Boomers: The Evil Generation!

[Birdjaguar]

I copied these posts from the other thread. I think this is a topic worthy of its own thread.

Boomers are some of the biggest supporters, funders and demographics of the republican party, a party not known for its humanity nor it's love or acceptance of anyone the does not for certain criterias, a group of people more than willing to engage in bigoted conspirational theories that overlap with antisemitism (when convenient) and other anti gay, anti people of colour, anti muslim, anti immigrant and anti trans rhetoric.

They also don't seem to have much stock in the continued survival of the planet given their tendency to deny climate change even exists and are routinely against the expansion of social security (unless it involves themselves of course).

So please spare me this pity party, they are pandered to by some of the worst and bigoted snake oil sales people, including the likes of the current president. They are part of the problem that is damaging America, it's future, the well being of it's citizens and the planet as a whole.

Yeah, when in doubt blame the boomers. Typical.
Then glorify the greatest generation before us while we where the generation that paid for their retirement.

That isn't really fair. The Boomers are the ones who turned the political plurality of the US conservative. And they did so for the purpose of extracting more from the nation than they produced. Post-boomer Americans will pay far more for the greed of boomers than boomers ever paid for themselves, or anyone else.

Funny how you think I'm garbage, but not the old people who believe in the crap I listed in my previous posts, not the old people who hold opinions about minorities that are frankly monstrous, nor the old people who routinely vote to save their own health care whilst wrecking the health care and social safety net of those younger then themselves and certainly not the old people who vote for a party as inhumane as the GOP.

If you don't like what you see, avert your eyes from the mirror.



Boomers have literally voted to make the lives of their children and their children's children worse off and are actively working to ensure there isn't even a planet left to inherit.

Maybe then the younger generations could actually vote and do something about it. Something we've yet to see. I guess it's just easier to blame.

Racism did not end under boomer control, only got worse in differing ways, the patriarchy is often reinforced by boomers, boomers fought tooth and nail to prevent ssm.

Maybe you should start looking at reality my friend things have only ever got better by dragging boomers and their sympathetic allies screaming and kicking into modernity.

They inherited the earth and their ultimate legacy is to leave it in a worse place, leave it more divided and poorer, to have spawned some of the most avaricious individuals ever, content to line their pockets even as they contribute to human misery, to have supported policies that are actively destroying this planet and for enabling a party that refuses to speak up against a borderline fascist with white supremacist sympathies.

The party that is majority supported by boomers routinely makes it harder for the young to vote and are under represented in politics.

What world do you live in in which boomers are free from any blame for the situation we find ourselves in? The richest of their kind are plundering what is left of this earth and fund literal white nationalists because that's more "moral" to them than what they perceive to be "leftism".

I'll admit that the boomers generation's biggest shortcoming was spoiling the next generation to believe that they should have everything handed to them.

You want change, go out and vote. Kick the boomers out of power. It's long overdue. Your children will be blaming you. Start to get used to it.

This isn't the boomers biggest short falling. Their biggest short falling was to benefit from a social contract that boosted their entire generation only to turn around and !@#$ their parents and their children so they could own a few more acres before they went into the dirt. It is obnoxious, it is statistically noticeable, it won't be forgiven. #@$% the boomers.

https://www.vox.com/2017/12/20/16772670/baby-boomers-millennials-congress-debt

https://www.npr.org/2018/01/07/576301190/millennials-and-the-economy

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/201..._millennials_mdash_screwed_america_37128.html

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...ials-are-waking-up-to-a-grim-financial-future

I mean I can go on. . .

The boomers are not a monolithic block of like minded folks. They pretty much split into right and left camps in the 70s. Since 1968 we've had 30 years of Republican administration and 20 years of Democrat administrations. Reagan laid the foundation for the evil capitalistic takeover and was elected by the pre boomer people who ran things then. The left wing of the boomer cohort solidified in the 90s and elected Gore in 2000; oh but wait...;

The Boomers had EVERYTHING handed to them! This is what just totally slays me every time some Boomer jerkwad goes on about how subsequent generations are so selfish and entitled. You got EVERYTHING, and then turned around and decided us future generations were not deserving of all those things that you got at little or no personal cost - and not only did you take it all for granted, you had the nerve to convince yourselves that you actually earned it!

We can't get rid of you, because you entrenched your positions in society to the point we're stuck with you until you're good and goddamned ready to step aside. Not when you stepping aside is good for anyone else other than you.

Oh, I know you don't care. It is quite obvious from the ruined world you've left us that you don't care about how things end up for us. Your animating principle often seems to be ensuring that the world ends with you in power, just so no future generation ever gets to run it.

