<That generation produced some of the greatest risk-takers and problem solvers. We had the freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all!!!

Does kind of look like we're being converted into a nation of wussies, doesn't it?

For a government, and a philosophy of government interested in total control over its citizens, the traits you list are not desirable traits in a citizen. Independence is the last thing they want to see, especially a tendency to cope with problems without government help.

The objective is to convince us that all life, wealth, goodness and justice flows from the District of Columbia, and we are being trained to think this way. How many people have, like you, noticed that we did surprisingly well without the Great Safety Nets? How many people remember how well we lived without massive government structures like Medicare, the Department of Education, and dozens of others?

Notice how the standard modern American response to almost any misfortune nowadays, regardless of fault, is to run wailing to the skirts of the State, or to its lackey, the legal profession.

When all of us are reduced to total dependence, the job will be done. The impossibility of having an entire citizenry feeding from the trough when no one productive is filling it any more doesn't bother the Left, which believes far more impossible things before breakfast than the Red Queen ever did.

The fact that our culture actually uses the word "entitlement" to describe a forced lein on the wealth of your fellow citizen, and that this is considered a good thing, shows how low we have already sunk.