I Love Lucy

It is not often one can quote that great Philosopher Lucille Ball. Usually her quotes are "Oh, Ricky" or "Can I be in the show?" But in her later show, "The Lucy Show," there was an episode where the troubles of the youth of the time are addressed. Remember this is the tumultuous 60's. Her character, Lucy Carmichael, said something along these lines.

The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect to their elders. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, and chatter before company. They eat up dainties at the table, ... and are tyrants over their teachers.

The purpose of the statement is to get the older generation watching the show to agree with it. But then Lucy gives the kicker. This was said by Socrates in Ancient Greece. Immediately, the conclusion was to be drawn that the troubled youth of the 60's were in fact normal. Every generation of elders disparaged the youth. In the show, the smugness of Mrs. Carmichael was almost unbearable.

But there are several layers of difficulties with the quote. First, as Abraham Lincoln once said, "There are lots of fake quotes on the internet." While the quote was pre-internet the quote is fake--Socrates did not say it. In fact we do not really know very much of what Socrates said. It is either an adaptation of something from Plato or from Aristophanes’ play The Clouds. Secondly, to use the quote in this way shows a huge ignorance of the history of Greece. When Socrates was alive the Greek people were in a golden age. They had defeated the Persians, the greatest empire of the time, in battle-once on land and once at sea. The plays, the philosophers, and the political philosophy of that time still influence us. But the leaders of the time, especially of Athens, decided to meddle in the affairs of other countries. The Athenian Empire was very short lived. The Empirical-leaning generation that this quote refers to destroyed the Greek culture and eventually they lost their independence, not to a powerful empire, but to the barbarians to the north led by Alexander.

In this same way the generation Ms. Ball and her writers so wanted to praise—those who were teens in the 1960s—are  destroying American culture through empire, bread, and circuses, to mix a metaphor. In the same way that ancient Rome bankrupted itself to pay for their military, the free bread to keep the urban poor from rioting, and the lavish entertainment of the games at the coliseum to distract them, so this same generation will bankrupt America. The bankruptcy will occur for much the same reasons that it did for Rome.

The two plans to stop our overspending, the Ryan and the Obama plan, are both just delaying the inevitable. The biggest mutual fund, Pimco, specializing in debt, no longer purchases American government securities. They see a crisis coming. The point is not the current debt ceiling. The point is that there is a debt ceiling that will be placed by the market on US bonds when no one wants to buy them. Neither the debt increase over the next 10 years from not having a plan (debt to 26 trillion), or the debt from the Obama plan (debt to 23 trillion), or the debt from the Ryan Plan (20 trillion) are sustainable.

How convenient that the generation that is causing these issues by over consumption is exempting itself from any cuts. Those 55 and older are free from any cuts. Normally since I am 56 I should support this. But I feel strongly that what my generation is saying to my children and grandchildren can only be described with an expletive. You pick the expletive you are comfortable with.

As a concluding note, what I am trying to do in these first blog posts is to provide a philosophical background as to why I feel that each of us needs to metaphorically leave Babylon the Great. Gradually I want to add and discuss the practical ways one can be in the world, yet not of the world. I see that some of my friends are ahead of me in this journey, and others need to catch up. In any case I feel the effort is well worth it.