So we got everything at little or no cost and then decided that those following us were not deserving enough for the same treatment? Interesting. What did we get? Please post a list of things, benefits, opportunities etc. that we got free or at low cost that you don't or can't benefit from or participate in. I'll help you start: Vietnam war and all of its veterans. Smoking in public.

I'm serious and do want to know what you think we got and then took away from you.

Hmm, isn't this younger generation proposing free college, health care for all, and UBI but at the same time saying we got things for free that they aren't getting.

Your generation started at a time when the US accounted for half of world economic output. You created a full employment economy which included plenty of family-supporting jobs for people with no high school degrees, went to college for a fraction of the real costs to students today, made it easy and affordable for anyone white to buy a house. You then systematically destroyed all these things when the time came for subsequent generations to benefit from them.

• Single income families
• Living wages for unskilled labor
  • Min wage is worth 64% less now than it was in 1969
    
  • And there were less truly minimum wage jobs as a proportion of the job market back then
• Non-family roommates have climbed as people can no longer afford independence
• Delayed age of first childbirth and less children being born
• Delayed age of first marriage (probably for the best though!)
  
• Union participation used to be much higher; now we have laws restricting labor and a culture of hatred of unions
  
• Tenured positions at universities have been turned into low-wage adjunct jobs
• Teachers can no longer afford to live in the cities they teach in
  • Meaningful pay increases stopped for many teachers 10-20 years ago
• College access has risen but the entirety of the costs have been pushed to students who are overwhelmingly young
  • Demand is also much higher now than it was in the 60's-90's so the improved access is as much a function of natural increases with demand as any access-focused efforts.
• Healthcare costs have risen far faster than inflation while conservatives spend political capital attacking social programs
  • Social security and Medicaid are perpetually under attack
• Home ownership has declined for the young significantly
• A refusal to endorse legislative solutions to social problems
  • Gay marriage was forced by the courts
• A refusal to do anything about climate change
• Increases in restrictive voting laws and practices
• A refusal to confront mass shootings
• The number of American veterans of Iraq is beginning to rival Vietnam's draft population
  • PTSD is actually worse in Iraq/Afghanistan vets due to the number of and length of deployments soldiers served relative to their Vietnam counterparts
  • Meanwhile the VA is broken and underfunded but all our money went to tax cuts for the rich (and mostly older) instead
• Welfare benefits were massively restricted started in the 90's
• More single parent households
• Kids stay longer with their parents before moving out due to housing costs and low wages

This is all off the top of my head so I don't have sources. I proactively retract anything I got wrong here.

We're talking in generalities because neither of you have anything meaningful to say about the specifics put forth by me. If you won't even acknowledge, much less discuss the statistics and specific examples put forth then all we're reduced to talking about is general voting patterns.

Old people tend to vote conservative and young people liberal. Conservatives politicians enact regressive policies that specifically harm young people all the time including voter suppression.

Therefore old people are wrecking the country.

Nice list of things we got and you didn't, maybe.

Baby boomers born 1946-1964. Oldest boomers are about 74 youngest about 54. Boomers didn't enter the workforce until the 70s and didn't begin to take the reigns of power until the 90s. All those in Congress who are over 74 are not Boomers.

@Birdjaguar: the fact that polarization has increased between expensive, "desirable locations", and the rest should tell you a lot about how bad inequality of income and failure of public services is affecting your country.

What defined the shift in the 90s was that greed became virtuous in public space, in all kinds of speech It wasn't so yet in the 80s when the yuppies were looked down as despicable people.

Coming out of WWII the USA was king but other countries recovered and cold war policy exported jobs

There is no real difference in the reported unemployment rate from 1945 onward. There are some spikes related to economical shocks ofc. And the WW2 war industry period does not count.
https://www.thebalance.com/unemployment-rate-by-year-3305506

Now... unemployment figures can differ over time from definitions etc.

But if I use the Penn Table figures of "number of persons engaged (in millions)" and "average annual hours worked by persons engaged" and calculate the Utilisation % by dividing the total hours worked by "available labor on the population from 15-64 year", the utilisation is pretty much constant from 1950-2017. The 90ies relative good, and dips in the 70ies and after the GFC. Now at 0.5% lower than the average over 1950-2017.

 

[Broken_Erika]

you forgot my post!

 

[Birdjaguar]

you forgot my post!

Could be; there were a lot of them. Please repost it yourself.

 

[Broken_Erika]

Don't forget, Boomers also gave us Celine Dion!

And now for a picture of an Evil Boomer.

 

[inthesomeday]

Millennial-GENz cusp reporting in to say, it ain’t something special about “boomers”. They were and are just as victimized by the systems that came into existence during their haydays.

