Friedman talks crap. Lee Kuan Yew makes sense.

For once, Thomas Friedman's column is not flooded with metaphors.  And that is just about the only good thing about that column.

His column is all about values lost--that the Greatest Generation had all the right values and then it has been downhill since then. Yes, I, too have met and talked with a few of that generation and they were great. Fantastic people. Even a few days ago I was talking about one of them--Ellery--who grew up in the Ozarks, and said his first real shoes were when he joined the army as WWII unfolded. But, the worst thing to do is to deify them and put them way too high of a pedestal. And that is what Friedman does.

My favorite joke about baby-boomers is that all they did was spend everything that their parents saved :)  But, we can't skip over the fact that it was the new values of the boomers that also helped shake up the black/white divide, the role of the female in the household, ... I am not sure whether the values of the Greatest Generation would have achieved these.  A colleague back in California remarked once that his extended family were pretty much forced to change really rapidly their old negative views of blacks, well, non-whites.

And then Friedman throws in, yet again, the cliche about China and India catching up and soon overtaking America. Yeah, right!  Does he really keep track of the news of the poverty in India?  I mean, that is just for starters.

There is another way to talk about the values of now versus that of the past, which is what the Singaporean grand old man, Lee Kuan Yew, articulates in the Saturday profile in the same paper that Friedman writes. I hope Friedman read that.

Now, I am not a big fan of Lee's political philosophy that severely restricted individual rights. But, to give credit when due, this is what Lee says about the youth of today's Singapore:

Younger people worry him, with their demands for more political openness and a free exchange of ideas, secure in their well-being in modern Singapore. “They have come to believe that this is a natural state of affairs, and they can take liberties with it,” he said. “They think you can put it on auto-pilot. I know that is never so.”

I am with the younger people demanding openness.  But, there is a great deal of truth in Lee's comment that we can't ever sit back and have whatever it is on auto-pilot.

I suppose this is the flip side of the fantastic economic and individual security--that there is a certain kind of hedonism that creeps in, as opposed to a conscious realization that the security can be gone soon if we don't maintain and cultivate it.

The only place where Friedman gets close to this idea is when he quotes at length Robert Samuelson's analysis of what is fundamentally wrong with our schools:

“The larger cause of failure is almost unmentionable: shrunken student motivation,” wrote Samuelson. “Students, after all, have to do the work. If they aren’t motivated, even capable teachers may fail. Motivation comes from many sources: curiosity and ambition; parental expectations; the desire to get into a ‘good’ college; inspiring or intimidating teachers; peer pressure. The unstated assumption of much school ‘reform’ is that if students aren’t motivated, it’s mainly the fault of schools and teachers.” Wrong, he said. “Motivation is weak because more students (of all races and economic classes, let it be added) don’t like school, don’t work hard and don’t do well. In a 2008 survey of public high school teachers, 21 percent judged student absenteeism a serious problem; 29 percent cited ‘student apathy.’ ”

The challenge then is to some extent the same across all the rich countries: how do we instill in children and youth the sense of hunger and fight that is needed for a true democracy?  Tough question.

BTW, as I have noted earlier, Lee did great with his son, Lee Hsien Loong, who is the current prime minister. A brilliant fellow with a wonderful and graceful demeanor.