Hopelessness: Our Father's Legacy, Their Children's Downfall

Manhood Rediscovered presents: The Younger They Are The Harder They Fall. In this 3 part series, we delve into the legacy of hopelessness passed on from one generation to the next over the last 40 years! This expose` highlights the events, technology, and policies of this era that have caused this generation's downfall and how the fathers of this generation must go to them despite this legacy and help save them from themselves! With that, let's begin.

Part I

Hey Bruh! There’s something wrong within a society when its children are not protected from the negative influences in the world! These influences are the pressure that comes from premature exposure to adult content and the unfair and unexpected burden of responsibility! When it's placed on immature minds, this pressure alters their ability to think outside of the box that they were forced into by a flood of emotions. They are too young to fully understand these emotions and desires and they are too childish to know how to control them!

The intended effects of the technological advancements over these past forty years have almost made it possible for this generation to live on the moon! But at the same time, the unintended effects of these advancements have become a curse for this generation because they have opened up a portal into an alternate universe full of hate, perversion, and debauchery!

With just a click of the mouse, this access point is open to everyone, but that access has brought our youth into contact with a type of information that is so base and distorted that it is responsible for the flaws, futility, and failures in and of their generation! In other words, the “pros and cons” of advanced technology have given this generation an advantage over their predecessors and have produced some of the most intelligent, innovative, productive, successful, and affluent people to ever walk on this earth! 

Simultaneously it has exposed our youth to things that no one of their tender age should ever be exposed to! Things that not even adults should ever be exposed to! Consequently, this has spawned what has turned out to be the most angry, insecure, entitled, addicted, and violent generation this world has ever known! That is because the younger they are, the harder they fall

Example technological advancement over the past 40 years

 In addition to the blessing and curse of advanced technology, the influence and enforcement of societal philosophy still remain as divisive, if not more divisive than ever before! Political, social, economic, legal, and even medical theories and policies have the world so polarized that for many of the pundits on both sides of the argument, compromise is a four-letter word! Unfortunately, amid the finger-pointing, mudslinging, inflexibility, and distrust stand the youth of this next generation. Who is taking the brunt of the beatdown, calling out the BS, and yelling at the top of their lungs, "WTH IS GOING ON WITH YOU PEOPLE?" Let’s go ahead and take a look at some of those philosophies! 

Trickle Down Economics 

The fallout that continues from the theory called “supply side” or "trickledown economics" has "trickledown economics" has truly been unforgiving! So much so that this theory has been argued over since its inception! That theory gained traction in this country during the 1970s but the policies derived from it were enacted in the 1980s by the Reagan administration and those policies have been dubbed “Reaganomics.” What cannot be argued however, (because the numbers don’t lie), is the fact that “Reaganomics” was so detrimental to the poor and low-income citizens of this country that because of it, poverty skyrocketed, and the income equality gap widened to the point that only the top 1% of the richest people gain wealth in this country and that wealth does not and has not trickledown like its proponents said it would! 

We know that children are the people most affected by poverty in this country and around the world. Hungry children don’t do well in school! Children in low-income communities attend substandard schools and get a substandard education! Poor children get brutally picked on, teased, and made fun of because they are poor! But what’s most disturbing is the fact that the so-called underprivileged, are allowed to fall through the cracks and have become a steady stream of bodies that flow into the school-to-prison pipeline!

Programs making up the social safety net that assist people who are at or beneath the federal poverty level have had their funding cut over the years! Policies set in place by the FDR administration with his “New Deal” in 1933-1939 and "The Great Society" that was launched by the LBJ administration in 1964-1965 are again, in their newest iterations, not just having their funding cut, but opponents of them are fiercely fighting for the opportunity not just to put them on the chopping block but to completely shut these programs down! All while the 1% continues to create and obtain wealth! The truth is, trickledown never happened! 

THE WAR ON DRUGS  &  MASS INCARCERATION

What this deadly combination of targeted oppression and social control did to this country is beyond explanation! That is to say that I don’t know if anyone can adequately put it into words, but I will try! Failure on every level is a recipe for extinction, which is putting it mildly because I don’t know how else to articulate it! The fact that this war was both inflicted by the oppressor and self-inflicted by the oppressed, is simply mind-boggling! While that will be a subject to be addressed on another day, the reason it is so astonishing-and it hurts me to soul to say this is because of the undisputed fact that we, (the oppressed,) share a large part of the responsibility for our own oppression!  

"JUST SAY NO," JUST DIDN’T WORK

Between 1984 and 1990 crack cocaine exploded on the scene in such an unforgiving and violent way that at its peak cocaine addiction leaped from 4.2mill. to 5.8mill. people who admitted to using it on a routine basis! During that time we saw violent and nonviolent crime rates increase exponentially as a result of the gang wars over the profits from drug sales which made dealers go from living large to being larger than life and that made all the little homies want to be like them!

This was because that “rock” was cheaper to make, cheaper to buy, and because it was so addictive everyone from children to grandparents, and from the unemployed to big city mayors wanted it and wanted it so bad that they would do anything to get it! Consequently, it almost completely destroyed the inner cities of America!

The Reagan Administration launched an ineffective campaign that was just as, if not more unforgiving than the drug and more violent than the people who were controlled by it called “Just Say No!” That campaign coincided with the unequally applied criminalization of drug use that was responsible at that time for 50% of the US Prison population being jailed for low-level drug offenses! It targeted black and brown communities and created Drug Enforcement Units that took police brutality to a whole new level! Not that this brutality was worse than before, it’s that they put it on TV and people couldn’t get enough of it  

Under the guise of Just Say No this administration launched negative ad campaigns, created news stories, and released investigative reporting that depicted the people of the inner-city who sold and used drugs as unsalvageable! They painted them as the scourge of the country that needed to be locked up and the keys needed to be thrown away!  They also created and spread the myth of the “Crack Baby” which was debunked at the time, but still continues as the narrative even to this day!

While it had some success in keeping kids off drugs, Just Say No was nowhere near as effective as it was made out to be! The effects on the children of that era span from seeing addicts to becoming addicts, from selling drugs and killing or dying for and from them. This caused the mortality and fatality rates of people between the ages of 13-26 to explode off the charts! 

From the felony convictions that sent their fathers to prison for long periods for simple possession, to the increase in both school and high school dropout rates while graduation rates decreased! To the blatant subjugation and dehumanization of that generation through criminalization and by law enforcement, the juvenile court system, probation, and detention centers stayed filled to the brim! Today, those children born in that era (if they made it out alive) are in their 40s. Some are doing well, some are doing alright, and some were messed up so bad that they have never been and will never be the same! 

In Part II of The Younger They Are, They Harder They Fall, we will resume with the chronology of negative influences that have created a generation that we have to save from itself! Starting with the technology, societal philosophy, and drug culture of the1990s and how those influences affected the youth of that era! Stay tuned!