The one piece of advice I would give to future generations...Be kind to each other.
Sassysister
Since it is so close to Halloween, maybe a story that gets the imagination going???
1. A wealthy man devises an elaborate hoax to force three people to apologize for humiliating him earlier in his life.
2. An old radio picks up signals from the past that bring together a pair of elderly lovers.
3. At a concentration camp a former Nazi is tried by a phantom jury of his tortured victims.
I would tell every young person to read the book “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.” I read it when I was nineteen, at a friend’s urging. It didn’t make me rich, but it made me wary of get rich quick schemes. It made me wary of the Housing Bubble of the New Millenium, which seemed remarkably similar to the South Sea Bubble and Tulip Mania. It gave me a kind of immunity from “New Paint Disease” as well, realizing that shiny stuff eventually fades, then you see what’s underneath the new paint and chrome and glitter. After reading this, any young person with a modicum of common sense or critical thinking skills could see that humanity often behaves irrationally. “Because everyone is doing it” doesn’t make it right or practical. That is what I would tell young people.
Of course, this could easily be expanded into blog length, say four or five hundred words, by recounting the various manias past and present. In my time, I witnessed “dopemania” in the sixties, and am distressed to see the same garbage being peddled by the same types of people today. I’m talking not just of cold blooded dope peddlers with guns and money and no conscience, but the cultural icons that glorify it. In my day we had the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton singing about cocaine (“she don’t lie”, really?) and Country Joe and the Haight-Ashbury based guru bands the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane selling millions of records for their labels touting psychedelic toxins to a gullible juvenile audience. Now we have rap “artists” doing the same thing, talking about getting the formula (for making crack, presumably) and smoking “blunts” with underage suburban girls backstage who go back to the high school all gaga about it the next Monday.
As Solomon said, there is nothing new under the sun. I would recommend reading the Bible but that book has been sadly characterized as a fairy tale for right wing evangelicals by anyone who has gone to college long enough to get teaching credentials then gone on to choose reading material for school age children. We see the same patterns of greed and exploitation over and over, every generation. My generation seemed to go “bad” about 1971. I noticed the band “Bad Company” singing about guns and cocaine. Now we got a whole new generation of coke dealing gun-toting thugpunks who think they’re bad getting ready to die or do hard time till they wise-up, if ever. Some of them say they are “G’s for life”. That may be, and they may do life in prison. Meanwhile, the man that sings the phony songs and acts like a gangster is being protected by body guards paid for by the record companies. Meanwhile the cops still get paid and the prosecutors put their kids through college busting stupid kids who think they are bad till it's too late then it's "Mom, can you bail me out?".
So, people, check out all the crazy stuff that other people have done in the past, then look around at what’s going down today. What are you willing to gamble away to be down with your G’s? Twenty years in the joint can be a long time, and your girlfriend won’t wait for you. When you get out you’ll be old and poor and a stone loser. And sure as I'm alive there will be a new generation out there that won't care about you, including the kids you weren't there for, who might just fall into the same trap you did.
