A German Perspective of the White Malaise

 

 

Hardly a day goes by without media outlets mentioning inequality and racism in America, Dogs chained up in illegal compounds suffer beatings and starvation. Tropical settlers burn more of the rain forest every day, and what are the Whites going to do about it?

Media organs browbeat White people regularly over their complacent enjoyment of life, while much of the World lives with poverty and malnutrition. Sex-traffickers target children, Human traffickers target indigent illegal-aliens, and Henry knows what else!

The other nations make the Whites feel responsible for the whole World. Everything depends on us not being wasteful and materialistic. We feel like stewards of the planet, but without the authority to save it. Damn, something's gotta change! This can't go on much longer; or maybe it has gone on too long, already.

The cumulative browbeating and guilt-tripping in the media leaves White people bewildered and demoralized, but few journalists will comment on the degree of hurt. One person who does talk about it is Oliver Jeges, a writer in Germany. He thinks he understands the effect and explains it in an interesting book titled Generation Maybe, published 2014. The title says it all. 

The main effect of the World placing all its negative vibes on the Whites, Jeges says, is to blunt the Whites' sense of forward movement; so they dither a lot. Jeges's revelation started with a reunion of his old university classmates. He made these observations about them:

1.  None of us has a clear idea about where we go from here. We feel hemmed in.
2. We have a tough time with decision-making. . .
3.  . . . basically because we no longer have a sense of what is right or true.
4. Sometimes I feel like a victim of society's prevailing views. . .
5.  . . . Other times, I feel like I put myself in this mess.
6. We are overly conscious about the environment and tend toward a minimalist lifestyle.
7. How can we "Keep Calm and Carry On," if we don't want to leave a CO2 footprint?
8. We are the first generation with no private spaces.
9.  We lack personal definition.
10. That means simply that we live without personal values or ideals.
11. After an institutional education and a personal interpretation of knowledge, we must venture out on our own.
12. We are the super-flexible. We vote neither Right nor Left. Culturally we are at home as much with Harry Potter as we are with Tolstoy.
13. We are the first generation destined for the executive-floor, who don't want to be on the executive floor.
14. We feel that high-achievement isn't worth the trouble.
15. When we're not complaining about our taskmaster employers, we see the World through rose-colored glasses.  We want it all—a villa with servants, a yacht, money, and fame.
16. Everything would be okay if we did not feel this emptiness.
17. What do we lack? Is it perception? Orientation? Or values?
18. We feel so directionless that we want to escape making decisions for ourselves.
19. We are more impressionable or flexible—if not spineless.
20. "I really have no faith in my own opinions."
21. Our nation does not maintain a "red thread," a sense of cultural continuity that leads young people forward.

The time has come for parents to show these excerpts from Jeges's book to their children and to ask them how much the excerpts describe their own situations. At school, young people grow up away from their parents, and even without the browbeating and guilt-tripping, venturing into such a wide-open environment, with so many moving parts, can be a hassle.

I don't think any amount of arguing will convince everyone in the U.S. that we have a crisis on our hands. Since the crisis involves conflicting views about running the country and the guiding forces in the society behind the conflict, I hope a better understanding of the conflict will convince enough people that we can't continue like that, and we can pull off a division of the country. No telling how many other nations will follow suit.

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