Or will it…?

Everything turn out all right?

It is hard to acknowledge that things have not been too bad for me, in a community where one-upping hardship is a parlour game. (see the paradigmatic Four Yorkshiremen sketch here on YouTube: https://youtu.be/VKHFZBUTA4k?si=FPvtpmdOUBvLgtG4). I once inwardly gloated that a friend said, “You know, George, you’d never know you went to college.”) But, I am a “Boomer”. My dad and mum were late “Greatest Generation”. His pensions (Navy and Civil Service), and their property passed to his kids, me and my two siblings. And, we also got Boomer work-values. We worked good semi-elite jobs with our own pensions and houses in first-world countries; me in England with a (now semi-) functioning National Health Service, funded through taxation, free at the point of use for almost anything and anybody. We “liberals” thought everyone should live like us: a little more, a little less maybe OK but no hardship was to be the hard full stop. Aid programs from the global north to the global south were intended to help spread our wealth around. Our weapons were to spread peace. Weren’t they?

Well strip the knickers off my naked emperor. Twenty five years ago or more Elon Musk and Peter Thiel were decrying liberal equity policies in their university, and in national liberal initiatives like Affirmative Action. Silicon Valley’s “…most successful conservatives empowered regular guys…” read their Founder’s Fund blurb. Regular guys like J. D. Vance, who was staked by said successful conservatives into the venture capital marketplace. Fifty years ago Norman Mailer wrote Why are we in Vietnam about paradigmatic people for whom little but money as power had any meaning. Sometimes I feel we “Boomers” just might have dropped the ball.