Ep. 44 - Stop Blaming Millennials For Everything
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Summary
Baby Boomers will be the last to enjoy Social Security and Medicare by the time they die off in the 2030s and 2040s. Will the government be there for them? Or will they leave nothing for their kids?
Transcript
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So some great news was announced yesterday. Medicare will be insolvent by 2026 and Social
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Security by 2034. So this means, of course, something that we already knew, but now it
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makes it official that baby boomers will be the last to enjoy either benefit. Their kids,
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the millennials, and the younger generations are paying into this system, financing it,
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but it will not be there for us. The older generations are draining it dry and leaving
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nothing for their kids. That's what's happening. How else can you put it? That's what's
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happening. They are milking this thing dry and just tossing it to the side and saying to their
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kids' generation, well, see ya. Good luck. Yet the older generations have been completely resistant
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to any discussion of reforming or changing these programs so that perhaps the programs might be
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around for their kids. It's something that they won't even let you talk about. If any politician
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tries to bring it up, and almost none of them do because they all lack the moral courage to do so,
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even though every single one of them, the politicians, I mean, they all know the reality.
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They've known the reality of these systems, yet they will not speak truth because the older
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generations vote. And they will vote out any politician who speaks up and says, hey, guys,
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you know, maybe we don't want to steal tens of thousands of dollars from each one of our kids
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and leave them with nothing. I mean, maybe we don't want to do that. Maybe we should think about
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something reforming, changing something, making some adjustments here. If any politician does that,
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they'll just be voted out of office. Now, personally, I would love to do away with Social Security
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and save for my own retirement. So when I talk about these programs being there for me, I don't
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want them. But I also don't want to finance them for my entire working life, which will be my entire
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life because I'm not ever going to get to retire. Nobody in my generation will. But I would like for it
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just not to exist. And then I can save for my own retirement. I don't need the government to save
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for retirement for me. It's such a crazy idea. Such a crazy concept. It just, I remember the first
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time I ever learned about Social Security when I was a kid. And I remember just being flabbergasted by
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it. Like, what? Why would you want the government to take your money to save it when they're not even
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really saving it? But even if they were saving, why would you want that? And I continue to be
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flabbergasted. I have not, I still, to this day, it has been perpetual, a perpetual state of being
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flabbergasted. I just like the word flabbergasted, as you can tell. I try to work it into conversation as
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much as I can. So I'd like to do away with it. But older folks say, no, you can't do away with it
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because we need your money now. And then I say, yeah, but I won't be there for me. And they say,
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well, not my problem. I'll be dead. So give me your money. That's the way this is, this conversation
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is going. So it can't be abolished, can't be changed, can't be reformed. And as the last baby
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boomers are dying off in the 2030s and 2040s, they will take Social Security with them. Now, what I'm
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told, I talked about this yesterday, a little bit on Twitter, and I was told by some baby boomers,
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they, when I said that, you know, they're going to drain this thing dry and leave nothing for their
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kids. And what I was told by some boomers is, yeah, you're darn right, I'm going to drain it dry.
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This is my money. Of course, I'm going to drain it dry. It's my money. Yeah, but it's not your money.
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See, that's the thing. Your money is gone. It is gone, baby, gone. I mean, it's just, it is long gone.
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I hate to tell you. And I mean, it's a terrible thing, too. So I'm, of course, sympathetic. It's
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happening to me right now. But you didn't pay into anything. It wasn't being kept in a lockbox
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somewhere. The government doesn't have a giant vault somewhere where they're keeping all of the
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Social Security payments, and they've got each thing in a, you know, a nice little, like a bank
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vault. And each person has, so there are millions of little drawers or something keeping all the
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money. That's not the way this goes. Your money is gone. It has been stolen by the government, not by us.
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We didn't have anything to do with it. So this is not your money. It's my money. My generation's money.
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We are, my generation, we're just starting out in life. Some of us are a little bit further along in
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that regard than others. We are, we don't have anywhere near the same assets, the same financial
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security as you do as an older person. Yet, we are being tasked with financing this huge system,
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this huge, cumbersome, gigantic failing system that will not be there for us. That's the way this is going.
