Well given how often Millenials are accused of being whiny, self absorbed, lazy, entitled snowflakes. It makes sense that they might approve of getting some licks in on the other side.
I’m an old fart who is against that garbage. But, it’s way past time to worry about THEIR feelings. Give 'em hell.
Agreed. Hard to imagine how we older folks could have screwed it up worse than we did. I suppose we could have had a full scale nuclear war. But barring that, not a very good record. My generation will probably be most remembered for its greed and squandered opportunities.
They’re not attacking old people. They’re saying that we’ve seen what happens when only the old people vote, and it’s clearly not what you like. So come in and vote yourself, to offset them.
I know a lot of good older people. I also know a lot of shitty ones, and the shitty ones seem to be outvoting the good ones. I see so much problem from our kids: even my younger friends who have been raised Evangelical are all about how Trump is horrible, how racism is bad, and just otherwise showing they actually learned what their parents told them were good values, even if they’ve decided not to practice them.
So I want them voting. I want to take this country back from the Fox News watching grandparents, who think Trump is okay because he’s just as mixed up as they are.
They are actually attacking old people, at least implicitly, by showing them in the background of these screeds while excoriating the record of their generation(s). They are implying that old people are the enemy (at least politically) of young people.
I’m not interested in the percentage or degree to which that may or may not be true. I’m opposed to generalizations, including all the ones about millenials, all the ones about boomers and all the ones about the “greatest generation,” as well as all other groups. Of course it would be a good idea for millennials to vote, not to outweigh the votes of us old folks, but just to take part in their government processes. The outcome of a huge increase in millennial voting may not be what everyone thinks, but it would still be better than the status quo of really low participation.
So I’m not particularly encouraged by much of the response here, that the posters on this board are more enlightened and intelligent than the average population.
Then I think we can safely ignore any other opinions you may have on the subject.
If, for example, you don’t care that it’s true that the president consistently lies but you’re opposed to criticism anyway then it’s valid to discount your opinion on the matter.
I don’t want to demonise old people in general. However, I’ve had to explain, just over a year ago, that UK university students don’t get grants for their accommodation and food, and actually have to pay for the course to an 80 year old relative, former educator, who was horrified to hear this (I told him I’d got a Uni placement, he nudged me, grinned, and asked ‘How big’s the grant you get for that one?’ he honestly no idea).
This same relative has voted in every election since grants got dropped 20 years ago, apparently entirely unaware that the free education plus free money he got was now (up to) a £9000 a year fee and the only money available for living costs is a loan. It’s been a huge topic of discussion since the mid '90s, but hey, it doesn’t affect him so he somehow just didn’t notice, until I told him. Then, like I said, he was horrified ‘But you’ll be graduating with a huge debt! Right when you’re trying to get started in a career! Why aren’t taxes paying for that? If it’s worth it, you’ll be earning more in a few years, you’d pay it back in taxes later!’
There’s a hell of a lot of either blinkered single issue voters or zero issue voters in the older age brackets- those who just show up and tick the box for ‘their party’ every election, because that’s what they’ve always done. They don’t follow politics, they don’t think about the issues (except maybe pensions) but they still vote. You don’t get so much of that in younger age groups. If they’re not interested, they ignore the whole thing and don’t vote. Yeah, that’s a problem, but a different one.
And yes, a whole bunch of them voted here to keep the foreigns out, because they don’t like having all these Polish people here, (except Basia the home help, she’s a dear, oh, and that nice man at the corner shop, but there’s all those ones in the paper taking all the jobs and benefits and that, and would you like a boiled sweet?).
I mean #notallgrandmas but…
When people vote in their own interests, it is only natural that many older voters will be thinking of the short-term, while many young voters will be thinking of the more distant future. Global warming? A selfish old person will have no interest in future climate, but will want to keep gasoline prices low. Tax cuts? The problems with underfunding the government take a while to manifest themselves, but a taxpayer gets an immediate cash infusion from a tax cut. Schools? The quality of schools is irrelevant to a selfish old person.
Obviously some old people will be concerned about the future, either due to love of their grandkids or due to altruism. And some young people will focus on the near-term. But on average, young voters are more forward-looking than old voters.
For these reasons I would strongly approve of measures that would give younger people a larger effective franchise than older people.
This is totally anecdotal, but in the past two years I’ve observed that no one hates Donald Trump more and more consistently than women from New York in the 55+ age group. Women I know who were totally apolitical before 2016 talk of little else. Women I meet in a waiting room for 10 minutes. Women I meet in an elevator for 2 minutes. Even women whose husbands and adult sons voted for Trump. Even women whose husbands and adult sons work for Trump. We all fucking hate his guts.
I know this really can’t be 100% true, but in the past 3 years I have yet to meet or hear of a single 55+ New York City woman who supports Trump. A friend of mine speculated that this one woman we know, the wife of a pretty fervent Trump supporter , liked Trump. But I found her Facebook page and confirmed that she hates him.
There was that one older bleached blonde I saw at a march defiantly holding a little Trump Pence placard. But I think she was visiting from out of town. I managed to scare the crap out of her by making that “point and shoot” gesture with my hand. It was kind of mean but really funny and she deserved it.
Not really feeling much sympathy for “old folks”. They could stand to be a bit less entitled. We could rub it in a bit more that they destroyed the environment with abandon, racked up staggering deficits. “Pulling up the ladder” indeed.
Voting against public heathcare when you qualify for medicaid seems a really good American example of their complete selfishness. In my country they are campaigning to relax the rules for financial buffers for pensions so they can plunder a bit more. The whole generation is shortsightedness personified. Fuck 'em.
