by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Confession here. I never figured out hippies. Even as a child observer, there always seemed something nonsensical and decrepit about their condescending pitter-patter and new age beliefs and little crooked hats and shitty long hair and smelly jeans and amazingly bad taste in music.

Here in Quebec that generation was no better than anywhere else, a whining, oversexed, overprivileged and aimless bunch that had very high opinions of their world view. So sure and cocky were they in their false notions of enlightenment that many considered it reasonably fair game to kill people in the name of nationalism.

Oh, and talk about a generation spoiled rotten. Unlike today’s youth, these people had steady and permanent employment, rampant sexual opportunities and plenty o’ cash made at union-style pay in government-protected monopolies. And now, as that generation gets set to leave the workplace—as any bus driver or electrician on the way out can attest—many boomer labourers will be earning as much in their pensions as they were making full-time working.

Never has such a narcissistic and self-congratulatory generation existed, and these Pink Floyd fans never miss a chance to moan on and on about the supposed evils of their parents’ values, describing that hard-working era as “the Great Darkness.”

But the biggest crime of the hippie boomers is the gift they’ve left to the adults of tomorrow: eternal indebtedness. If you’ve got a few decades more to go, you’ll be forced to make weekly payments for the debt excesses of the boomer era. Past governments spent serious coin that we’re expected to repay, buying the favour of these now-ageing grey-haired boomers who knew no pain but sure knew how to whine a lot.

The first of Canada’s great debt criminals was PM Pierre Trudeau, who shruggingly justified his insane overspending by asserting that his debt would be paid for in future times of great prosperity. Now, that was a well-thought out plan. Of course, those years never came during his time. The supposedly more fiscally responsible Brian Mulroney then managed to run up the tally much higher, as the duo, with a little help, managed to increase the federal hole from $16-billion in 1968 to its current half-trillion dollars.

And the province also ran Quebec’s finances like the boys at the tavern who found a credit card on the floor. Quebec was a mere $5-billion in debt at the onset of the Parti Québécois in 1976, but five years later, then-finance minister Jacques Parizeau managed to dig that hole five times as deep. His Liberal successor, Gérard-D. Lévesque, brought the debt from $31- to $65-bil in eight years, and the recent five years with Bernard Landry as Finance Guy has left us owing $105-billion on the provincial level alone.

The toxic offshoot of all this is that we’re living on the illusion of false luxury, demanding things that we figure we can afford because the governments have been spending way more than they’ve taken in over the last 30 years.

I’m admittedly mystified by leftist orthodoxy that suggests we not even think about the debt. This approach is nonsensical, because as long as tax payments go to service debt, it means much of the chunk of the cash deducted at source from your paycheques never get to the needy. The hefty interest payments on debt go directly to bankers and rotten trustafarians, not the poor.

I challenge the legitimacy of a system that forces today’s younger workers to pay for another generation’s subsidized jobs, Seadoos, bean bag chairs, hash pipes and whatever else that deficit cash was eventually spent on.

No way should today’s youth, already challenged by a costly education system, a tricky job market and bad parents, have to pay for another group’s long-finished party for which they derive virtually no benefit. I suggest we just pay the debt by creating a special tax on the sanctimonious children of the ’60s who got us into this mess in the first place. :

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca