You are absolutely correct about greed being the reason that those Boomers gripe about potentially not getting Social Security monies after paying into the system all their working lives. Reducing or eliminating payments is perfectly justified and no objections should be countenanced.
In fact, we could solve even more of our problems with need-testing. Let’s say you’re covered by health insurance and find out that you require an operation. Try this scenario:
Insurance company: "Say, that knee surgery you want approval for? We know you’ve paid many thousands of dollars in premiums over the years, but in checking your salary and personal worth, we find that you can well afford to pay for the surgery yourself. Coverage denied.
Hardly. More like a bunch of old curmudgeons swapping stories. If it makes you feel better, think Grandpa Simpson in the nursing home.
Actually, I think the internet offers a vastly superior source for news than we had back in the day.
Most newspapers supported the war. It wasn’t until Uncle Walter started showing the body bags on the nightly news that the horrors were brought home to your average American.
Numbers were constantly unreported during the height of the Iraq protests.
250,000 people on the streets equalled tens of thousands.
Cameras swooped down on the handful breaking shop windows or setting a police car on fire while ignoring the masses of peace demonstrators.
Oddly enough, I can remember the same thing happening in Berkeley.
Suddenly a police car would get overturned and the cops would have license to break heads.
We most likely did. I was involved with the Oakland VVAW. My boyfriend was an ex-Marine who’d done horrible things incountry, was haunted by nightmares and desperate to atone.
I also campaigned for Bobby Seale for mayor-just another skinny little honky going door to door for Bobby promising a bag of groceries if you registared to vote.
I’ve actually pretty much given up on modern civil obedience.
You get a ‘parade’ permit, you march where you’re told, and you end up in a ‘free’ speech zone miles away from the event that you’re trying to protest.
It’s a nice way to get exercise and see old friends and make you feel like you’re doing something worthwhile and all but it accomplishes shit. Naomi Wolf has an excellent video somewhere on YouTube about the ineffectiveness of government sanctioned protest.
Now, if you want to talk to me about closing I-35 in Austin during rush hour, we can talk.
Agreed. And I don’t want to hear any more crap about how one particular generation screwed it up for everybody, ok?
Well, it would be pretty to think so but we’ve won shit.
The class divide is greater than ever. Climate change is wrecking havoc with the food supply and with our water sources. The commercialization of women is worse than ever. The wars drone on.The corporate take over of government is just about complete. The kids get dumber and the people get poorer and we squabble among urselves. Robert Jensen neatly summarizes what I and many of my friends are feeling today.
We don’t have time for petty squabbling anymore. The clock’s ticking.
But, thanks to that, I’m more committed than ever to getting the hell outta this place before any morphine is involved.
Any other boomers with me? We need a really creative going-away party. Something better than a skydiving party without chutes (ooh, but we could hold hands and make those cool star patterns before we splattered*)
Like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. Give me five bees for a quarter, you’d say. Now where were we? Oh yeah: the important thing was I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones…
Jesus F’ing Christ, is there anything black people have done that boomers won’t take credit for?
As for the Summer of Love, that’s a matter of personal taste. That is, if you have your own personal time machine to go back and experience it. If not, well, thanks for nothing, glad you had a good time.
I think the issue here is simply that people (mostly younger people like myself), despise their parents on many different levels. Why? I don’t know. However, right now it’s at a point where the Boomers are kinda’ like the parents of everything that’s going on to date, so there’s a little more animosity towards them IMO. Sure, they may have done some really weird (even stupid if you will) things, especially during the sixties and the whole free love thing. What they should have done is controlled themselves, at least I can take a few puffs of the green (don’t anymore) and hold my own without wanting to watch anything psychedelic, wear bellbottoms, or strip naked :smack:. That’s because I can control myself, I know what the substance I’m taking will do (I stick to alcohol now, but that’s the worst substance IMO), and I never let it break down my inhibitions, or at least not much anyway. The reason why the sixties were so terrible is because the parents had so many sticks up their asses they couldn’t hardly walk straight. If drugs and sex had merely been more acceptable, the problem would never had occurred. It’s not that drugs and sex weren’t acceptable, it’s just that you weren’t supposed to talk about it, but guess what morons, kids need to talk about it.
