GO-BAMA between Hope & Dreams

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

(Berlin, Germany - 10.20 p.m. local time)
It looks like Obama has ideas to create a social market reform European style. By investing huge sums of money and resources into education and green technology, he wants to turn the recession around. Its a spiritual move and people are behind him.

Not so sure on his foreign policy ideas... Now that it’s official: he is coming to Berlin. His political message will be read as an attempt to synchronize his domestic and foreign policy with what is going on in Western Europe. A large scale longing that will make history. Welcome in Berlin, homeboy!

Funny, how I feel when I hear statements from a bunch of college kids in Canada, who discussed a lack of opportunities 23 years ago! It is my own generation and at that time, I was behind the Wall in East Berlin. I complained about not being able to visit my father in Sweden. I never wanted to achieve what both my parents did: finding a secure but boring job that pays their bills for life. Now was this my instinctual (generational X) shift or simply dysfunctional? Has the atmosphere of the constant collapse in economic terms re-covered since the Eighties?

The East German economy was definitely already bankrupt at this time. I do not know much of outsourcing. When exactly began this in the West? If the same old school capitalism created the biggest financial crisis ever this year, then the consequences are becoming generational and endemic for our planet. Every period creates its political leaders. To tackle this collapse in a global style, Obama needs to convince almost two generations. They might have to change their consumption patterns and downsize ideas, or our kids will see the biggest global slow down ever experienced. Armageddon?

The discussion about economic downturns that I saw in a public TV archive poses just one question: DOES THIS SOUND FAMILIAR?

Generation X: Lives on Hold
It wasn't supposed to be like this. Young people born from the early 1960s to late 1970s believed that the future was theirs. As baby boomers aged, employment and prosperity would be passed along. Instead, "Generation Xers" complained that they were propelled into a changing, recession-driven workplace that offered little but "McJobs." They became the first post-war generation to be worse off than their parents, left with reduced expectations and downsized hope for the future.

At this forum in St. John's, Nfld., young people say they are fed up with the platitudes their parents have always told them. Their generation does not yet have an identity.

Source: archives.cbc.ca/society/immigration/topics/1209/