Today I had my mother and step-father, and my husband’s parents over for a Mother’s Day breakfast. It would have been perfect, except for one thing…
The paranoid anti-science, anti-Obama ranting. For the past year or so, my step-father has been moaning about how Obama is going to turn us into an Islamic nation of socialists (he saw videos on YouTube that prove it!). We had to hear about poor ol’ Mitt was booed for quoting scripture. How bad Kids Today are. How they want to move to another country and get out Before It’s Too Late.
Normally, his parents are rational, but today, they weren’t. His mother raved about mutant fish and cloning animals and “the television these days is so raunchy”.
It was uncomfortable for us. I’m 34, my husband is 32.
I’ve noticed my dad and step-mother have begun this trend, too. They bring up “Obamacare” every time we visit, and act as if it’s going to destroy the world. Every time we visit with someone over the age of 40, it’s some rant about the government, culture, and the usual “old people” rants.
Is it just age, the fact we live in a Republican state (Indiana), or some other element. It seems to have gotten worse since 2011. Anyone else notice this?
It makes socializing with them irritating beyond all belief. Today, I just kept my mouth shut and tried to steer the conversation to happier topics, to no avail.
I guess it’s just the old generation yowling. Is it only going to get worse from here? :rolleyes:
My mom, a lifelong Democrat, was initially opposed to Obama because she fell for the “He’s a secret Muslim” crap. She didn’t seem to get it when I explained to her that even if he was a Muslim, there’s nothing wrong with that**, and that he wasn’t one anyway. She was also opposed to “Obamacare” because she felt it would affect her disability payments somehow. Immigration was another thing that she suddenly opposed even though she used to have several friends who were immigrants, ironically from the middle east.
I thought maybe it was age. She’s only in her early 50s, but has had epilepsy and severe depression for most of her life, so I thought perhaps the stress of divorcing my dad had brought out some nuttier ideas. She certainly didn’t raise me that way and lives in Northern Virginia which is pretty liberal.
Thankfully she’s stopped spontaneously bringing those subjects up. My dad didn’t say anything about it to her as he stopped communicating with her after their divorce, but he found it incredibly bizarre as well. I’m hoping it was just a temporary phase brought on by extreme stress affecting her mentally.
I think a lot of the boomers wanted to be rich, successful entrepreneurs, and then the dot-com & housing bubbles came along and kicked them in the nuts, and they’re still reeling in shock and trying to adjust to reality and trying to make a living managing a hardware store. They didn’t realize they should have been pushing & fighting for things to be the way they wanted them to be clear back when they were in college, and now it’s too late for them to do anything effective, so they’re lashing out at whatever they can, and today, it’s Obama.
Right, because boomers were never political at all back when they were in college. They weren’t out in the streets protesting and getting shot by the National Guard, not like today’s students. :rolleyes:
Most of them, no, they weren’t. When I was in college in the 80’s, I didn’t know anybody who was protesting or getting shot by National Guard. Did you?
College in the 80s makes you an X-er. But it does stand that the majority of the first waves of Boomers (those in college in the 60s and who were “Thirtysomething” in the 80s) were NOT protestors or activists in college. They quietly took classes, graduated and went to work as accountants, managers, teachers, engineers, etc. Even more so the later cohorts.
HOWEVER… Boomers of all brands are seeing in this day and age that a lot of things people took for granted to be ironclad-guaranteed entitled rights (retirement; home value) and/or immutable facts of life you could plan upon are revealed as having only been contingent on economic or social circumstance. A lot of the things that one group were told would be theirs if they kept their noses clean and to the grindstone are being pulled away from them just as they expected to be enjoying it all.
Rather than accept how that all was based on fallacious premises and that the necessary steps should have been taken decades ago (with the commesurate effect of compromises and inconveniences at the time), it’s easier to take the position of older generations through history and say that the world’s just going to Hell now.
Fair enough. Late Boomer, then. Your protestors would have been about “US out of El Salvador”, South Africa boycott and the nuclear freeze – and that made for even fewer of the group being involved in activism/confrontation.
(I’m in the same cohort but never saw myself as “boomer”, culturally.)
People do seem to become more conservative/reactionary as they age. People have been decrying the younger generation and how everything’s going to hell since written records began. That said, it must be especially hard for people who were born in America’s golden age (1945-1970) to accept just how far down the American middle class has come. Remember when being an auto worker guaranteed a comfortable middle-class lifestyle and a secure retirement?
My Mom, aged 80, is pretty reasonable although she did express a distrust of middle-eastern people after 9/11. She seems pretty tolerant these days and doesn’t complain about Obama, hell, I think she voted for him. I think it may have to do with where people live - my Mom lives in Salem, Oregon - pretty liberal.
