Grumpa Joe's Place

A truly great essay and a genius level analysis of our millennial generation. How can our youngsters truly know what living poor is all about? They can’t know and never will know until they get into the world and have to fend for themselves. Prosperity is their norm. Please read the attached essay by Alyssa Ahlgren

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To Whom It All Concerns….
My Generation Is Blind to the Prosperity Around Us
I’m sitting in a small coffee shop near Nokomis trying to think of what to write about.
I scroll through my newsfeed on my phone looking at the latest headlines of Democratic candidates calling for policies to fix the so-called injustices of capitalism.
I put my phone down and continue to look around. I see people talking freely, working on their MacBooks, ordering food they get in an instant, seeing cars go by outside, and it dawned on me.
We live in the most privileged time in the most prosperous nation and we’ve become completely blind to it Vehicles, food, technology, freedom to associate with whom we choose.
These things are so ingrained in our American way of life we don’t give them a second thought.
We are so well off here in the United States that our poverty line begins 31 times above the global average. Thirty. One. Times. Virtually no one in the United States is considered poor by global standards.
Yet, in a time where we can order a product off Amazon with one click and have it at our doorstep the next day, we are unappreciative, unsatisfied, and ungrateful.
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.
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.
Why then, with all of the overwhelming evidence around us, evidence that I can even see sitting at a coffee shop, do we not view this as prosperity?
We have people who are dying to get into our country. People around the world destitute and truly impoverished.
Yet, we have a young generation convinced they’ve never seen prosperity, and as a result, elect politicians dead set on taking steps towards abolishing capitalism. Why?
The answer is this, my generation has only seen prosperity. We have no contrast. We didn’t live in the great depression, or live through two world wars, the Korean War, The Vietnam War or see the rise and fall of socialism and communism.
We don’t know what it’s like to live without the internet, without cars, without smartphones.
We don’t have a lack of prosperity problem. We have an entitlement problem, an ungratefulness problem, and it’s spreading like a plague.”

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When one lives in prosperity from the minute they are born, how can they understand poverty? People of my generation witnessed the struggle of our parents working to give us what they never had. My grandfather John sent my Dad to America because he “could not feed him”. My Dad left, and never looked back. He knew what poverty was.

My dad had an aversion to potatoes, and when I challenged him once on why he didn’t take any potatoes at the Sunday dinner table he told me “I ate enough potatoes in my home country.” He left when he was seventeen. In my mind that is a whole lot of potatoes to eat in seventeen short years.

As an adult, I traveled to the far east on my job. I visited some pretty poor places in Malaysia and Indonesia. I came home with one major impression. These people work for pennies per hour because they are hungry and those pennies represent more money than they have ever seen before.  In the USA we have people who protest the poor wages in these far away countries yet our poverty level salary would make the people in those countries very rich. As my mother reminded me often “we have a loaf of bread under each arm and we complain that we don’t have anything to eat.”

What socialist leaning millennials do not understand is that to bring the level of poverty up in the world will also mean reducing the wealth of our nation. So the complaint of never having seen prosperity will reverse to seeing poverty in a grossly mis-calculated backfire.

Filed under: Biography, Conservative, family, Immigration | Tagged: Hunger, Millenials, Poverty, Prosperity, socialism | Leave a comment »