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You've got the younger generations who have no money and no assets. And I think I looked it up once, I don't
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remember exactly the statistic, but the average net worth of someone in my generation versus the average
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net worth of say a baby boomer. I mean, our average net worth is a third or a quarter. Yet, we're the
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ones who have to finance this thing. And so it kind of leaves, if you're a baby boomer, it leaves you with
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a choice. You can either insist that we keep this system going as it is now, so that you can make all
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you can from it by taking from your kid's generation, knowing that it won't be there for us, so you could
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do that, which is what essentially we have been doing this whole time. Or you can demand that some
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changes and reforms be made to it. You can say, I'm willing to make a sacrifice now for my kid's
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generation, because this is not right, what we're doing. You could say, no, I'm not. Yes, the money
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was stolen from me. It's a horrible thing. I am not going to demand that I be made whole from the theft
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that happened to me by stealing from my kids. So I'm going to end this cycle of theft and deception.
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I don't want it to continue. I'm not going to put it on my kids. So you could say that.
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It is really just a shame that I have very rarely heard an older person say that. Almost all of them,
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it seems, are going with the former choice and saying, look, I don't care. I just need to get mine.
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Which brings me to a point that I want to make. I'll try to be as delicate as I can here.
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All of this complaining that people do about the millennial generation,
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calling it entitled and spoiled and selfish and lazy, I just don't see how the older generations,
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especially baby boomers, can accuse other people of those sins with a straight face.
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Let's review, okay? The baby boomers inherited a prosperous country from their parents,
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their parents who won World War II and did all those great things. So they inherited a prosperous
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country from them. They leave behind a bankrupted country, drowning in debt. They inherited a culture
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with strong nuclear families. They leave behind a legacy of divorce and broken families. And they,
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in fact, were so terrible at marriage that their kids have given up on marriage, almost entirely.
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They inherited relatively strong churches. They leave behind empty, decaying churches. And we can go
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right down the list, looking at things politically and socially. I mean, think about politically.
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Think about all the baby boomers, baby boomer politicians. Has there been a good one? That's almost
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the worst thing about, well, it's not the worst thing. The worst thing is the destruction wrought
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upon the family by the boomers. But still, politically. So whether you're looking at
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politically, socially, culturally, we find that the boomers just absolutely decimated everything.
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So as the kind of their last and final act, they're going to drain social security dry and leave
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nothing for their kids. So are millennials entitled and selfish? Yeah, many are. But where do you think
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they learned it from? Where do you think they picked up the habit? Where did they learn it from?
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They learned it from the best, clearly. They were tutored. They were under the tutelage of their
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parents' generation. And now the worst thing about the millennial generation is that they're ending up
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exactly like their parents. They learned it to be specific from divorced parents who plopped them
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in front of televisions for their entire childhood, let the media and Hollywood raise their kids so
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that they could run out and amass material wealth for themselves at the expenses of their families and
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their marriages. That's where they learned it. And now these very same people who have been selfish
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and entitled their entire lives and are leaving behind destruction and ruin from everywhere they
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went, have the audacity, the gumption to sit back enjoying a retirement that we will never experience
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on a pension we will never have with social security checks that we will never see and complain about the
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kids that they screwed up. It's incredible. It's such an incredible dynamic that we're seeing play out.
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How do we let them get away with it? How do we ever let a boomer complain about anyone, let alone their
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own kids who are turning out exactly like them? I mean, you have these people who didn't even bother
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to raise their own kids and are now shocked when they see how their kids are behaving. Now, whenever I
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point out the cataclysmic awfulness of the boomer generation, and I mean, cataclysmic, I don't know
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how else to describe it, especially when you look at what they did to the family and to marriage.
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But whenever I point this out, I'm scolded for generalizing and for being divisive and for engaging
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in generational warfare and all that. Now, funnily enough, those very same people who tell me I
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shouldn't criticize entire generations. They never complain when I criticize millennials, which I do
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all the time. I criticize my own generation all the time, and I'm quite unforgiving in those
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criticisms of my peers and of myself. And whenever I do that, I never hear these people say, well,
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you know, that's unfair. You shouldn't lump an entire generation together. No, they don't say it
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then. They only say it when you talk about their generation. So again, we see the boomers expecting
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special treatment, which is in keeping with how they've always operated. Now, and I know this
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obviously does not apply to every boomer. It doesn't apply to my own parents. Hopefully, if
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you're a boomer watching this or listening to this, it doesn't apply to you. Although I don't know if it
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does or not, but I mean, only you know. But if you know it doesn't apply to you, then there's no reason
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to be offended by anything that I'm saying. I'm sure in that case, you agree with me, because just like
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when people criticize the millennial generation, I generally agree with those criticisms, and I say
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so. But it's clear that the boomer generation as a whole has been horrifically historically terrible.
