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So, we’ll accept this crisis, this terrible, debilitating crisis of Social Security exactly as it is presented, as sheer, imminent bankruptcy. But we’ll propose our own solution.
One of the interesting things I might observe at this particular moment in our culture — if I may digress again and I am running this little get-together so I will — it’s pretty obvious that, despite recent missteps, the conservatives have a stranglehold on politics and increasingly on culture. Everything is a retread: we want the comfort of what we’ve seen or heard before. Culture has become the realm of regurgitation.
The thing that’s causing the reactionaries such agita is that the culture in harness, the culture that keeps getting spun back, and back again, is what’s left of the radical culture of the 1960s, and they can’t do anything about it. If they could just come up with an alternate culture that wasn’t dead on arrival… That’s the holy grail of the conservatives right now: How to make their police state an attractive buy. At the same time life expectancy is way up. Those ageing radicals are gonna be around for a long, long time, taking bucks. And as long as they’re around, they’ll be pulling their considerable bucks out of Social Security.
We have to ask, who does this effect? Why, the younger generations who are going to have to put up with the radical superiority of their elders far into middle age.
There’s some tension there, folks. Maybe you haven’t noticed. So we have cultural differences and we have the fact that all those people under 50 are going to be carrying a burden for those over 50 until the latter group is 100 plus.
When you remove a boomer or two, you free up the culture and you lessen the strain on Social Security. What exactly are those ageing boomers going to contribute now that the sun has set on their youth, except a few liner notes to some ancient album?
Here’s a way to put all those guns the liberals are so afraid of to good use. People should be rewarded for eliminating the old hippies, anybody over 55. That means Greenspan can take his saxophone home and Cheney’s got to watch his back. No exemptions. This isn’t ideological. It’s time to turn over a new leaf, turn the culture over to the young.
Conservatives and liberals alike decry the lack of worship and ritual in our society: all right, how about a good old hunting season, two months of every year, open season on Boomers. Thin out the herd. Just do this and you get the young, you get the hunters, you get the psychos, and at the same time you lose all those quibbling lefties who never voted anyway. And suddenly Social Security has a real bonus, a bonus that isn’t in the hands of Wall Street — best of all, we Democrats are the ones who’ve saved it.
We could even create a special holiday or two, Spring and Fall. “Shooting Day.” Get religious backing. At this point the Southern churches are so far to the right of Torquemada that the preachers will be grabbing the guns out of the kids’ hands, and doing the shooting themselves. I’m sure it gives them permission, somewhere, in the Bible.
