Al Gore is probably going to be elected President, and I will have enough to write about for the next four years or more. He’ll be using hundreds of billions of dollars, no trillions, from your Social Security and Medicare payments in order to pay down a national debt that he and his cronies ran up to astronomical proportions in the last twenty years. A debt that Alan Greenspan, who just woke up to the implications when the interest alone hit one billion a day, now says must be paid down. I’ll have tons of material to work with. I can continue to be the voice in the wilderness trying to wake you up.

I was born in 1932, six days after the banks closed and people were jumping off rooftops because they lost everything. Lost everything in a depression that started in 1929 and continued through the thirties. I was a child of the Great Depression, a period where people were afraid to bring children into the world or migrate to this country because times were tough. And Roe vs. Wade had not happened yet.

When I went to school, classes were half the size that they had been in the twenties and nothing compared to what class size is today. In my home town, there were 47 kids in my 1949 parochial high school graduating class. Compare that to new larger High School where the last graduating class was 292, including girls which my class didn’t have.

The census shows the rate of population increase dropping in half during the thirties, my early years. And yet, we were the people who entered the work force in the fifties and kept Social Security going throughout our working lives. How do you explain that? You hear plenty about the baby-boomers who came on the scene after World War II, but you don’t hear anything about my small generation carrying much more than our share of the load for so many years, do you? And Social Security chugs right along despite it all.

Today, I can’t believe there are so many young people who think that the supplemental retirement system is not going to be there for them. That an organization making a $68.6 billion profit last year, 1999, is going to go under. An organization that’s going to have more than $80 billion in extra money this year and more than $100 billion next year. Enough for Al Gore to pay down the national debt in a mere 12 years with your excess FICA taxes and theft from other entitlements.

How can the younger generations believe that such a system can be in trouble when it delivers more than 40 million checks right on time every month and still has so much in receipts left over? Leftover money that is all “borrowed” by the federal government and blown on pork-barrel activities, world banking, world odor or other nefarious ventures.

What’s wrong with the youth today? Did they sleep through simple arithmetic? Have we failed to teach them? Or is it simply that their pocket calculators can’t handle the number of digits involved? Have they been disciplined into non-confrontational attitudes that left inquiry out of the picture? Where are their heads?

Here we are, living in the information age. A time when the Internet provides one of the greatest research tools ever invented. A tool which, unless you use it only to play games, requires the ability to read.

I have a hard time accepting the idea that it’s an educational problem. Even playing games on a computer requires reading skills in order to know the rules, make selections and point your cursor at the right link. No, the problem is much deeper than that. It’s a matter of spirit and the desire to inquire. Only part of it might be policies that teach kids to be “nice guys” rather than being seen as confrontational, competitive or assumed negative. After all, if you’re going to rob them, you want them complacent.

My generation grew up believing that we could overcome adversity. We were the “can do” generation. We believed we could make a difference. Don’t tread on me. And we had plenty to back that up.

I think today’s youth might be overwhelmed by the complexity of it all. Lulled into the attitude of “what can one man do?” Beliefs that the system is so entrenched and powerful that the average person is just a part of the herd, without voice or the ability to create and manage their own destiny. Why else would today’s young people wallow in a counsel of hopelessness and allow the government to pick their pockets, then double bill both they and their own children under the Pay-It-Again, Sam plan?

Add in the fact that more than 50 percent of the people seem to hold an absolutely stupid idea that the federal government has money of its own, and I get really depressed.

Fox New Opinion Dynamics conducted a survey where they asked the question: “Some people say the government has plenty of money of its own and it should be spent on programs. Other people say that the government has no money except that which it takes from citizens in taxes. Which do you believe?”

• Thirty-nine percent gave the right answer--that it all comes from taxes.
• Eleven percent said neither or they weren't sure.
• Fifty percent said the government has plenty of money of its own.

When more than 50 percent of the people have the idea that our federal government has its own money, like a fiefdom, then we are all in deep doo-doo. Why even bother trying to explain how they are being robbed?

It also goes a long way to explain why someone like Al Gore can be so popular. Big spenders like Al, those who squander your taxes, must be overjoyed when they can make it seem like conservatives are just not willing to pass out these funds to the people. That conservatives are the bad guys and shouldn’t hold office.

What’s the use? What can you do when faced with absolute ignorance? No clue of the basics of our republic? People like this 50 percent deserve to be robbed.

My only hope is that Fox sampled an insane asylum or some other area where abnormal people congregate. Fat chance.