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And I do believe that's important to point out for two reasons. Number one, it's just a matter of
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being honest and just. You know, I can't sit here and allow all the problems in our society to be foisted
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by the people who caused the problems onto my generation. I just can't, I can't tolerate that.
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It's not right. It's not just. It's not honest. And so I think in the interest of being honest,
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it's important to point this out. And I really, I just, I'm sorry, I don't have a lot of sympathy for
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boomers who whine when their generation is criticized. Millennials are criticized all by everywhere,
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all the time, constantly, our whole lives. I mean, this is, everything's been, all the problems in
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society have been put on our shoulders from like, from birth, for goodness sakes. And now you can't
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handle it when you're criticized a little bit. I mean, cry me a river. Second, if we're ever going
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to break this cycle, we have to understand where these problems come from and what caused them.
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To put all the blame on millennials, it's not just unjust and dishonest, but it also precludes us from
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actually ever solving any problems because we're ignoring the origin of the problems.
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And where is the origin? Where can you find the origin? Well, as always, it goes back to the family.
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It goes back to the home. Baby boomers speaking generally. Okay. And that's not true of every
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single one individually, as I've already said a million times now, but baby boomers were very,
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very bad at marriage and very, very bad at parenting. And I feel that the statistics back me up on that.
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I mean, look at the divorce rate, especially look at the divorce rate in like the late 80s,
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early 90s, when, uh, uh, or really throughout the 80s into the early 90s, look at the divorce rate
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when, when the boomer generation was in kind of prime marrying years, look at the divorce rate.
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It is just astronomically high. It shot through the roof with the boomer generation. So when I say
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they were bad at marriage, I mean, that's an understatement. I'm being very kind putting it that way.
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And if you're bad at marriage, you're going to be bad at parenting. How do we reverse this trend
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as millennials? We've got to be able to look at it, be honest about it so that we can reverse,
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have some chance of reversing the trend. Well, we reverse it by shifting our focus,
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by putting our priorities where they belong in the home with our families. We form stable families.
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We remain loyal to them. We reject materialism, selfishness, greed, secularism, all of these things
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that our parents' generation embraced. We have to reject. We have to build our families on something
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stronger than that. That's our only hope. That's our hope of, of, of really making a change. And
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I mean, I don't have a lot of hope that it will actually happen because I look at my own generation
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and for the most part, most of us seem to be repeating the same mistakes as our parents.
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And that's not the case across the board. There, there are pockets of millennials in America
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who are really rebelling against the rebellion of their parents' generation. Our parents' generation
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rebelled with drugs and sex and, uh, and, uh, and orgies and STDs. Okay. Um, that's how our,
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If we're going to rebel against them, which we must, and we should, we rebel with a Bible
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and by getting married and having kids and staying loyal to our families and praying with
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our families and going to church. I mean, that's how we rebel. And there are some, some millennial
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rebels like that. But I think unfortunately those pockets are few and far between where you find
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them though is a wonderful thing. And you see the hope of tomorrow in those places.
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I've pointed out before that, uh, in almost every case, the, the best churches that I've been to,
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the churches that are on fire with the faith are really Orthodox and reverent and really love
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the faith and truth and are, are, are, are engaging the culture and engaging these,
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talking about these issues that need to be talked about and are really fighting,
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you know, where, where you can go and really find the church militant people that are militant
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about their faith. Um, in almost every case, those are young churches and most of the time led
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by younger men. And in most every case, the churches that you go to that are just, are shallow and
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flimsy and secular and pathetic and weak. In almost every case, those are older churches populated by
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and led by boomers. And that's not a coincidence. So that shows you, that shows you that there, that,
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that there are some millennials who are, who have learned the right lessons and are trying to apply them.
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I just don't know if there are enough, but we have to fight in any case. And we fight by looking at
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the mistakes that were made, um, looking at, looking where people went off course and then
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going in the other direction. It's just that, uh, you know, we're, we're going to have to do that
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without the benefit of social security or retirement or anything like that. But that's the way it goes.
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No sense of complaining about it. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening, everybody.