The young always think us oldsters are old, even when we aren’t.
When i was young (the ancient days) , I thought anyone over 30 was elderly.
Now that I am over 30, I see teenagers who look like children.
Its ALL in the perspective.
scuse me while I change my depends 
I remember when I was 18 and in first-year university. There was a woman in the class who I thought was hot, but there was an unbridgeable age gap between us: she was so much older than me, that she would never consider me.
She was 24.
Now I am 41 and I’ll look at a 24-year-old woman and think, "Man, she’s cute, but she’s so younggg… It just wouldn’t work… " I remember when I was 24 and people in their forties were basically slightly-younger… parents.
Gotta agree on this, especially from an attraction perspective. When I was a teenager, I was ONLY interested in guys around my age. As I age, my upper ceiling keeps rising. Interestingly enough, my floor age for attraction is still at 18. That’s for physical attraction though, not emotional. Most 18-year-old gay men tend toward the shallow and bland, to the point where they can ruin an entire assignation by opening their mouths and speaking. (This is not meant to paint an entire generation of gay men this way, please note)
But now, it’s like I look at 16 or 17 year-olds working the fast food place and think… “When did they start hiring 12-year-olds at McDonalds?”
I was in line at my local coffee shop Saturday morning. The woman ahead of me was chatting with the server about changing jobs and asked her how old she was.
“I’m 24”
“Oh, I thought you were my age.”
“Oh, how old are you?”
“I’m 28. I’m old.”
At that point she truned around and realized what a wheezing old graybeard was standing behind her. “Oh, sorry.”
If I’d had my wits about me, I would have said, “That’s okay, I’m 27 myself.”
You know, Zoe, this isn’t the first time you’ve accused me of an arrogance that I have not expressed. I don’t think you read the next paragraph of my post:
I really would like to know what your problem is with me.
Hey, I was only a year old when Star Wars came out, and I still saw it in the theaters.
I did read the next paragraph of your post. In it you said that you “didn’t do that to younger people.” Then you went on to describe how you had answered their questions in a straight-forward manner, filling in the information that they did not have. That is to be commended. But to imply that information about the events that happened to the Boomer generation was never made available to you except in a “lording it over you” manner is absurd.
In the first place, what does it mean to “lord it over” someone?
Think how silly I would have sounded to have said:
The time period during which one is born and the events that happen to that generation don’t have anything to do with superiority. It’s the courage and the character that those events nurture on an individual basis that make a difference. (And certainly, my generation had its share of individuals who fell apart.)
Not all Boomers scoffed at you. Not all Boomers felt they were superior. Why would the dance craze or a corrupt President or a rock concert make a diverse group of people think they are superior? Why would you think that they think they are “superior” for those reasons? Don’t project onto us feelings that we don’t have.
I don’t think it was arrogance you were feeling, but you seemed to be resenting an entire generation just for having had life experiences and having talked about them with any relish.
You seemed to be mildly scolding others of your generation in this thread who find it amusing to realize what the younger folks don’t know.
I don’t recall the previous post of mine that you mentioned, so I can’t speak to that particular situation. But in this particular thread, I did not like your generalization, your blindness to how you yourself have learned, your irrational put-down of an entire generation, your seeming assumption, misattribution of language used, and mischaracterization of how I see your post, and your assumption that I have a problem with you as opposed to your post.
This comes to you from a first year Boomer who spent her career answering questions as straight-forwardly as possible and encouraging her students to ask them.
And when one of my students does something dumb, I ask one next to him, “Don’t teenagers just BUG?”
With the freshmen, this gets howls of protest that they’re not annoying and are almost grown up. With the sophomores and juniors, this lets the second kid launch into a fake rant about how kids these days are stupid and no good…
I didn’t say “never”. It’s absurd of you to think that I was implying that.
To constantly make comparisons between the experiences of two different generations, always favoring one’s own. To claim that people younger than yourself “can never understand”. To claim that kids today are being raised without morals, and that one’s own generation had unimpeachable morals. I have heard all that and more.
Well, apparently it didn’t happen to you, but there are people your age who had to hear it chapter and verse from their parents’ generation about war deprivation and other hardships. Guilt trip, because the Boomers had it “so much better”.
Which is what I was saying in my first post to this thread! “Everybody’s every age, eventually, if they live long enough…Knowing something that younger people don’t doesn’t make me old. It makes me someone who was born in 1970. Their taking stuff seriously that I’m not into doesn’t make them whippersnappers. It makes them people who were born in 1988 or whenever.”
Some did scoff, though. Some did act superior. Not you—after all, I don’t know you IRL—but enough of them did to make me wary of them. Don’t tell me I didn’t encounter a mindset that I did encounter.
It didn’t seem to me that they were entirely amused. What I got from the first two pages of this thread was people either getting down on themselves, or devaluing people younger than themselves, neither of which I like to see.
And yes, I realize that at least some of the posts in this thread were meant to have a somewhat lighthearted tone. But I don’t like to see, even in jest, this battle line between “young” and “old”.
