Perspective from my 70th birthday

 Yesterday I turned 70. The world could care less. A few dear friends did and threw me a party in case I do not make it to 71. Fingers crossed.

Today the world is different: America is legitimately embarrassed by the incompetence of our leaders - watch Suday 8/15/21 videos of people falling off airplanes escaping from Kabul. How could we come to this? Some would say: Simple. History repeats itself: elect an incompetent like Carter (Biden) as a knee-jerk reaction to a personally objectable President like Nixon (Trump) and your fate is sealed. History is not kind to amateurs and incompetents.  Carter should have stuck to Habitat charities, Biden to credit card lobbying.  As with Carter (a real nice person but unfit), we are set for inflation, recession, "malaise" and geopolitical embarrassment (Iran then, Afganistan now), energy dependence (Biden just begged OPEC for help - to his credit Carter knew better than that). Our chief general Millie (Gen. Woke, also the mastermind of Afgan Army and Police training since 2003) was more concerned with promoting LGBTQ and gender studies in our military than in winning strategies and limiting losses getting out of Afghanistan.

I see the world through an old and odd lens foreign to today's younger crowd: 

I grew up in an Italy rebuilding after WWII destruction, I saw the power of a free economy destroyed by socialism and communism in 68-75, - yes, Italy, it has the largest communist party in non-USSR western Europe countries and to this day the highest unemployment outside of Greece in the EU. When I came to the US (legally) in 1970 I saw Black Panther riots in the US and the Student for Democratic Society and associated terrorism, I applauded the welcome sacking of Nixon, the catastrophic electoral response electing Carter. After immigrating legally a second time, I saw the recovery of America with Regan (the "Regan recession" was most painful to me personally, but it worked for the country. I believe that the Regan/Thatcher economic policies are the reason for the difference in today's economies and standards of living of US-UK vs. the rest of Europe). Then I witnessed the corruption of national finances and character brought by Clinton, then Bush's disastrous extension of the Afgan War and the conning of the country to go to war in Iraq, on and on.

From those experiences, I conclude that history is a sequence of ups and downs. Biden has just shown us one of the most costly downs in recent history. Incompetence does not come close to describe it, but should have been expected. The criteria for a person's selection to a task are no longer competence, just woke-fitness. So we, Americans, pay the financial cost (interest on Afganistan and Iraq wars is estimated at 6.5 trillion by 2050 - the kids will pay for it). Afghans will pay a personal price and in the geopolitical future untold numbers will see their world upended.

It is not what I had hoped to enter the end of my days