This is going to make for an ugly country in five or ten years.

Today’s teenagers and young adults are far more likely than their parents to believe they’re great people, destined for maximum success as workers, spouses and parents, suggests a report comparing three decades of national surveys.

And these so-called Millennials or Gen Y young people may be heading for a fall when their self-esteem is punctured by reality, says psychologist Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. She examined changes from 1975 to 2006 in yearly surveys, given to thousands of high school seniors by University of Michigan researchers.

My first reaction to this was to think “Well, then they’ll meet reality like every other adult does and adjust accordingly. No biggie.”. Except that I think this is a biggie. When their artificially-inflated self-esteem hits the hard wall of the real world at ninety miles an hour, their reaction isn’t going to be introspection and improvement but rage at a world that they perceive as broken because it does not recognize them at the unique and special snowflakes they’ve been told from birth that they are.

Look around you. It shouldn’t take much searching to see how many bad things are happening because we’ve raised an entire generation of kids who each believe that they are the center of the universe. You just wait until this Generation of Narcissists has to compete in a world economy against people who have actually had to compete to win the sort of praise that we’ve lavished on our kids for simply existing.

I think we’ll get a preview of that anger over the next four years as President-Elect Obama fails to live up to the expectations he raised during his campaign.

That’s not to say that I think he’ll be a wholly incompetent President. he might, or he might not. I really don’t have any idea because, as I said many times during the campaign, he’s never really been in charge of anything in his life. But he has set himself up for failure. The Messianic campaign message, led by his ridiculous “Yes, we can” campaign mantra fed right into the whole “Yay, me!” attitude but it also made some promises, impled and otherwise, that no one can keep. Think about it. There are going to be some things that we simply can not do no matter how unified we become nor how much we really, really want them. Take a look at this survey.

Seven in 10, or 72 percent, voice confidence the president-elect will make the changes needed to revive the stalling economy, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll released Tuesday. Underscoring how widely the public is counting on its new leader, 44 percent of Republicans joined nearly all Democrats and most independents in expressing that belief.

The poll shows that faith in Obama is even broader, at least for now. Sixty-eight percent said they think that when he takes office in January, the new president will be able to enact the policies he pushed during his presidential campaign.

In other words, over 70 percent of the people in this poll believe that Barack Obama can do the impossible. It takes time and the market working the way it’s supposed to (i.e. us) and nothing else. Indeed, the best the President can do is to pull the government back out of the way and let the economy fix itself, but he can not revive it himself. No one can.

So what’s going to happen when that many people discover that economic laws trump “Yes, we can?” What are they going to do when Obama can’t pass all the policies he’s pushed because, in many cases, they come with a cost that we are not willing (or even able) to pay?

You think they’re just going to slink away into a bout of navel-gazing then come back stronger, wiser, and ready to take their paces as responsibile citizens and members of their communities?

Yeah, sure they will. It’s a lot more likely that they’ll throw a temper tantrum that they expect will be indulged the same way their parents and the rest of us indulged them when they were coddled brats. Whether we indulge their petulance is up to us. Thus far, we’ve been willing to tolerate their infantile behavior. At some point, though, the number of us who aren’t willing to become bigger than the number of tantrum-throwers.

That’s when the fun will really start.

(via Conservative Grapevine)