I Think I Got It Figured Out

I don't think I'm breaking any news when I say that it seems like the world is full of bad guys nowadays. It was once the case, say, after World War II, that we could easily classify the world into good guys and bad guys. We were the good guys, obviously. Even after the collapse of the bad guys - the Soviet Union - we could still find good guys and bad guys.
   But not no more.
   Who is a bigger bad guy, the terrorist who sincerely believes that blowing himself up will make his poverty-stricken world just the slightest bit better, or the corporate fat bastard who knowingly subverts the systems he's supposed to protect just to make another few million dollars he's never going to spend?
   I think you know the answer to that one.
   But I got to thinking... why now? Or, more accurately, why in the last ten years? Why has corporate America gotten so venal, so corrupt, so blatantly self-serving and not at all shy about letting everyone know it? The answer has two words:
   Baby Boomers.
   It's a demographic reality that the incidence of violent crime goes down as a population band gets older, but the incidence of fraud skyrockets. Grandma is not very likely to beat someone up, but the chance that she'll steal a million dollars when she has the opportunity is almost even money. And Baby Boomers are aging.
   But shouldn't the generation of free love and color-blind drug culture be above that? Shouldn't these ex-hippies still tread the path of the greater good?
   Nope.
   Civic responsibility was for their parents, the people who lived the Depression and fought World War II. The Baby Boomers had everything handed to them, literally. They were coddled and pampered and encouraged, and they suffered for it. They sought to tear down the very systems that nurtured them. Look at the education 'reforms' of the late 70's, with Boomers declaring that the approaches used to teach them were defective and lacking and in need of fresh re-thinking. Which didn't work.
   Fast forward about 20 years, and throw in that rat bastard son-of-a-bitch Phil Gramm and his bank deregulation, and you have the exact same thing with finance: foxes in charge of the hen house. Or foxes who designed and built the hen house. Replace 'foxes' with 'disillusioned Boomers who believe the system has failed everyone and is ripe for the plucking' and you'd be right.
   Our grandfathers realized that the only way the banking and finance system was going to survive the Depression was if the people in charge of it acted in a way that restored faith and confidence. Because a banking and finance system is only viable as long as the citizenry believes it's working for the greater good. Replace our grandfathers with their spoiled children, who believe the banking and finance system is only there to be cheated, swindled and pillaged and you have the situation we're in right now. No one trusts the people in charge, for very, very, very good reason.
   The idealists of the '60s turned into the cynics of the '80's turned into the corporate bandits of the 2000's. Not surprisingly, a generation of self-centered egotists turned into AARP-eligible sociopaths who completely abandoned the pretenses of their youth. They were put in charge of a system they didn't create and didn't really believe in, so their only recourse is to abuse their authority. That's not an excuse it's an explanation, and they're still the first against the wall when the revolution comes. And I'm still not joking about that.