A must read, especially since its written by a 26 year old.
This article was written by a college student by the name of
Alyssa Ahlgren, who's in grad school for her MBA.
"College Student: My Generation Is Blind to the Prosperity around Us”
I’m sitting in a small coffee shop near Nokomis trying to
think of what to write about. I scroll through my newsfeed on my phone looking
at the latest headlines of political candidates calling for policies
to “fix” the so-called injustices of capitalism. I put my phone down and
continue to look around. I see people talking freely, working on their
MacBook’s, ordering food they get in an instant, seeing cars go by outside, and
it dawned on me. We live in the most privileged time in the most prosperous
nation and we’ve become completely blind to it. Vehicles, food, technology,
freedom to associate with whom we choose. These things are so ingrained in our
American way of life we don’t give them a second thought. We are so well off
here in the United States that our poverty line begins 31 times above the
global average. Thirty. One. Times. Virtually no one in the United States is
considered poor by global standards. Yet, in a time where we can order a
product off Amazon with one click and have it at our doorstep the next day, we
are unappreciative, unsatisfied, and ungrateful.
Our unappreciation is evident as the popularity of socialist
policies among my generation continues to grow. Democratic Congresswoman
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said to Newsweek talking about the millennial
generation, “An entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest
electorates in America, came of age and never saw American prosperity.”
Never saw American prosperity! Let that sink in.
When I first read that statement, I thought to myself, that
was quite literally the most entitled and factually illiterate thing I’ve ever
heard in my 26 years on this earth. Many young people agree with her, which is
entirely misguided. My generation is being indoctrinated by a mainstream
narrative to actually believe we have never seen prosperity. I know this first
hand, I went to college, let’s just say I didn’t have the popular opinion, but
I digress.
Why then, with all of the overwhelming evidence around us,
evidence that I can even see sitting at a coffee shop, do we not view this as
prosperity? We have people who are dying to get into our country. People around
the world destitute and truly impoverished. Yet, we have a young generation
convinced they’ve never seen prosperity, and as a result, elect politicians
dead set on taking steps towards abolishing capitalism. Why?
The answer is this, my generation has only seen prosperity.
We have no contrast. We didn’t live in the great depression, or live through
two world wars, the Korean War, The Vietnam War or see the rise and fall of
socialism and communism. We don’t know what it’s like to live without the
internet, without cars, without smartphones. We don’t have a lack of prosperity
problem. We have an entitlement problem, an ungratefulness problem, and it’s
spreading like a plague.