General Discussion

The right to vote or the right to terminate a pregnancy safely were not things we had to worry about twenty years ago. Now they are. That's a big "what's wrong with this picture?"

As for the "free stuff," I think that is a small minority, even if they do make a lot of noise. The "everything is free in Germany" crowd is still around, but facts do tend to knock them down a peg. I live here (Düsseldorf), am married to a German social worker, and know only too well what is free here (practically nothing) and what is not. Quoting selectively edited web sites from San José or Peoria isn't going to change facts on the ground here.

As for the young people one encounters, that will obviously depend on whom one talks to. On the bright side, at least, I will put up my meager contribution: one of my two daughters has opted to live in the USA, and has lived in crappy apartments when she had to, but she "had a plan for that:" she pounded the pavement in Manhattan to find work to enable her to not ask us for extra help. She is now almost 40, married, one child, and has found work that supports the way she wants to live. She votes straight Democratic, of course. So does her sister, who lives in Frankfurt am Main (works for a New York firm), but has kept her US citizenship. She has become a star in her field, has joined the 1%, but that's only because she is good at what she does. A neighbor already called her "madame 10,000 volts" when she was 2, and she hasn't lost any of her charge since then. Neither my wife nor I are like that. Her DNA must have undergone some mutation in utero.

My brother's two sons both live and work in the USA (when the younger one isn't stationed in Nigeria in the Hausa area, helping with infrastructure, while dodging Boko Haram). Two more solidly Democratic voters. They both work for a living, too. They live modestly, but haven't asked for a thing since they got out of college.

Now, I realize that using my family as an example is no more representative of American youth as a whole than the ones who think they are entitled to free everything because they think that kids in Finland (or wherever) have it. But I would be wary of using either as a "typical" example of American youth. We are a pretty diverse country, and there are as many stories as there are young people.