WHAT ARE WE GIVING YOU? A WORLD FULL OF PROBLEMS
The adults have messed up the world for you…Think about it. We have two world wars going on, or two wars. We have countless local frictions. We have health problems, environmental problems, income disparity problems, educational disparity problems. You name it. What are we giving you? A world full of problems.
Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor, April 30, 2025
I’m sure Justice Sotomayor is sincere in her anxieties about the mess her Baby Boom generation is bequeathing to us. Although she’s worried about the state of the union, was there ever a time when “a world full of problems” was not Situation Normal?
During one of his daily COVID-19 briefings in 2020, the Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, made the following comment: “You find me a generation that has had a better overall situation than where we are right now. Go back, World War I, World War II, Viet Nam, 1918 flu pandemic…You find me a generation that hasn’t had a challenge to deal with.”
The Greatest Generation dealt with the extraordinary “messes” of the Great Depression and World War II.
The youngsters of the 1920s were weary of conflict and controversy. Their parents were responsible for the carnage of World War I, Prohibition, two decades of progressive legislation, four Constitutional amendments, the Red Scare generated by the Russian Revolution, and the national exhaustion over whether or not the US should join the League of nations and sign the Versailles Treaty. “No thanks, old folks, that was your world of activist government. You gave us this mess; we are going to ignore it. We’re going to gather our rose buds and have a good time.”
When Sotomayor’s Baby Boom generation was young, they blamed their parents for a legacy of racism and the very real possibility of nuclear Armageddon. Boomers also had the hubris of youth to believe they had the wisdom and the wherewithal to make things right. In 1962, a conclave of Students for a Democratic Society at Port Huron Michigan, essentially sneered at the world their parents created.
The Southern struggle against racial bigotry…the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract "others" might die at any time.
We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.
They were going to look “beneath the stagnation of those who have closed their minds to the future”
Their parents had not only left them with a troubled and dangerous world, but also with inauthentic values and meaningless goals.
The goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with image of popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic.
They had to take action, had to wake up their complacent parents to the vapid lives they lived. “Men still tolerate meaningless work and idleness. While two-thirds of mankind suffers undernourishment, our own upper classes revel amidst superfluous abundance.
With her progressive sensibilities, Justice Sotomayor views the world through a leftist lens that distorts and ultimately exacerbates these “messes.”
She breaks down the “mess” to war, local frictions, health problems, income disparities and education disparities. This is old news. There has always been war, always local (tribal) conflicts, always disparities in every way in every form. By disparities she means inequality, but inequality is the biological norm of creatures on planet Earth. The constant mixing of genes creates a diversity (a term deified by the left) of talents and attitudes.
Diversity, wonderful though it may be, is the foundational cause of war, local frictions, health differences, and income and educational disparities.
It’s who we are.
She has the philosophy that one may use the overwhelming coercive power of government to solve all of the social ills. I like to call that “better living through slavery.” The most chilling phrase in the English language is “for the greater good.” You can thereby justify anything. What could go wrong?
"Diversity ... is the foundational cause of war, local frictions..."
The more that people who are members of groups interact with other groups, the more that they will hate those other groups. DEI, forced racial integration, increased travel have all increased the enmity of the people involved.
“…the time that Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Zhou Enlai [Iranian] and the Islamist forerunner Sayyid Qutb spent in the west would have disarmed them, instead of heightening their awareness of difference. “
That is from an article in the Financial Times, a rare case of leftists admitting the truth that travel has increased international tensions and hatred instead of decreasing them..