Usually when you think of the term, “skipping a generation”, it’s in reference to some genetic disposition like red hair or twins or the ability to turn your tongue over. But our all-consuming obsession with the economy, and the deficit in particular, has begun redefining the phrase in the bleakest of ways.

When most of us boomers weren’t paying attention, (and that just might be our dominant trait), the balance of wealth skewed inordinately toward the wealthy few and those gains have, for all intents and purposes, been at the expense and near demise of the middle class. While we were finding our various comfortable niches, working as hard as we thought we needed to, we trusted that the big picture stuff was being taken care of by…somebody. That was certainly true, for a while, but in the seventies with the trend toward more fundamentally conservative leadership, (globally), those somebodies switched from being governmental or governmentally-regulated to profiteering cowboys who speculated on transportation, power, infrastructure, health care, (insurance, really), real estate and investments in real and imagined goods. The result, forty years later, is a handful of very, very rich cowboys and an across-the-board disaster in almost everything they touched.

There really is no mystery as to what the model for the perfect free society should look like: Supremely educated, healthy, fully employed and motivated to excellence for the benefit of that society. The feudal concept of class and economic station is inconsequential to quality of life or the measure of one’s happiness.

—PINKO! SOCIALIST PIG!—

What also holds no mystery is that the conservative answer to the deficit and the move toward over-reactive austerity, (“to save our children and grandchildren from facing unmanageable debt”), is, in fact, killing the hopes and dreams of today’s generation of 20-30 somethings, with and without advanced degrees, facing joblessness or inappropriate, underpaid employment. The intelligent alternative of investing fully in our future is being demonized as un-American, and that propaganda, paid for by the same ‘wealthy few’, will most certainly insure the worst possible outcome. If we skip this generation, if we allow the fear of an unbalanced bottom line to be our soul motivator, if we allow tweeted penises and vacationing bimbos to muscle all other news from the headlines, then…welcome to the “do you want fries with that?” future.