MTV generation must face the music

Every American generation has been defined by its own great struggle. For our parents there was Vietnam and Civil Rights and the violent upheaval of the 1960’s. For their parents it was World War II and the Great Depression. So it has been all the way back to the founding revolution.

But to Americans under the age of 30, the MTV generation, it has seemed for much of our lives as if we were born at the end of such history. In our earliest years we watched passively while the Cold War ended, the Berlin Wall crumbled, and America ascended to the height of global power and prosperity, seemingly without effort.

We all got trophies and learned that success was our birthright. We internalized that the simple fact of our existence was sufficient to merit reward. We were credulous and entitled; living in a world that was bent to fit our perception of reality. In short, most of our American generation has never really known struggle.

We will know it soon. The myriad economic and political crises of the last decade have done little more than foreshadow a reckoning to come. But, even as storm clouds gather, many of us are unwilling or unable to recognize the obvious signs of trouble ahead. Worse still, many of us do not even understand the nature and origin of the problems we face.

Those problems, from unsustainable deficits to severe cultural polarization, are the predictably disastrous consequences of overly-centralized planning and control, of arrogant denials by elected officials that two plus two must eventually equal four. The margin of error America has enjoyed for so long is almost gone, squandered by decades of complacency, greed, and entitlement. And it will be us who are forced to bear the cost of the expensive lies sold to preceding generations.

Consider, we will never see a Social Security or Medicare check, but rest assured, our prime earning years will be sacrificed by the government to finance the death throes of its bankrupt welfare state. And yet, as a demographic, we seem more eager than ever to accept false promises and fiscal sleight of hand from our leaders, and to embrace increasing government control over every aspect of our lives.

Perhaps that is because politicians understand who we are. They created the America that raised us and recognize the ease with which they gain unquestioning loyalty simply by pandering to our secret belief that the world owes us everything we want.

Unfortunately, it does not.

And on September 12th, 2009 tens of thousands of people who understand the limits of government, who understand what freedom means, what it costs, and who fear the corrupting influence of arbitrary power, will gather in Washington, D.C. at Freedom Plaza before marching to the West Lawn of the Capitol to protest the fiscal recklessness and historical ignorance that is driving our country to its destruction.

Anyone who grasps how badly we as a generation have been and are being cheated should be there.

No matter what, due to choices we have made and factors beyond our control, things are about to get a whole lot harder for a generation that is used to watching them come easily. But the past, as they say, is history. We can still choose the terms on which we will face the inescapable reality of future challenges. Marching on 9/12 would be a great start.

Full Disclosure: The author is currently an intern at FreedomWorks, the principal organizer of the non-partisan 9/12 event. FreedomWorks is a libertarian group often inaccurately associated by default and intellectual laziness with the GOP.

A version of this article was originally published at The D.C. Writeup.

Photo Credit: PRNewsFoto/MTV