Real Life imitates a message board! Trolls and all. You need to have a moderator in attendance, with the power to tell them, as clearly and plainly as necessary, to knock it off.
I hear that the SDMB mods are available for free-lance work.
My parents are in their mid-60’s. Both retired early, have paid-for cars and two houses. They have been unaffected by the economical downturn, are “enjoying” their retirement and doing just fine.
They also seem to have gone off the rails since President Obama took office. My dad is convinced he will be one of the early chosen for the death panels as soon as there is Universal Health Care (stage 2-3 renal disease). It doesn’t compute when I mention his current health care is already socialized.
My parents and I love each other dearly and enjoy each other’s company, but politics has to stay off the table. Usually I let them say whatever crazy thing they want to, stay silent, and so far the subject gets changed fairly quickly if it comes up at all any more.
All the boomers I know are off the rails, too. I’m afraid they’re just getting old. I hope they enjoy their Medicare while they’re ranting against Obamacare.
Hey, I’m a boomer! (Born 1954, about as mid-Boom as you can get.) Yes, I am getting old (beats the alternative!), but my friends would say I’ve been off the rails since my teens.
I have at least one friend who will have health insurance once again next year, thanks to Obamacare. You won’t hear me ranting against it, needless to say.
OTOH, my mother, who’s in her mid-80s, has been dropping slams against Obama into conversations lately, apropos of nothing. Haven’t had a chance to figure out exactly what her problem is with Obama, but I’m sure Obamacare must be part of it all.
Boomers are largely right wing, and right wingers spend much of their time in their reality-proof media bubble. They believe those crazy paranoid things because they spend most of their time listening to, watching and reading people who tell them those crazy things, and avoiding those that don’t.
It’s not really age; young right wingers are just as crazy, there just aren’t as many of them.
The categorical association of the aging with right-wing paranoia in this thread is annoying. I’ve posted links to papers with relevant statistics; the correlations are there but not nearly strong enough to just the lack of equivocation seen upthread.
My last job in California was at a research lab where the oldest person was also the most liberal. I now live in a remote part of Asia; among the half-dozen Americans I know within an hour’s drive, the oldest is also the only one (other than myself) who votes Democrat. The youngest of this group is the one who wants to abolish the Federal Reserve, and worries about the New World Order conspiracy.
Despite all this (and despite that Dopers will click Reply now and denounce me), I’ve espoused the disenfranchisement of the elderly in these forums. Since the rest of you are over-generalizing, I will too: The aging are more likely to focus on short-term financial issues than on America’s long-term direction.
I would not be surprised if a lot of those boomers are panicking at the idea that they may outlive their pensions/401(k)s (which by now it may be or seem too late to beef up) and the Social Security/Medicare funds, and they fear implementing Obamacare takes resources away from saving *their *vested entitlement which ITNSHO should be job one.
Not really. Less than half of them consider themselves conservative. More consider themselves conservative than consider themselves liberal. If you throw together the ones that consider themselves liberal or moderate, it’s more than the amount that consider themselves conservative. I would take “right wing” to mean something stronger than “conservative,” so I suspect that the proportion that consider themselves right wing is smaller than the proportion that consider themselves conservative.
You’re going to claim that polls that showed these figures underestimated the proportion of conservatives because the definition of “conservative” is anyone more conservative than you, Der Trihs. Look, you should get used to understanding that you’re more liberal than the vast proportion of people. You don’t get to define yourself as being in the middle of the political spectrum.
Incidentally, while researching this, I came on some articles arguing that it’s not true that people become more conservative with age. In fact, they tend to become somewhat more liberal with age. The problem is that younger age cohorts will be distinctly more liberal than they are. Although they are slowly becoming more liberal as they age, they don’t catch up with the liberalism of the younger cohorts, so they think of themselves as being relatively conservative.
As one of the earlier Boomers, I take offense at this generalization. None of it is true for me. Most of it is not true of my husband, who has become a staunch Republican. Anecdotes are of course not data, but I personally know no one in my age group who resembles these generalizations. Certainly I take the previous posters’ words for it that there are people who do.
We both get Social Security and Medicare, but also have fully vested pensions and retirement funds that enable us to live just fine, including annuities that will increase in payout over time. We do not fear outliving them.
Despite having some differing political opinions, we both are concerned about the country’s long-term direction, which will certainly affect our children and grandchild. Neither of us believes the Birther claptrap or the various conspiracy theories. We both value science and rationality over religion and superstition.