 

[Patine]

I copied these posts from the other thread. I think this is a topic worthy of its own thread.

I find it disturbing that stereotyping people's behaviour, association, and guilt by demographic has taken new and bizarre turns and forms now that overt racism, antisemitism, sexism, and homophobia are publicly denounced.

 

[Broken_Erika]

I find it disturbing that stereotyping people's behaviour, association, and guilt by demographic has taken new and bizarre turns and forms now that overt racism, antisemitism, sexism, and homophobia are publicly denounced.

Gotta stereotype and/or bash some group.......

 

[Birdjaguar]

There is lots of blame to go around if that is the goal. The boomers drove US culture forward in an unprecedented way, but to fully understand what happened, you have to understand the history of the past 70 years. Surprising things happen, but change happens slowly and usually has deeper roots that we suspect. 9-11 was a surprise, but its roots go back many years. All the things boomers are accused of also have deep roots.

 

[Patine]

There is lots of blame to go around if that is the goal. The boomers drove US culture forward in an unprecedented way, but to fully understand what happened, you have to understand the history of the past 70 years. Surprising things happen, but change happens slowly and usually has deeper roots that we suspect. 9-11 was a surprise, but its roots go back many years. All the things boomers are accused of also have deep roots.

But, the problem I'm pointing out is that you speak of them as a single bloc - like most stereotyping and collective blaming of the sort of I'm referring to. I assure you, my mother had no significant part in this, despite being part of the "boomer" generation.

 

[Estebonrober]

This feels like a pity party sort of. Fwiw not all boomers are bad (obviously), but they did usher in the GOP to power on their watch. They have recently doubled down on that bet, which in the last ten years hasn't become just counterproductive to all the cultural things that were good or better about the boomers, but has become vindictive and spiteful to anyone who'd continue the good work boomers did do in their lifetimes.

So yea there is some resentment about the path the last ten years or so and yes it does have deep roots, but boomers have been the power base for the entire time.

 

[Patine]

This feels like a pity party sort of. Fwiw not all boomers are bad (obviously), but they did usher in the GOP to power on their watch. They have recently doubled down on that bet, which in the last ten years hasn't become just counterproductive to all the cultural things that were good or better about the boomers, but has become vindictive and spiteful to anyone who'd continue the good work boomers did do in their lifetimes.

So yea there is some resentment about the path the last ten years or so and yes it does have deep roots, but boomers have been the power base for the entire time.

Why is it so hard for people to refer to individuals, or specific, definitive groups of deliberate motivation, and not whole sweeping, generalized statements about demographic groups as highly-unrealistic unified opinion blocs? Why are so many people so IMPAIRED in perspective nowadays?

 

[Estebonrober]

Why is it so hard for people to refer to individuals, or specific, definitive groups of deliberate motivation, and not whole sweeping, generalized statements about demographic groups as highly-unrealistic unified opinion blocs? Why are so many people so IMPAIRED in perspective nowadays?

Hyperbole is fun! I mean if I sit here and hedge on every statement trying to make everyone feel ok about the groups we are all in nothing will ever be said. As it is I thought I was being pretty diplomatic this time. I mean the first go around it was pretty much just flaming the entire generation.

 

[inthesomeday]

It’s not like there’s something wrong with any kind of general analysis of broad classes of people. But specifically the generation known as the baby boomers haven’t really earned the reputation they get. It’s not like they uniquely were responsible for any magnification of the pre existing social ills, in fact during the 60s-80s there was significant improvement to many problems in the world.

 

[FriendlyFire]

There is lots of blame to go around if that is the goal. The boomers drove US culture forward in an unprecedented way, but to fully understand what happened, you have to understand the history of the past 70 years. Surprising things happen, but change happens slowly and usually has deeper roots that we suspect. 9-11 was a surprise, but its roots go back many years. All the things boomers are accused of also have deep roots.

Well the Millennials will probably get their revenge in a few years and put the boomers off into a nursing home, if they havent already shuffled off from the lack of healthcare

 

[Peuri]

Instead of pontificating on how evil a generation is, wouldn't it be more productive to try to uncover why they did things that you have deemed evil? Did they even have an idea as to what they were doing and what kind of consequences their actions would have? Evil is just a cop out word.

