You have been dummed down.   It's true.

It's not quite as bad as the late 70's and early 80's, an era that saw an addle-minded B-actor whose best known role was upstaged by a monkey replace a Peanut Farmer with big teeth and a drunken brother to become President of the United States, but it's still pretty bad.

And I'm done believing this has a cycle to it.   It used to be that a swing of at least pseudo-intelligentsia reared it's nearly as ugly head around every mid-generation to course correct us but lets face it, that hasn't happened since Man left the Moon.

The US replaced George Bush Senior with the pant dropper Clinton who didn't even know what the definition of "is" was and then when given the choice between a bona fide intelligent man and a moron the American voting public was distracted by the bright colors of a ceiling mobile or something and let the courts pick a winner for them.

So we're in a downward spiral that numbs the soul of the regular thinking person and agitates the futurists into digging holes large enough to bury a city of junky School buses in just to ensure survival of the species but we don't do this because let's face it, why bother ensuring survival of this group of bozos anyway.

JFK had it right when he challenged all to "Ask not, what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country".   What a great concept huh?   A social contract.   A decade later Canada's Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, an egalitarian who did for economics what George Bush Junior has done for diplomacy, put it succinctly when he called it "The Just Society".

Well no one was listening because for the last 30 years we've actually been slipping backwards, away from a just society with principles and leaders worth following toward a screw you first BEFORE you get me bunker mentality.

This is not the era of the best and brightest, this is an era where the ethos of the ME GENERATION has taken hold and our youth are running around like a self raised lot of Veloceraptors from a really bad Jurassic Park movie, you know, like number 2 or 3.

We've replaced the Social Contract with lawsuits.   We've turned our back on the "Reasonable Man" in favor of "Pain and Suffering", "Idiotproofing" and "Evil-doers", the phraseology of the pot calling the kettle black if there ever was one.

The Baby Boomers followed the Greatest Generation with a greed unsurpassed in the history of civilization.   People don't serve the state anymore, they look for ways to cheat the system or vote for people who promise to make the state serve them.   Just like "Survivor" the one who seems to win is usually the one who weaseled their way past everyone else.

Some people act as if they won't be happy until every single ill is the responsibility of someone else and unfortunately the courts are buying into this logic.   They're buying into it so well that some places can't get Doctors simply because the Medics can't afford the Malpractice Insurance.

It used to be that Cheaters never prosper but now they're ruling the world and they'll continue to do so until the carcass has been cleaned and then they'll turn on the rest of us until we're gone and there's nothing left to pick at but each other.

So what's the solution to these ills?   If you can't figure that out for yourself you're not worth saving.   If you can then I'll see you later.