A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney

citizens do not have the right to ignore laws because they disagree with a policy.

The most newsworthy reform in recent years was forbidding benefits to ex-Nazis in 2014; well and good, but of limited budgetary effect.

It is true that conventional pollution then was more tangible to voters than invisible and incremental warming is now. The Cuyahoga River in Ohio repeatedly burst into flames due to industrial pollution, for example, which proved hard to ignore.

It is very hard for one generation to engage in the “pursuit of happiness” if it is busy paying the bill for another generation’s sociopathic pursuit of the same.

Worse, it can be hard to even participate in democracy at all. If a younger citizen, saddled with educational debt, paying taxes to service obligations taken out by prior generations, working a crummy and inflexible job, cannot take time off to vote, then his vote has been rendered nugatory.

It’s hard to see how a generation can maintain its moral credentials when it has created a political culture so distorted that no member of the nation’s highest court can distinguish between bribery and business as usual.