The Clash of Generations - NYTimes.com
►http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/opinion/sunday/17friedman.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail1=y
Indeed, if there is one sentiment that unites the crises in Europe and America it is a powerful sense of “baby boomers behaving badly” — a powerful sense that the generation that came of age in the last 50 years, my generation, will be remembered most for the incredible bounty and freedom it received from its parents and the incredible debt burden and constraints it left on its kid....
You can see that when you walk around Athens’s central Syntagma Square, where young people now gather every evening to debate the crisis and register their protests at the future being imposed on them. The facades of banks around the square have been defaced, and flapping in the wind are two large banners. One says “IMF Employee of the Year” and has a picture of Prime Minister George Papandreou, and the other says “Goldman Sachs Employee of the Year” and pictures George Papaconstantinou, the former finance minister. (And these are the good guys, trying to fix the problem.) Nearby is a picture of a baby, saying: “Father, whose side were you on when they were selling our country?” And the more blunt: “Yield to rage,” “Class war, not national war,” and, finally, “Life — not just survival” — a message that seemed filled with foreboding about what the next decade is going to be like for young Greeks.
