades. And while these observations are troubling, they aren’t surprising. In fact, there is another quote I’d like to share with you as a teaser for the next article:

“And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie.”

Yep, this is a quote from the single most polarizing book in existence written by someone who is more culturally despised than boomers, a Christian preacher. Specifically, this quote is found in the second letter written to the church in Thessalonica by the most boomer of all boomers, the apostle Paul. The old preacher is warning anyone who will read it that future generations will be contaminated by “strong delusion” because “they did not receive the love of the truth” (2 Thessalonians 2:10).

In other words, Paul saw future generations throwing cultural wisdom, moral common sense, and Biblical truth in the nearest dumpster in their mad rush to embrace whatever lies, deceit, and delusion their society fed them.

Any of this sounding familiar?

This widespread delusion is the primary reason I’m adding my voice to the growing cacophony of voices to the world wide web. Because, after fifty-plus trips around the sun, I’ve learned a few things that have greatly benefitted me. It would be incredibly selfish of me to keep all this knowledge and wisdom to myself. Because as good ‘ol Abe Lincoln, Mark Twain, or whoever coined the quote at the start of this article, fooling people is very easy. The hard part is convincing people they’ve been fooled.

Welcome to the ‘hard part’. I hope you stick around. Because this old boomer’s got a few things to share that I suspect you’re going to learn to love (after you get over hating it).

~ PappaMurf