Prosperity vs. entitlement

Readers of my column know I rarely broach controversial topics and current events in my writing. At least not as a confutation – look it up in your Funk and Wagnall’s Dictionary. However, a couple I count as dear friends, I do have friends, Linn and Gary Chitwood, yes he is related to the Joey Chitwood who for years had a show called The Hell Drivers who entertained people at fairs and other places driving stunt cars. They sent me the following thoughts.

Gary writes, “The people who need to read this won’t. In my 72 years on his earth I’ve never seen a more ignorant generation. My wife and I have visited Ukraine three times on mission trips from the Plainfield, Indiana, Christian Church. The first time was in 2003. We witnessed firsthand what socialism does to people. I’m sick of catering to this generation’s ignorance.”

They sent the following which was written by a 26-year old college student, Alyssa Ahlgren, who is in graduate school studying to attain an MBA.

AOC And The Blind Generation

“My generation is blind to the prosperity around us. I’m sitting in a small coffee shop near Nokomis, Florida, trying to think of what to write about. I scroll through my newsfeed on my phone looking at the latest headlines of presidential 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 walking 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 US that our poverty line begins 31 times above the global average. Thirty One Times!

Virtually no one in the US 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 appreciation is evident as the popularity of socialist policies among my generation continues to grow.

Congresswomen 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 are destitute and truly impoverished, yet we have a young generation convinced they’ve never seen prosperity, and as a result, we elect some politicians who are 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, live through World Wars, the Korean War, and The Vietnam War. Nor did we see the rise and fall of Socialism and Communism

We don’t know what it is like to live without the Internet, WITHOUT CARS, WITHOUT SMARTPHONES. We don’t have a lack of prosperity problem WE HAVE AN ENTITLEMENT PROBLEM, and UNGRATFULNESS problem and it is spreading like a plague.”

[Larry Vandeventer. Go to my two websites – Larryvandeventer.com and wjrambler1956.com – and purchase my books. I grew up North of Calvertville and graduated from Worthington High School and Indiana State. Contact me at Goosecrick@aol.com or 812-796-0784]