Mo' Material Wealth, Mo' Problems

Winston Churchill is quoted with

"Show me a young conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart.  Show me an old liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains."

Taking a stab at what he was talking about, I would argue that it's not so much about politics (especially contemporary parties!) or beliefs, but rather about preservation.  I believe he was referring to the basic human reaction to gain: preserve it as best you can, using the same tactics used to get it.  Liberalism - progressivism - is a tool to be used to break the status quo.  It can be, and is, used to disrupt the current state.  Out with the old, in the new.  Young people for generations have served as the foundation (read: not the whole thing.  Please don't argue history with me. Same goes for my use of "liberalism" in the previous sentence.  We'rte talking about the base ideology, not political affiliation.) for ideological change.  "Old" people have, for all intents and purposes, served as the primary pushers and movers of maintaining that very status quo, integration to rock'n'roll.

They say each subsequent generation suffers and solves the problems of the previous one. But it's that preceding generation who still clings on, desperately  to their beliefs they undoubtedly fought tirelessly to institute.

What does this have to do with anything, you ask.  Well, I respond, a trend I've been noticing as I get older is that those peers I grew up with, as we all go about our lives establishing careers, buying houses, starting families, the same people I once recognized as progressives, are now beginning their journey into conservativism.  From this, I've been beginning to think that the more one gains, the more one has, sways their ideological (and inevitably political) persuasion toward the right.  It seems to me that, simply, the more one has, the more one wishes to keep it that way, even at the expense of others getting their's as well.  In case you're new to my blog, please take a second and shuffle through old posts to figure out exactly how I feel about personal entitlement.  Go ahead.  I'll wait.

Back?  Good.  So I'm assuming you've learned that I tend to scoff when someone believes their "entitled" to something.  That I tend to smirk when someone tells me they "earned this! No one helped me!".  That I, frankly, find those things ludicrous.

Now, I haven't quite figured out what to make of my observations.  All I can say for certain is that, form what I've observed, the more people have, the more they tend to think they've earned it all by themselves.  And the more people think they've earned it on their own, the more they will begin to resist any and all change to the society that "allowed" them that profit.  It seems that while one can, on occasion, move from the lower to the middle class, they forget exactly what it's like to be that low on the totem pole.  And those born into wealth, they will never know.