I don’t care if they vote or not. I just want them to stay off my goddam lawn!!
You can add my mother to the list. We hardly ever discuss politics in my family but she said she doesn’t like Trump when I visited her this week.
Young people don’t need a commercial to tell them that old people’s interests aren’t aligned with theirs. They know this from first-hand experience.
Boomers suck in a lot of ways. I don’t think it’s an inherent suckiness, and I don’t think they uniquely or uniformly suck. But many Boomers just don’t get the reality that folks considerably younger than them are dealing with. Like, I have a Boomer friend who once insisted that you can find a nice apartment in a nice part of town for $600/mo. I don’t know what was the basis of this declaration since she hasn’t rented property in over 30 years and she doesn’t even have to pay a mortgage, but I had to “insist” her out of that notion real fast before she started beating her 20-something daughter with it. Boomers collectively are still under the impression that if you do everything right (go to college, study something marketable, make good grades, do internships, etc.), then you will find a good job and won’t need to move back home for an extended period of time, working low-wage jobs. Boomers are still encouraging their kids to follow their passions and do what you love and don’t worry about loans. But many Millennials are ruing the day they swallowed these myths. And they harbor resentment over the fact/perception that these weren’t myths for their parents.
The modern workplace is multigenerational. Millennials, GenX, and Boomers working side-by-side. I’m GenX, so I don’t know how things used to be back in yesteryear. But it seems to me that Boomers, when they were coming up, did not have to compete for jobs with very many 60 and 70 year-olds. And if they did, the competition was limited to management positions. I’ve got a coworker who is 71-years-old. He can never remember how to use Outlook or use an Excel spreadsheet. He spends the majority of his time working crossword puzzles and reminiscing with the other old farts about the “good ole days”. Ask him why he doesn’t retire and he says “I love what I do. Why would I quit?” Meanwhile, he’s the kind of guy who calls Millennials “entitled” because they are upset over the fact they want to buy a house before they turn 30 (just like he was able to do) but they can’t afford to, not with their wages and student loans. “Why didn’t they get a job in college like I did? No one told them to take out loans!” is a common Boomer refrain to the student loan problem. But again, it reveals a certain myopia. 1) The cost of college tuition is so astronomical that the minimum wage job at the university book store isn’t going to cut it and 2) many Boomer parents did a great job pushing their kids into the arms of the Fanny Mae. Now, there are some Boomers who appreciate both of these facts, so they continue to support their post-college grad until things work out for them. But a lot of Boomers are of the “tough love” school, where anyone who boomerangs back to their childhood bedroom must be subjected to daily shaming for being a fuck-up.
Boomers aren’t the only ones who need to sit down somewhere, though. Look at the make-up of the Senate. I don’t have anything against old people, but I really don’t like that the Senate is so skewed towards the assisted living set.
There has never been a time when old people fully understand what young people are going through. If reminding young people of this is enough to motivate them to vote, then I’m all for it. Even if it hurts old people’s fee fees.
They exist - plenty of them. But they seem to fall into a certain group that you may not have much contact with*. They are white, married to white men, come from a lower middle or working class background and are not college-educated.
- I don’t know a single NY woman over 70 who didn’t support Trump at some point. I’m sure that there are some who hate him - I just don’t know any of them.
I’m reasonably sure that none of the Brits to whom I’ve had to explain (currently doing it again) that their laws aren’t the laws of the world, that other countries have other bank account number formats, that other countries have other name formats, and many other pieces of UK-centric idiocy from people supposedly providing international services…
were boomer generation.
Idiocy knows no age.
In the 1931 debate over whether women in Spain should be able to vote, the “nay” was Socialist Victoria Kent, who reckoned that “since women are mainly conservative, they shouldn’t be allowed to vote”. And yes, she was a woman, elected in an election in which she herself wasn’t allowed to vote. Note that one of the arguments from her opponent, liberal Clara Campoamor, was that for over a thousand year women in Spain had voted and none of the places where they did saw hellgates open in the middle of High Street. The brushes I see being used to try and get young people to vote are as big as Kent’s was, and as stupid.
no no, see, Medicare and Soc. Sec. are completely different. You see, all of that money they paid into those systems has been sitting locked away in a vault until their retirement.
So that’s not “socialism,” they’re just getting their money back.
edit: adding /s just in case it’s necessary.
That’s not a problem specific to Boomers, though. I was born at the tail end of the baby boom ( 1963) and my mother was born shortly before it started (1940). She didn’t get the reality that I was dealing with at any point in my adult life - and she was only 22 when I was born. There were a few characteristics that make baby boomers different than the generations that came before and after them- and I think the most important one is the size of that generation. There are enough of them that when some issue is important to them, they are able to elect politicians who will cater to them. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Federal college financial aid programs changed the qualifications when I was halfway through college- just about when most of the Boomers who benefited from those programs started to pay the taxes that funded them.
Jeebus. I don’t know if I’m being whooshed or not but the ageism displayed in this thread is disappointing.
I watched the 2-part Frontline special on “The Facebook Dilemma”, and without knowing much about FB beforehand, came away with the conclusion *this is exactly what is going on here.
*
I experienced this on a very small scale recently. I live in DC, but work in Arlington, Virginia. There is an early voting station near my office that I walk by when I come and go from the building. There are always Democratic Party volunteers out front asking “ have you voted yet?” and try to give out some voting information. But every time I go by, they never ask me if I’ve voted. I’m a white guy in his 50s in the typical office drone uniform and I guess they don’t want to take the chance. I am a Democrat and I have to admit it bugged me every time they ignored me, but I’ll live.