A Privledged Life

 

For a little while I have been reminiscing on how things have changed since I was a naïve youth to now. Growing up, while we were not rich money wise, we always had food on the table so that we did not starve and a roof over our heads. I still have fond memories of those times. I now appreciate why so many talk about “the good old days”. Then life was simpler in that we focused on just a few items. Would we find a job? For a loner like me would I ever find a woman who would take me for her husband, and would we have children of our own? Simple things that we just let time determine our fate.

Then I would compare then to now. Things I took for granted back then I can no longer do. I remember well buying a BB gun so I could go hunting. I was maybe 12 or so in age. When I saw the BB’s bouncing off the roughed grouse I hoped to take home to eat I managed to take my meagre savings and then bought a used single shot pellet gun. Much more effective! With some of my school class mates I would somehow find my way to the Fish and Game club to target shoot using .22 rifles. This at a time when my parents had only one vehicle and ferrying my younger brother and I around for teenage activities was not high on their priority list. Yet it happened. I do remember when I was 15 and took the hunter safety course over, I think 2 or 3 evening sessions with the final oral and written exams. During the oral exam I saw friends of mine fail for, to me, obvious reasons. Like taking the rifle they were handed and asked to make sure it was unloaded by pointing the muzzle in the wrong direction (toward others). Even then I took the lessons to heart and passed both parts. I do not recall if I made any mistakes on the written part, but I did not on the oral exam. Then when I was 17 and having saved up money from my summer job, I bought a brand-new firearm; a Browning T-bolt .22 rifle from a sporting good store in Thunder Bay. I was in heaven!

Why do I talk about this? Because it is next to impossible for that to happen anymore. Politicians have used firearms, as one example, as a scapegoat to restrict our freedom. All in the name of better public safety yet never providing any evidence that was the case. Rhetoric was more important than facts.

These days issues of 50 years ago that made sense are bandied around as if they are still relevant. Or make an issue of things that do not warrant it. What happened? Why is rhetoric far more important than facts and why issues are no longer relevant to simply basic things that really make a difference in our quality of life.

While I was still mulling it over, I have come across a few things of late that have helped crystallise my thoughts. Things like how now we have “poor” people who are obese as one obvious example. A half century ago if you were truly poor you suffered from malnutrition as every day was a struggle to find anything to eat. Then yesterday I came across this article that had been written almost 2 years ago:

https://alphanewsmn.com/thoughts-from-a-hipster-coffee-shop/.

In brief the authour, in her mid 20’s, looked around and saw that her generation and those somewhat older than her, were living a privileged life and didn’t even realise it. Here are just two paragraphs from that article that bring it all into focus:

“Our unappreciation is evident as the popularity of socialist policies among my generation continues to grow. Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said to Newsweek talking about the millennial generation, “An entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest electorates in America, came of age and never saw American prosperity.

Never saw American prosperity. Let that sink in. When I first read that statement, I thought to myself, that was quite literally the most entitled and factually illiterate thing I’ve ever heard in my 26 years on this earth. Now, I’m not attributing Miss Ocasio-Cortez’s words to outright dishonesty. I do think she whole-heartedly believes the words she said to be true. Many young people agree with her, which is entirely misguided. My generation is being indoctrinated by a mainstream narrative to actually believe we have never seen prosperity. I know this first hand, I went to college, let’s just say I didn’t have the popular opinion, but I digress.”

Prosperity. That is the difference from my youth to now. As I said at the beginning, I grew up in a family that, while we never wanted for the basics (food and shelter) we were NOT prosperous. My mother handled the family financial affairs and for her it was a constant struggle. Using credit when ever possible to get us by. And why I and my siblings to this day value a dollar and have worked hard to have a better life than how we grew up.

I am pretty much “retired” now. I am not “rich”, but neither am I “poor”. I can live a comfortable life all because for a significant part of my life politicians focused on making this country a place where prosperity could thrive. But no longer. For reasons that, thanks to that article I better understand, we are blindly striving to undo our prosperity. By killing whole industries through the application of nonsensical regulations and replacing real issues such as job creation with imaginary ones such as “fighting climate change” and fighting a virus that is no more dangerous than the common flu as two examples. We have become so entitled that few any more even know what “reality” is. We see monsters everywhere just like Don Quixote in seeing large windmills thought he saw “giants”. We battle these imaginary monsters and take no care for the damage we do to our selves and the society we have built. We are self destructing to the point that rather than embracing the advances that have been made we find mythical targets for us to chase at the detriment of the society and prosperity we worked so hard to build a better life from. People like me can only look back at simpler times with envy as hard fought freedoms are stripped away and we do nothing about it.