I’m actually between Gen X and Y, I’m in my own generation if you ask me, in fact, I think I’ll call it: Gen ‘fuck it’…Bwahahaha
The problem now is, the Boomers are in charge, and even more of a problem is that Gen X knows there just about get control, and they’re losing control in the anticipation, while the Boomers are gripping on harder 'cause they know they’re about to lose it. A power struggle if you will. What they need to do is gracefully hand it off (you know you’ll have to eventually) and give Gen X a sturn warning not to let Gen Y have it till they’re good and ready (another power struggle waiting to happen).
Well, that’s my .02, so now I’ll put my sheild up and take the blows as best I can (cringing and fear…shaking…:eek:)
While I’m Gen X, I feel lucky that my parents were the GI generation. From many friends, I hear tales of infidelity, selfishness, self-indulgence and divorce that ruined many families and scarred a lot of children for life. I can appreciate that some social changes were completely necessary, civil rights, women’s rights, lowering the voting age to 18 and ending the draft. Unfortunately, the blow-back fom many of these changes have led an erosion in workers’ rights, a just economy and our basic freedoms. I think Hillary Clinton supporting the Iraq war and the Patriot act is a damn good metaphor for how far things have deteriorated.
Here I am. Crest of the population boom. More Americans are my age than any other age! I was in the army during Vietnam, and in the streets during Vietnam, and tried to explain to folks that Vietnam started in 1955, when my father served there. No one listened. I remember watching the November Moratorium March, and commenting to a friend, “The revolution is over. We lost. It was on TV.”
Yeah, the boomer generation was mostly wannabes, and ersatz hippies in designer shoes. Turn on, get busted, and cop out was the usual route. The vast majority of my age cohort ended up being the establishment, and jumped in with both feet the first chance they got, while keeping their Grateful Dead tee shirts on their walls at home.
You know what? The vast majority of all humanity is pretty much the same. We had better music, though.
Like you, I’ve never felt any attachment to the stereotypical “boomer” group (summer of love, anti-Vietnam protests, psychedelic drugs etc.) and was a bit surprised to see in this thread that I am, by some definitions, a boomer. When the Gen X concept was known, I thought I could be defined into that group, but that stereotype didn’t fit either.
Oh no you didn’t…OH NO YOU DIDN’T…(paces to and fro)…OH NO YOU DIDN’T!
Don’t get me started on that CRAP! You are responsible for this: sixties songs, I even think one of the guys in the second song is falling asleep, even you all thought it was crap. :smack:
It’s not that the music of the 1960s was necessarily better. The importance of that era is that it brought rock and roll out of the exploitation movies and teenage burger joint jukeboxes into the adult mainstream culture. Young people today can relate to the music of the 1960s far more readily than we could to the music of the the 1920s and 1930s. That’s kind of why we’re basically stuck with it, at least until rock and roll finally dies the true death.
This thread reminded me of the SEVEN beautiful women on my BLOCK who were born in 1954, alone. And a couple more who were pretty cute. There may be disadvantages to being a Boomer, but that ain’t one of 'em.
It was 40 years ago. They moved. Not even their younger sisters, who liked me better, left forwarding addresses after I got married to someone who was not them.
One had a distinctive name and I Googled her. I’m no prize pig, and the years have not been kind to her, either.
I’ll give you that, Spectre of Pithecanthropus (says in British, gentlemanly sounding voice), however, 'till such time as the ‘rock and roll’ has been replaced completely with the new ‘rock and hop’, I will still maintain twinges of pain when one refers to the sorrowful sound that is ‘California Dreaming’.