Here's my take on it:
Around 1955 Satan ascended from his nether realm after a 20 year hiatus and touched all the little boomerlings, yes even the PoC and LGBTQ+ ones, with his accursed staff of patriarchal white supremacy, that was crafted in the fires of mount Boom by his master craftsman and impeccable liar mr. Shicklgruber. In this Manichean world of ours, with his staff the dark one corrupted the souls of millions to insidiously and consciously work against the only true vision of the world and to usher in a 1000 years of Republican party power. Global warming was also on the Archfiend's agenda, because transforming the Earth to more closely resemble the Adversary's kingdom, would allow his imps and troglodytes to seize ultimate power and to lower the marginal tax rate of the wealthiest percentiles. The pure ones, touched by Mohammed and Jesus themselves, were at first able to resist the curse, these were the hippies, but eventually they too had to succumb to Lucifer's sinister powers.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

I just discovered i am a "Xennial". Somewhere beetween X and Milennial. Should i hate my parents?

 

[Birdjaguar]

But, the problem I'm pointing out is that you speak of them as a single bloc - like most stereotyping and collective blaming of the sort of I'm referring to. I assure you, my mother had no significant part in this, despite being part of the "boomer" generation.

I only quoted a few of my posts from the original location, but I am anything but monolithical about Boomers. And I am on the leading edge of boomerism!

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Wow. So much hostility. Apparently I should be praising and worshiping Jason Kenney instead of having a pleasant chat with a campaign worker representing the NDP candidate (she phoned tonight to ask if they had my support in the coming provincial election and I educated her on a few issues pertaining to disabled voters so the candidate can address them at an upcoming all-candidates' forum).

I am apparently also a science-illiterate corporation-worshiper who is glad that my childhood home was literally paved over (it was a beautiful semi-wild area with seasonal wetlands and an abundance of wild animals and woods).

FYI: A lot of the women who are part of the Raging Grannies are of the boomer generation (they're left-wing ladies who take part in various protests from environmental issues to anti-nuclear to supporting a Canadian bird biologist who was suspended from his job in 2015 for singing a song critical of our then-Prime Minister, Stephen Harper).

What a lot of evil people we are.

 

[Peuri]

Wow. So much hostility. Apparently I should be praising and worshiping Jason Kenney instead of having a pleasant chat with a campaign worker representing the NDP candidate (she phoned tonight to ask if they had my support in the coming provincial election and I educated her on a few issues pertaining to disabled voters so the candidate can address them at an upcoming all-candidates' forum).

I am apparently also a science-illiterate corporation-worshiper who is glad that my childhood home was literally paved over (it was a beautiful semi-wild area with seasonal wetlands and an abundance of wild animals and woods).

FYI: A lot of the women who are part of the Raging Grannies are of the boomer generation (they're left-wing ladies who take part in various protests from environmental issues to anti-nuclear to supporting a Canadian bird biologist who was suspended from his job in 2015 for singing a song critical of our then-Prime Minister, Stephen Harper).

What a lot of evil people we are.

Also pretty hypocritical, especially when it comes to global warming. I am 100% sure that by the time I, a millenial, was 20, and by the time my father or mother were 20 I had contributed tenfold the amount of carbon to the atmosphere than they did. I don't think the situation is much more different for the rest of the millenials and gen Xers that would like to externalize the blame unto someone else. We are all sinners and throwing rocks comes easy.

 

[Hrothbern]

When you are young, you have your whole life ahead of you
And I think the way you feel about your "now" has much to do with how you feel about your future

When the baby boomer generation was young, there was a feeling of doom from the cold war risks up to talking about wanting no children ourselves, Vietnam "proving" that the establishment could not be trusted 100% with the nuclear button, and at the same time an enormous optimism from the growth of everything around you and within you. The sky the limit. And for everybody his own sky to pursuit.

On the one hand bound by the traditional respect for the older generation, generating also that so visible and tangible growing prosperity and progression projects like the Apollo program etc, SF, cartoons like the Flintstones & the Jetsons, etc.
on the other hand unchained from the older generation because we were with so many, we were better educated, we were the first generation where it was normal that both male asfemale were fully educated...
to put that sharp: with the enthusiasm of the youth... we were going to do everything better than our parental generation.. up to the point of plainly feeling superior !
And as young teenagers not yet having many real material possessions, that feeling of superiority started with the immaterial stuff: the music, the happenings, the experiences, another way of thinking & socialising, etc. And why did we boys have long hair ? Just to be different ? For sure... but long hair does look much better when your are young, than when you are old. Look at us... we have something you oldies don't have anymore: we have our youth


OPTIMISM for the future, and especially for your own personal future.

Has the young generation now in general that same feeling of optimism ? I think not.
But are the reasons that there is less optimism caused by the baby boom generation ?

I think that the baby boom generation was just by accident very "lucky" !

And I can imagine very well that the current generation would like to have that same feeling of optimism, and that free ride on a wave of also significant material progress.

The provoking question:
how much of blaming the baby boomers is also caused by having envy on that optimism during the youth of baby boomers ?

I cannot "give", as an material object, that feeling of optimism to my daughters !