6478

I have found it strange that the right now doesn’t seem bothered by possible Trump ties with Russia, while now it’s the left that argues that such ties are treasonous. My how things have changed in 30 years.

6479

Name a generation that didn’t think the kids were dumbasses intent on doing nothing but having a good time.

6480

And, yes, that is Rose McGowan that started #metoo. So maybe GenX’ers are going to save the world! The women GenX’ers, anyway.

In case you’ve never seen the Doom Generation, it ends with emasculation by hedge clippers and casual doritos.

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6481

Do you know very many Boomers who are happy, like people are just generally content with life? My experience is this is a miserable group, no data or anything, just experience. They’re angry and judgmental… all the time.

I work with managers who kill themselves and try to kill everyone around them for a bonus, a big financial bonus and they never take time off… when someone said they were going to take time to be with their kids, one of them said just buy something nice. They seem so miserable.

I assume there are happy Boomers out there but I don’t run into them often.

6482

You guys love to generalize, don’t you. A whole generation of assholes who are sad and looking for quick ways to make a buck. And they hate the younger generations. Real bastards.

6483

Fox news specifically caters to them, and what you just described there is pretty much the program schedule every day.

6484

I specifically said it’s not data generated. Seriously Scuzz calm down for a minute and listen up. When I walk into a room full of Boomers from my family, I hear the talking points of the NPR and FOX… at dinner, at holidays, at birthday parties. Every freaking time. When they try to pull me into it, I tell them we don’t need to talk about slavery at a five year old’s party.

Do you know what we talk about with my cousins and other people my age, whatever they’re enjoying. Movies, children recitals, vacations, the new store that opened up. The different dynamic is noticeable.

6485

To be clear, I don’t think you are a bad guy Scuzz. You seem cool enough.

Any talk of generations is going to be, by it’s nature, full of stupid generalizations.

6486

Yeah what he said. I can find thousands of articles bitching about Millennials and GenerationX. I just pick one to relate too since I am not really either.

6487

I think that might just be a product of them being old. Your experience with people from the previous generation happens to just be boomers. I suspect boomers grew up hearing the previous generation gripe a lot too, when they were older.

Basically, I think your data set of personal interaction with the previous generation is all boomer based. Hell, I feel myself turning more and more to the “get off my lawn” type on daily basis. My kids will say that my generation was the grumpiest ever.

It’s an age thing rather than some sort of specifically boomer thing.

6488

That could very well be. To me old is Boomers, and I realize that generation stretches a ton of years, my parents and my greats are the same group. The generation before them, they’re all dead in my stretch of the world, sadly.

6489

As a boomer I’d like to thank a previous poster for hoping for my demise. I agree. The way things are now I sometimes wish I was dead.

6490

Nah, your one of the “good ones”, rich!

6491

I don’t know if I count as a Boomer, but if I am I’m on the tail end-- born in 1961. I do think that some members of the boomer generation, especially if they grew up with all the advantages of parents with solid middle-class incomes over decades, plus a college education that was affordable enough to graduate with a BA not basically owing the equivalent of a mortgage on a house in their early 20’s, if they’ve prospered themselves, really don’t get what it’s like for young people now who aren’t trust fund kids, or for older adults who may have been doing all right until the Great Recession and now are scraping by (or aren’t). Also I think that some of them really think it’s just as easy to bootstrap yourself now as it was 40 to 50 years ago–that there are nearly enough living wage jobs for that to be the case.
They grew up in a period of fairly sustained high growth rates, the product of the particular postwar global economy coupled with a federal government that believed in making public investments in infrastructure, public education and health, and just take all the good things that bought for society for granted–they think that stuff just happens without planning, policy and resources.

6492

And they systematically and relentlessly destroyed all those things so that their children and grandchildren couldn’t have them. Why? So they could save a couple percentages off their taxes.

The Boomers get shit on because their parents gave everything. They fought the greatest war ever known by the human race, after wallowing in poverty and barely surviving. Then they saw the greatest economic revival ever and instead of hoarding money, they gave back, paid down the massive debt in short order, made the largest human structure ever and made sure their children never suffered any of the things they did as best they could.

The Boomers took all that and dismantled it before anyone else could benefit from it, then bitched about how the people they fucked over were lazy and ungrateful. Anytime anyone tried to do something about it, they leveraged their electoral might to crush them like insects so they could keep bitching about how lazy they are.

6493

You’ve gotta remember, though, that a lot of those Greatest Generation people were the first ones to succumb to the siren song of Richard Nixon’s “law and order” platform combined with the Southern Strategy. Both were designed to woo less-educated whites to the Republican Party and away from the Dems and their outreach to newer less white and less male constituencies, the former in the North and Northeast and the latter in the just-desegregating South. Both were appeals to racist animus and to resentment of the 60’s Counterculture. It started to work on the electoral targets then, and primed the pump for Reagan 12 years later. <— that was a planned consequence of the Right’s long-term project after World War II to begin the eventual dismantling of the New Deal.

6494

Oh yeah, the greatest generation were by no means enlightened when it came to race.

My grandfather was crazy racist.

6495

So let me get this straight. You are arguing that if any generation is less traumatized than the Greatest generation, then they are not traumatized. Is that correct?

Ok. Name a generation, as a generation, that you think was more socially activist than the boomers. And how you reached that conclusion.

For every boomer who ignored the social issues of their time, there is a Gen-X’er or Millennial who did the same thing. Maybe two.

If you are suggesting that the post 9/11 conflicts made a bigger collective impact on the national psyche than the Vietnam War, then sorry but I’m not buying it. At all.

12000 Vietnam protestors were arrested over just a few days in 1971, towards the end of the war. When was the last time anyone was arrested for protesting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?

More people fought in Vietnam. More people died in Vietnam. Nobody even pretended we won in Vietnam. And those who fought in Vietnam often did so against their will. All these things left long term scars, even more than those left by Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yawn. There are people right here on this forum who argue that the debt is irrelevant. I don’t know if they are right, but I do know that I don’t much care.

Not at all.

Our political response to climate change is lacking. But there is a lot more to a generation than its political leaders.

In 1985, recycling bins were nowhere to be found (ok, maybe in Portland!). In 2005, they were everywhere.

In 1985, you bought a car with the biggest engine you could afford. In 2005, the Prius was a bestseller.

In 1985, solar and wind energy production was negligible and new coal plants were still being built. In 2005, solar/wind energy was growing exponentially. Today renewables account for 14% of total energy production in the US, right between the Dutch (13%) and the French (17%). It is unlikely a new coal plant will ever be built in the US.

Those changes weren’t brought about by our shitty boomer political leaders. They were brought about by private sector leaders who openly acknowledge what DC refuses to admit. And who are mainly boomers.

6496

I meant to mention in that post that the fictional archetype of the type of “GG” guy I was alluding to is Archie Bunker of All in the Family.
I really don’t find it all that useful to divide/blame generations. Everyone pretty much takes the course of action that seems like the best one at the moment.
With regard to race in American politics, though, I think it’s the major thing that’s held the country back by allowing the country’s elites to divide and conquer us, to their benefit and against our best interests.

6497

I mean… we basically threw out the Constitution in response to 9/11.

I’d say the collective impact on our psyche was magnitudes greater.
Vietnam made us afraid to go to war. 9/11 made us afraid to be free.