The wealth will concentrate somewhat because people are having smaller and smaller families. It’s stabilized more or less since about 2000, but significantly smaller than it was in 1960. Birthrate is also lower for people with more money.
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Yeah, we know. You never cease to remind us about how much better you are
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When your criticism is always phrased as “you/they are awful” instead of “we are awful” it’s pretty clear how you see yourself in comparison. And no, I don’t take it personally. I usually stay out of the intra-left blood feuds.
Like Wookie says, we’re all just individuals generally acting upon the cumulative values and biases society has instilled in us. You can say this about any class of people, even, to a large extent, Trumpers.
However, the Boomers have had a pretty toxic run of influences and biases acting upon them. Some early Boomers were anti-Vietnam protesters, but that’s more for people born in the 40s. Most boomers were kids when all that was going down, and their childhoods consisted of their parents abandoning cities to go live in pleasantville. Their young adult lives were shaped by the war on drugs, then all the misogynistic and racist media BS of the 80s and 90s, and then the Islamophobic fever pitch after 9/11, tea party, Trump. Of course they’re gonna be a shitty generation on the whole.
They’re also the generation the experienced the sun setting of a less class-divided USA (for white people ldo), so they’ve had much more equitable access to resources than subsequent generations.
Blame the puppet masters and people who have orchestrated these awful turns in society, imo. And that’s a relatively narrow band of reactionaries who subverted a political party and basically have infected the whole of our national discourse and society. That’s the rot we really need to be attacking; a ruined generation is just a symptom, not the disease.
Peak Boomer
Registered Republican.
Of course I’m going to blame Boomers as a generation. They’re the ones that actually did the shit. Thought experiments about how other generations would have acted if switched in time with Boomers are outside the actual critique: it’s specifically about generations.
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People like order. Some of the (white) Boomer generational spirit was probably formed as a backlash towards hippies, counterculture, and the civil Rights movement as sources of chaos.
Ok boomer
“I’m just doing it to look after my family” could have been the war cry of the boomer.
Re. voting - the median boomer vote in the 60s was some way to the left of how you and your generation voted at the same age. Sure they drifted to the right, just as many of your cohorts will.
Meanwhile check out the number of Gen Xers storming the Capitol.
Everyone trying to blame shadowy overlords for doing what the Boomers actively voted to let them do is incorrect. There are exceptions to the rule that boomers are awful, but they were nowhere near enough to redeem them as a group. As a group they have never voted to sacrifice any comfort, no matter how small, and no matter for how short of a time for the long term good. They, as a group, share a deep cultural belief in the idea that everything will be fine no matter what they do because reasons.
They think greed and selfishness are virtues rather than things you have to keep under control. They think the high performing asshole is the protagonist and an absolute necessity to the success of the organization rather than an angle shooting dbag who erodes the brand while free riding off the work their betters did to build it up. They also, as a group, strongly believe in never worrying about anything more than 3 months in the future.
And all of that applies to almost every Boomer in a leadership position from a shift leader at a KFC to the members of their cohort who they elected president. It has been in the water of their fishbowl since they were kids and oh boy is that fact obvious.
The people defending them are thinking of exceptional Boomers, but notice how many people ITT have said things like ‘I love my parents but their politics, and they aren’t even Trump supporters, are really problematic’. Yeah no shit these people are fucking monsters as a group. If it was up to them Trump would still be president right now. The good ones are Mindy St. Claire from The Good Place and the rest are fucking demons hell bent on sucking the marrow out of the planets bones before expiring.
And the rest of us need to stop making excuses for them. The next person who says something sad panda about ageism in x workplace I’m going to laugh clear out of the room. It’s not ageism to replace a Boomer who can’t rotate a PDF who makes 250k with a millenial who makes 125k and is 400% as productive. IBM was 100% right when they purged everyone over 50 a few years back. If you’re above a certain organizational level and you aren’t advancing or stuck because you’re irreplaceable at your current role you don’t even deserve the buyout you’re probably about to get.
As for the lower class Boomers they’re idiots who got screwed by corporations and right wing politics their entire lives and decided that the brown people were at fault. I’m out of sympathy for them. I’ll worry about their situation when we’ve bailed out every generation that followed them from the damage the people they voted for their entire lives did.
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I tend to agree with you, I also think there is a bit of a chicken/egg going on where many characteristics of the Boomers are objectively terrible but also recognizable at several points in history in the cohorts of populations that ran societies at the time empires failed. The boomers’ lazy unfounded faith in the supremacy and natural exceptionalism of their society certainly would have also existed in the ruling class of late stage Rome, peak global Spain, imperial Britain, etc etc. etc. Boomers deserve their criticism, but even their shallow lazy awfulness is not noteworthy.
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Interestingly those other generations are the other contenders for WOAT generation. It was our terrible luck that this round of them got to be the first generation to really benefit from the life extending powers of modern medical technology.
“Someday they’ll be as bad as the Boomers” sort of undercuts your argument that Millennials are just as bad as Boomers.
Also, hasn’t the “people drift to the right as they age” theory been beaten to death before ITT?
Swing and a miss, lol.
Also we’ll never get the chance. If we were half as bad as the Boomers humanity would be drawing live to extinction. Even the Boomers confronting our situation, would be better than the Boomers have been.
There’s some truth to the idea that we would be the same in their shoes but we aren’t unfortunately and one of the only advantages we get from having to clean up after the massive bender they’re still throwing is that we get to tell ourselves that we’re better than that. I’m not giving that up. I paid for it.
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These “huge swaths of the population are collectively bad” arguments have to be beyond the sophistication of this forum by now.
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I liked the post as I agree with the thrust of it, but almost boomer levels of stupidity if you think this is actually true!
Unless they can be easily proven statistically true dude. You don’t have any problems labeling the same people collectively bad when they’re GOP voters. As it turns out they’re mostly the same people.
Also hating Boomers is very much where me and NBZ’s ranges merge. I think that the younger generations need to develop a real active dislike of Boomers, Boomer politics, and Boomer ways of thinking. I think this backlash is necessary to getting out of the hole the Boomers have dug and honestly late to the party.
You can say what you want about the lack of sophistication, but as a society the US has to start digging its way out of the giant hole we’re in. What’s annoying about being in a hole to start with is that the Boomers started on top of a fucking mountain and now in their dotage they’ve turned it into a deep dark hole that they plan to keep digging until they die.
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GOP voters are people choosing to be members in a morally repugnant group. Simply being born in a certain year is not a choice.
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Its kind of hard to duck this type of thinking when a root cause of many political problems is white supremacy. We DO have huge swaths of the population with objectively bad thinking, I suppose you are rightly arguing for more attacking of ideas than people. But as political action that can only go so far - eventually individuals need to held accountable for individual actions.