Generational Wealth

Generational wealth is more than the bank accounts, stocks, and other assets that one’s progeny receives without having earned a dime of it. If the cash and compounding interest on accounts and residential or commercial properties were all that matters to our offspring, we would be wise not to leave them an inheritance that has dollar value. If they eagerly await our death so that they have full access to the money and assets we accumulated over a lifetime, then something is amiss. 

• We raised our young to believe that wealth can purchase the happiness, achievements, and privileges they yearn for.
• We withheld too much from them in their young adult years when they struggled to find happiness, achieve goals, and use privilege for the greater good.
• We raised people who despise us, either because of our own behaviors or because we oppose their behaviors.
• We did not have wealth to help our young while we ourselves were growing up but, we grew some wealth in our older years…and we are not sharing it yet.

 Of course, the younger generation of adults need financial help with college, the purchase of a first home, setting up their first business, and marriage or moving expenses. Even more so with America’s under-forty who entered their teenage and young adult years under the burdens of economic upheavals, exorbitant college and university costs, rising housing and healthcare costs. Our nation over the last three decades has rescued and extended financial assistance many times over to the upper classes and wealthy industries. In the same time period, we’ve made life much harder for our children and their children.  It is no wonder that young voters are turning away from traditional political parties and looking for leaders who will build a thriving economy for workers and families and enact policies that will help all people, not just the privileged few.

 But again, if generational wealth is not merely knowing that your family will pay for college, help you buy a first home, give you a grand wedding, invest in your first businesses, leave assets to your children and grandchildren, prevent your falling into bankruptcy, then what is it? Is there more about generational wealth that, sans any monetary wealth to leave our descendants, we should pay attention to?

 Yes. Because you and I know many Americans who’ve benefited from their parents’ monetary wealth yet have no ethical or moral standing in their families or communities.

  They’ve cash-in-hand and interest-bearing investments but lack integrity and empathy. They vote for Republican, fascist, and MAGA policies. They vote for Democratic, centrist, weak, corporate-adoring policies. They socialize with like-minded shallow selfish authoritarians. They’ve no common sense, rational, reasonable, ethical, or critical thinking abilities; yet they are determined to undermine every government effort to build a strong public education system to give every student equal education opportunities – no matter their familial, immigrant, financial, religious, or racial identity.

 They did not earn the wealth they use for themselves; yet they deplore every government effort to raise taxes on them and redistribute the immense wealth that many Americans enjoy. They flaunt their privileges and demand entitlements. They buy politicians, religious leaders, and policies.

 Millions of these Americans use their wealth and the politicians they purchased to trample on the Constitution and suppress the opposition. Many of these Americans use their wealth to flaunt and build wealth. They stay away from politics, preferring to remain silent and be loved for their neutrality.

 No matter when Donald J Trump starts to push up golf course turf from below, the tens of millions in the U.S.A. who have wealth well beyond middle class stability will still be who they are and vote for politicians who will devote policy to building their wealth while diminishing social programs that give needed assistance to workers, families, single parents, single-income earners, immigrants, students, the elderly, and children. We will celebrate the demise of the White House’s demented rapist, but we won’t be rid of Americans who are not sure that democracy is worth fighting for.

 These are the traits, the true assets of life, that one generation should pass on to the next: 

• Empathy…without it an individual and an entire generation will be devourers and predators. With it, an individual and a generation can move mountains to build a world that upholds peace, justice, fairness, liberty, accountability, and equality.
• Critical Thinking…without it an individual and an entire generation will be willfully ignorant and slaves to Power. With it, an individual and a generation can build a world that upholds art, creativity, liberty, justice, peace, education, literacy, innovation, philosophy, and social democracy while shunning ignorance, abhorring cult mindset, and resisting all the extremisms that enslave people.
• Appreciation…of life, time, challenges, gifts, friendships, adversaries, health, beauty, and nature. Understanding precedes genuine appreciation. But adults can teach children and young people to express appreciation, even as those students of life grow up and only begin to understand all the diversity, complexity, sameness, patterns and learning opportunities in their experiences.
• Self-Respect…without it an individual takes risks in relationships and experiences that they know cannot end well, behaves and thinks in servitude to others who behave and think as predators do, avoids struggles and challenges no matter the potentially positive outcomes, shirks duty, seeks refuge in people and places and ideas that offer false hope, grift and con their way through work and relationships. With self-respect, an individual finds strength and hope in the darkest and most difficult of times, recognizes shysters and conmen, welcomes challenges to their biases and ideas and embraces learning experiences.

A family might work very hard their entire life and still live in poverty or be self-sufficient but live without luxury or privilege. Perhaps the family will have no assets to pass on to their heirs. The family has done the best they can to help their children live well and enjoy life.

 We know many who’ve started their adult lives and lived to reach retirement age without the assistance of generational wealth, but who are the best people in their communities and in this nation…because they use the empathy, critical thinking skills, appreciation, and self-respect that their parents and grandparents taught them.

 One reason that I’ve little hope our nation can climb out of and wash off this vile muck into which the Republican party, MAGA, Trump, and white evangelical religious leaders have thrown us…is that the 20+ millionaires and nearly 1000 billionaires who lack the traits I’ve described will do everything in their imagination to protect their privilege and undermine efforts to build a social democratic government.

 Our democratic, judicial, and legislative systems have been empowered in the last four decades to assist millionaires and billionaires. The institutions protect them. The Republican party has systematically dismantled the safety nets and boosters that once helped two generations after WWII to build generation wealth from poverty.

 We will become a nation resembling many third-world nations to which wealthy tourists throng…where the top 1% holds all the power and wealth and the 99% live in servitude to the 1%.  Without empathy, self-respect, appreciation, and critical thinking skills, the top 1% do as they please and the 99% avoid resistance to it.

 #Resistance