The 80s "Me generation" morphed into a post–Me generation. This is best summed up in a term I hear some variation of (at least in stance, if not in word) in almost every movie and in many music videos: "I'll bust a cap in your ass if you get in my way."
This "shoot to kill" attitude is influencing the rest of the world too, mainly through the media.
"I'll bust a cap in your ass if you get in my way" is also sometimes summed up as the softer but still aggressive "Don't you know who I am?" This phrase is usually shouted by at least one of the participants in any conflict, from a school-yard fistfight to a street gunfight to a world war.
Many of the most popular video games in the world, especially "Grand Theft Auto" and its clones, involve players pretending to shoot and kill people. I think you should question why the world is at a place where the popular games have you pretending to kill people.
The "I got to get mine," post–Me generation ideal doesn't exist just at the street level; the philosophy often guides corporations too. A corporation is simply a way of counting and distributing money and can be administered in a very ethical fashion, and this does happen. But corporations exist to make money, and if they are guided by people without ethics, they will make money at any human expense. We're seeing this in the collapse of the mortgage industry, and the Wall Street bailout. When my parents first married, a man working on the line in a factory could buy a house and feed a family. Now, families where both parents work can't make ends meet. Homelessness used to be mostly for drunks and the mentally ill. Today a lot of hardworking people are ending up homeless.
I used to think that "the Man" (the establishment) was intrinsically evil. That's an easy way to see it when you're young and don't really have much direct experience with government or big business. But in the past 15 years I've had a lot more direct dealings with the Man (which is not always men; it's a new era, and the Man is often comprised more or less evenly of men and women).
Now that I've worn a tie and worked in offices, paid my taxes, stood in line at the DMV, stood in line to get permission from the state to marry the woman of my dreams, and put a toe into the mainstream media distribution networks and cashed checks from them, here's what I've learned. The Man is not so much evil as he is just boring. Boring, square, and slow-moving, the Man really has no idea what people want. Not only is the Man boring and square, he thinks he's exciting and hip. Dealing with the Man will not so much crush your soul as make you cry tears of boredom and make you rush back to your bedroom to make some art that's interesting and share it with as many people as possible.
Pay attention, get involved, and learn what the issues are. They're incredibly complex. That's the idea behind our "representational democracy"—that most people are not smart enough to vote on the issues, so we vote in people who vote on the issues for us. It may actually be true that most people are not smart enough, or informed enough, to directly participate in politics. But you don't have to be one of them.