6458

As a boomer I plead insanity. I didn’t mean to fuck everyone else over while trying to make a living. It just worked out that way.

6459

I hope that the millenials are using their critical thinking skills and saying ‘the boomer way didn’t work out so well for us, now did it?’ and are choosing differently.

I’m Gen X, and am now also a slacker helping to hold the country together despite the warnings of my boomer parents and their friends. The kids are all right.

6460

I found this to be an interesting read on the topic; while at first enjoying unparalleled political support, the realities of the interstate program quickly led to a lot of grumbling. Still, valid point that you made.

6461

A big part of the huge economic boom after WWII was due to the fact that tons of people were employed building up that infrastructure. Building interstates, skyscrapers, bridges, power plants… That took a huge amount of manpower.

6462

I think you are moving the goalposts. The author wrote that boomers were never “traumatized”, and you are trying to make this into a contest into who was most traumatized, a contest which anyway the Greatest Generation will not win.

Clearly, it’s quite possible for more than one generation to suffer. And pointing out that returning veterans were treated like shit just highlights the degree of suffering.

Again, I’m not even sure what your point is. The boomers took unpopular positions on civil rights that were later adopted by the mainstream. This is evidence of a social conscience. You seem to be arguing that they should have taken popular positions? But what does that prove? You don’t need to protest slavery in 1960, because everyone already agrees with you.

One of the larger public works projects in our history - maybe the largest - was the Interstate Highway System. The majority of that construction occurred in the 60s and 70s.

I’m not trying to argue that the boomers were better than other generations. And they weren’t perfect. But the particular criticisms leveled by that Gen X author are absurd. If boomers didn’t suffer, then neither did the subsequent generations. If they lacked a social conscience or were unproductive, then the same is true of pretty much every other generation.

6463

I was underwhelmed by it. Were it not for my memories of that game in grade school, I’d probably dislike it.

6464

That, plus the GI Bill providing college education opportunities to tons of young vets who wouldn’t have had them otherwise (my own late father included) was a great investment toward national prosperity.

6465

The Boomers were not, as a generation, traumatized. They never faced anything like that faced by their parents.

I dunno if you still just don’t understand the difference here, or if you are willfully trying to obscure it.

The great depression had a profound impact on virtually everyone in America. Boomers never lived though anything like that. You suggestion that the recession in the 70s was even remotely comparable is laughable.

Everyone I know who came from that generation had various things ingrained into their behavior as a result… They tended to never waste anything, ever. They were they original recyclers, reusing jars and containers from virtually everything. They hoarded things like canned goods.

No, I’m arguing that your assertion that Boomers, as a generation, did that is incorrect.

That’s good, because they weren’t.
They were worse.
They were the worst.

The Gen Xers and millennials only suffered by having to fight a never-ending war for two decades at the behest of the Boomers…

And now we get to deal with the mountain of debt that they left us.

And their complete failure to deal with donate change.

But you’re right. Most of the suffering we’ll deal with is yet to come.

6466

I don’t often pick on Boomers as others tend to, but Timex is right here. Members of my family survived off hunting raccoon hunting, eating them and selling their skins. They held onto things for years, hid money in coffee cans, mattresses, that sort of thing until the end of their days. They did not trust the banks, and they were children when they lived through it. It stayed with them for life, and there were a lot of them that endured that.

I am not sure Boomers, Genx or Millennials have experienced anything like that… I mean trauma yes, but wide spread behavior like that. Closest thing I can think of is… if anyone hijacks a plan in the USA, I doubt everyone will sit there and hope things will be okay again.

6467

Does having drills were you got under your desk in case you were nuked count? The daily Vietnam body counts on the network news shows, which everyone watched back then. Knowing your brother or friends brother or perhaps you or a friend could get drafted, does that count. How about seeing political leaders shot and sometimes killed on TV? Having Nixon as a role model?

Every generation has its drama. We worried about getting nuked as kids, today we worry about the environment changing. You could be dead either way.

6468

When you hear a siren, do you still drop under your desk?

6469

I’ll admit, the notion that you were on the verge of nuclear war is something which, until recently, was unique to the Boomers and I dunno what kind of trauma that caused. But I’ve never seen any kind of hardly manifested behavior as a response to it.

6470

We didn’t use a siren, they just had us do it. But the parking lot in elementary school did have a siren.

Hey, let’s blame the generation that started WW1. After all they basically set everything in motion from then until today.

6471

Look I am not saying the Boomers didn’t experience trauma or even significant hardship but… I’ve never seen the Boomers react like the generation before them. I mean just look at how much one group likes Russia now. It didn’t seem to scar to the point of not being rational about stuff forever.

My great grandparents hoarded cash, hid cash, until they died.

6472

I think it led directly to the feeling among many that we have to always have a strong and viable military. It led to fear based policies.

Just look at how the news jumps at every North Korea story and imagine that the USSR was thought of as North Korea for 35 years.

6473

This is fair, perhaps.

6474

Well, I don’t think any American generation has has to deal with anything as “forming” as the great depression.

6475

Probably not. I don’t think it’s a fair stick to measure with either but… that’s a better argument than we had Vietnam and the Cold War compared to these other… things.

Except they were so scarred by the Cold War that we can’t wait to ally with… Russia. It doesn’t seem that scarring then.

6476

I have just finished reading Doris Kern Goodwin’s book on the Roosevelt’s during wartime, called No Ordinary Time. It is not a book about the war, it is basically a book about the Roosevelts themselves, but it also gives you a clear look at what America was in 1940 and where it was in 1945 when the war ended. The state of the country socially and economically. America in 1940 was a much different place that it was by 1960. Maybe no generation or society has undergone so much change so quickly. Sadly there was so little change in racial attitudes during that time. Even advances made during the war were lost when the troops came home.

6477

I think that part of what makes me overly critical of the Boomers, is that I’ve personally encountered so many of them who were just such total pieces of shit… the guys who thought Gordon gecko was a role model.

And that, coupled with the fact that Boomers seen to be hyper critical of everyone else… Like everything that’s wrong with the world today is the fault of kids, rather than the fault of the Boomers themselves who ran the world for the past few decades.