My Reply to Bill Gates

by Dr. Ellen Brandt


No, Mr. Gates, the Developing World's most pressing problems are not ours. And if we fail to make that distinction, the entire World suffers.


While we've posted a couple of stories similar to this one in our Baby Boomers - From Anger to Action series, we think it might be useful to include one in our Party of Yes series as well, since it is the principal group of articles many of our fellow Republicans are likely to read.


That's not to say that everyone - GOP, Democrat, and Independent alike - should not absorb and take to heart the information and commentary in this piece.


Since the very beginning of the 2016 election cycle, we have been bombarded with what seems like a never-ending stream of Propaganda, utilizing the Limousine Liberals' number one tool in their arsenal of political correctness, which Republicans know is anything but correct - or decent - or humane - or, some would say, sane.


That tool is attempting to divide Americans along the fault lines of gender, ethnicity, religion, or anything else they can come up with - telling us that instead of identifying with all Americans as Americans, we should identify with our sex or ethnic makeup or religious background or . . . well, anything at all that presupposes an unbridgeable gap between Us and Them - the great Other that is not Us.


Bill Gates - sometimes writing with his wife, Melinda - has become the Limousine Liberals' go-to man for generic Propaganda about the so-called gender gap, posting story after story after story about poor women in the Underdeveloped World; how their problems are our problems; and how fixing these problems would somehow make the entire world all better again. (There! No more Boo-Boo. Have a lollipop.)


The major disconnect between this kind of Propaganda and our own economic and social and cultural reality within the United States - and Europe and Japan and Australia and Canada and the rest of the Developed World (plus, very significantly, China) - is that it is not our reality at this point in history.


The most pressing problems in the Underdeveloped World are not our most pressing problems in the Developed World. In fact, they are completely different.


By all means, Bill and Melinda Gates and their respected Gates Foundation should be able to concentrate their philanthropy and their attention wherever they want to. If poor women in the Underdeveloped World are their own personal major concern, they have a perfect right to spend all the money and devote all the resources they wish to help alleviate and reverse such poverty.


But don't try - by a harmful wrenching of reason and logic - to equate what may be major concerns in the (ever-smaller) portion of world that is Underdeveloped to our major concerns in the (ever-larger) portion of the world that comes under the heading of Developed.


Here's my reply to Bill Gates, posted in response to his latest story at LinkedIn's Pulse, which talked about the gender gap in the Developing countries and posited it as the most serious problem facing the World Economy:


Dear Mr. Gates,


Note that already, over 43 percent - or more than 2 in 5 Americans - are part of our Gray population age 50 and older. ***


*** Including Bill and Melinda Gates. Bill Gates turns 61 in a few months. Melinda Gates turns 52 this summer.


This statistic will likely increase, not decrease, over the next couple of decades - not only in the United States, but throughout the Developed World plus China - until our Gray populations reach a possible high of 50 percent - or 1 in 2 of us.


Because women in the Developed World still outlive men by several years, the proportion of women who are 50 and over - female Grays - is already close to half - Yes, 1 in 2 -  women in the United States, the rest of the Developed World, and China.


Whatever the reality may or may not be in the Developing World, with its much younger demographic profiles, the reality - right here, right now - in the United States and Europe and Japan and Australia and Canada and China is that any perceived gender gap between women and men is by no means our most major, pressing economic or social or cultural problem.


Nor is our most pressing concern perceived economic disparities among ethnic groups. Nor struggling Youth. Nor those poor, poor illegal immigrants whom Limousine Liberals incessantly talk about - Quick, give them mansions and yachts!


In the Devloped World plus China, our most major, pressing economic and social and cultural problem is that we have been lulled into creating Inverted Pyramid economies, with Youth placed at the top of our societal structures and Grays - again over 2 in 5 Americans and close to 1/2 of American women - shunted to the bottom, with many millions upon millions living in utter and hopeless destitution and despair.


For close to 30 years now - at least since the first Clinton administration - we have been favoring the Inexperienced over the Experienced, the Unskilled over the Highly-Skilled, the Poorly-Educated over the Highly-Educated. In short, the Immature over the Mature.


This is the economic and social and cultural profile of a typical Failed State - Somalia, say, or the Central African Republic.


It is the polar opposite of the economic and social and cultural profile of a Highly-Developed Nation - a civilized, humane, decent, and moral society, like the United States very recently was.


Restore the economic and social and cultural prominence of America's Grays over age 50, women and men alike, and you restore our society as a whole.

 
Fail to do so, and every American's future becomes bleak, indeed.