Well, hi, everybody. I'm Bill Whittle and this is Afterburner.
Well, there are protesters in several major American cities
using their iPads at Starbucks to make Facebook and Twitter updates
on the evils of corporations, and you don't know whether to laugh or cry, honestly.
What we're seeing here, I think, are the self-esteem movement's chickens
coming home to roost. These kids are upset because the $100,000 of debt
they took on in order to get their degree in Bitterness Studies isn't paying off
with a six-figure job and a car and full benefits at an organic farm collective.
I feel genuinely sorry for these people, I really do.
These are people that are born under the asymptote. I'll get to that in just a second.
You know, if you look deeply into human history you'll see that every civilization
collapses the same way. They're not overrun by barbarians. That happens later.
No, they fail because of their success.
Prosperity makes them lazy and breeds a sense of entitlement.
They're trapped under the asymptote. Let me show you what I mean.
Here's an exponential curve. Now, this is what life looks like for a growing and healthy civilization.
You work hard, and the quality of your life improves.
Every day, things not only get better, they get better faster.
But then something happens. The prosperity curve becomes asymptotic.
Things still get better, but by smaller and smaller and smaller amounts as time goes on.
These people don't know what they're protesting, but I do.
They're protesting the fact that they've never been hungry, never been cold,
never been without TV and air conditioning and a car, they've always had a video game console
and a laptop and a smartphone and they never EVER had to do any long, hard, real work
for any of it. They were born into a level of prosperity so pervasive
that the very idea of a difference in prosperity became vulgar and disgusting to them.
These kids couldn't even become relatively more or less prosperous on the soccer field,
because having winners means having losers, and these precious snowflakes
have been told how wonderful and unique they are their entire lives,
and everyone has always come in first place.
Only now, they're out in the real world. And the real world keeps score.
You know, I could cure this asymptotic disease. I could stop the rise and fall of civilizations.
I really believe I could.
Because at its core, this isn't about corporations or the economy or what they paid
for their bad education. What it's really about is ingratitude.
Ingratitude and entitlement and an utter lack of perspective.
So, I'd provide some perspective, and I'm afraid I'd have to do it by force.
You see, to cure this sickness, I would take from every single American
between the ages of 10 and 60, say, 1 percent of their life every year.
There are 365 days in a year, so 1 percent of that is 3.6 days,
so we'll just round it down, we'll say three and a half days. And during those three and a half days,
I would force everyone to live out in the woods in a cabin.
I wouldn't make anyone chop wood -- if you want to shiver through three nights, that's your business.
I'd make people carry their own water up from the river --
hey, if you don't want to go to the trouble to boil it, be my guest.
Recovering from amoebic dysentery will be part of your education.
I'd make everybody grow and harvest their own food, or dig up roots or collect berries --
or not. You can sit and complain about it and not eat for three and a half days if you'd prefer.
And, like most modern Americans, I have a soft spot for little furry animals.
But I would make people trap and kill and skin them in order to stay alive.
That goes for chickens and fish as well.
You see, reality can be ugly and bloody and horrible.
And that's something that those protesters have been protected from their entire lives,
but not any more. Play time is over now.
Now, I think that after three and a half days -- days spent working hard, gathering food,
chopping wood and carrying water, nighttimes spent with no iPad,
no smartphone, no wi-fi, no DVDs or XBoxes --
I think that would be just enough to make people like this appreciate the fact
that there are people out there who will do these things for you.
I think three and a half days out there every year for 50 years would make you very grateful
that there are groups of people willing to pump and purify your water,
provide endless and affordable electrical power so you can be 72 degrees all the time,
that there are people who will kill, clean, cook, package and deliver food
so that you don't have to see the blood or the dirt -- all of those things --
and that these groups of people who provide these services are called corporations
who feed their own selves and their own families by doing these ugly, difficult, unpleasant things
for you and charging more than it costs. There are people out there doing that right now.
Not for three and a half days. They do it every day. They're called farmers.
And they work for corporations called Kraft and Green Giant and Monsanto.
You should be grateful and you should thank them.
And there are people out in the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea, wrestling with steel beams
the size of automobile transmissions in 60 mile an hour winds to bring up the oil
to charge your iPad and run your AC and your XBox and your Prius.
They work for companies called Exxon and Shell and BP and you should be grateful
and you should thank them.
Now, three and a half days is all I'd need. What those protesters need is to grow up.