Kimball Shinkoskey: The Problem Runs Deeper Than That

To the Editor,

Today, we clearly have a problem of young adults well into their 20s and 30s still tethered to their parents’ homes and purse strings and unable to make it on their own. In my own home, Bank of Dad and the extra room in Dad’s house get regular use by adult children in mid- and late-30s in temporary need or real crisis.

However, lack of economic self-sufficiency is only the surface problem. Forget twenty-first century children and grandchildren in perpetual need. Parents and grandparents are themselves still living off the considerable social, economic, and political capital supplied by their far distant ancestors who actually knew how to live democracy day to day.

If it were only true that sappy story we like to tell about how generations Y (Millennials) and Z have been standing on the shoulders of their Boomer and Xer parents, and Boomers and Xers in turn have been standing on shoulders of their parents. Nobody is standing on anybody’s shoulders today.

The truth is, Boomers, Millennials, Xers, Millennials, and Zers are all badly slumped on the backs of ancestors going back a dozen generations in this country or in the countries the ancestors immigrated from.

Our people today have simply forgotten how to be self-motivated, self-sufficient, self-less, and bound together into social units. Instead, we are self-important, self-interested, self-righteous, and standing alone. We have a super-exaggerated sense of personal importance in a world that doesn’t reward but absolutely stomps on such individualism. We need strong interpersonal relationships, marriages, and families to be able to endure life, and we don’t have them today.

The only way we can live at all securely and comfortably going forward is to learn how our ancestors built this country. And to do that, we have to study our nation’s history and the laws, ethics, and spiritual values our ancestors lived by that enabled them to build the economic and ethical powerhouse that came to be the United States of America.

Unfortunately, that powerhouse has rapidly decayed into the humongous welfare state required today to take care of our helpless and life-less citizenry of all ages.

Print this entry