I’ve made a lot of sometimes very bad mistakes as a parent but this is not one of them – when my daughter was younger, parents at that time were leaping aboard the self-esteem bandwagon. I held my ground: “If you want to have self-esteem, do something good.” For a lot of people my age and their children, achievement isn’t doing something a certain way, it’s feeling a certain way. In the pursuit of that goal, anything goes. Peggy Noonan has finally detached her lips from President Obama’s posterior, and written a very interesting article comparing the “doing” and “feeling” generations: Sully vs. Octomom.
It’s Sully and Suleman, the pilot and “Octomom,” the two great stories that are twinned with the era. Sully, the airline captain who saved 155 lives by landing that plane just right—level wings, nose up, tail down, plant that baby, get everyone out, get them counted, and then, at night, wonder what you could have done better. You know the reaction of the people of our country to Chesley B. Sullenberger III: They shake their heads, and tears come to their eyes. He is cool, modest, competent, tough in the good way. He’s the only one who doesn’t applaud Sully. He was just doing his job.
This is why people are so moved: We’re still making Sullys. We’re still making those mythic Americans, those steely-eyed rocket men. Like Alan Shepard in the Mercury rocket: “Come on and light this candle.”
But Sully, 58, Air Force Academy ‘73, was shaped and formed by the old America, and educated in an ethos in which a certain style of manhood—of personhood—was held high.
What we fear we’re making more of these days is Nadya Suleman. The dizzy, selfish, self-dramatizing 33-year-old mother who had six small children and then a week ago eight more because, well, she always wanted a big family. “Suley” doubletalks with the best of them, she doubletalks with profound ease. She is like Blago without the charm. She had needs and took proactive steps to meet them, and those who don’t approve are limited, which must be sad for them. She leaves anchorwomen slack-jawed: How do you rough up a woman who’s still lactating? She seems aware of their predicament.
It’s sickeningly true, and so profoundly reminiscent of Ayn Rand’s writing that I mourn because it seems clear this is where it’s all going. The Suleys are winning. The “stimulus” passage makes that abundantly clear. We’re going to be funding a new welfare generation of the sort that brought tears of rage to my eyes when I was literally hungry and cold, standing in line at the welfare office listening to my fellow applicants discuss a sale of designer jeans they were going to hit after providing paperwork to show they were entitled to continue recieving benefits. The highly successful welfare reforms enacted since then are being dismantled, and the new entitlement generation, led by Suley of the acrylic nails and the 14 taxpayer subsidized, deliberately conceived children, will do the workers of the nation the favor of letting us support them. Do you wonder that I’m going on strike? I wonder that more people aren’t.
I hope that there are a few of us out there still raising the “Sullys.” However, I have relatives that are of the entitlement mindset who would even go so far as to ask their employers not to give them a raise because they might lose their food stamps and Medicaid. Meanwhile, the rest of us are out there working hard to pay for it.
I have no problem with the concept of the welfare system – helping someone when they fall on hard times, but it is meant to be temporary help to see them through until they get back on their feet. Unfortunately, too many decide it’s easier to sponge off the rest of us than get back out there and make their own way.