I’m generalizing? This is a Pit thread, not a GD thread. Everyone’s just been posting anecdotes.
I said in post #101 that I learned about stuff before my time by asking questions.
I think you’re the one being irrational.
You weren’t there when the incidents I speak of happened. You don’t know what these people said and how they sounded.
Yeah, I knew you’d jump on the phrase “with me”. Whatever. You’re the one flying off the handle, not me, that’s all.
Okay; great. But you’re just one person. I’ve encountered others not like you.
How can they possibly learn the etymology of the word “spam” if they don’t know about MP?!
:smack:
I think people either know Monty Python by heart, or they have no idea, regardless of age/youth/etc – I had to go in and lecture on the day I found out Graham Chapman had died, and mentioned it to my class of upperclassmen, and that I was feeling down about it – general reponse was, ‘Huh? Who?’
Yet in the later afternoon class mainly of freshmen, was the resident keeper of the Monty Python grail who quoted the show constantly (and frequently incorrectly) – and I once overheard him say to one of his fellow classmates, ‘Oh, she’s probably too old to know who they are.’ Meaning me!
So, lessee…this would have been 1989 when I was 24.
Rilchiam, the “misattribution of language used” was poorly phrased. I was referring to something that you claimed that I had said. But since we have both mistakenly done that now, we’re even.
Thanks for admitting that not all of the Boomers are as brash as what you described. I’m sorry that enough have been to put you off and make you wary.
Oh, I had to hear it all right. My father never really emotionally survived the Great Depression. I think he was always afraid that there would never be enough to be safe. The damage that it did to him bothered me, but knowing about their experiences made me grateful. I knew we had it better and I think my friends did too. There was no reason to feel guilt.
(I usually don’t buy into other people’s guilt trips anyway. The emotions that I feel are ones that I have to accept responsibility for. No one “makes” me feel anything – even though I may use that phrase from time to time.)
It is hard to imagine Boomers claiming to have unimpeachable morals. But I will take your word for it. I guess some in every generation say that “kids today are being raised without morals.” (I know that Socrates complained about the manners of the younger generation.) But I reather like what I see in the young people I know. (I have three teenage grandchildren with lots of friends.)
I disagree with you on one thing. People who don’t experience what we do can never fully understand what “it” was like. The same is true for you. There will be those after you who won’t remember the collapse of the WTC and they will never have a sense of what that day was like to live through. You and I can never fully understand what it was like to live in Ireland during the potato famine – no matter how much we read. You know what I mean. Sometimes it’s not an insult to say to someone, “You really can’t understand.”
Thanks for hearing me out. Have we left anything unresolved? Keep on questioning! (And answering!)
Its “Pfister Faucet”, children, and I took a date to the premier of “Its a Mad, Mad, Mad World” in Cinerama.
Your making my joints hurt…
Wait until you’ve heard “Hey Jude” for the eleven millionth time in an elevator. I’m sure you’ll decide, like me. that John Lennon got off too damn easy…
Okay then!
Well, thanks for believing me!
Well, my experience doesn’t quite parallel with those of most people my age. My parents were not Boomers, and neither were Mr. Rilch’s. Our parents were teenagers during WWII, and reached adulthood in the '50s. I believe that’s called the Lost Generation? So their Depression stories are about what their parents and older relatives did to survive; their WWII stories are about scrap drives and watching newsreels. I wasn’t made to feel guilt either, but I know that the phenomenon existed*.
I got a lot of that from teachers. We weren’t “involved” like they were. It would never occur to us to take over the dean’s office. Why were we watching MTV, instead of protesting about apartheid or calling for Ollie North’s head on a platter? And so on and so forth.
Fair enough. But ISTM that, after enough time has passed for the event’s historical impact to be measured, that it is possible for someone who wasn’t there to at least appreciate what it means in the grand scheme of things. What interests me most about the '60s is the transition period between 11/22/63 and the summer of '67. (Which we’ve been over before.) What I hope to get future generation interested in is the aftermath of 9/11, and the changes it brought.
Neither of us were around during the Civil War, but I’ve seen movies and documentaries; I’ve been to Gettysburg and seen the re-enactments; I’ve visited Appomatox Court House. I admit that I’ll never fully understand what it was like to hear the news, when it was news, that the Southern Army had surrendered. But I could look at Little Round Top and think, “The tide of the war turned there. The fate of the whole country was decided on that mound,” and feel the impact. I could stand in the courthouse and picture General Lee and General Grant meeting again, years after they’d known each other at West Point, and tear up when the guide said, “And General Grant let the Southern Army keep their swords.”
I understand what you’re saying. But I resent what others have implied, or even stated outright, that because I wasn’t there for a historical event, that it can’t mean anything to me.
And some things I’m not sorry to have missed. Now, I love the Beatles, but I’ve seen footage of teenage girls, crying and hysterical after a concert, in such a state that you’d think…well, that they had just seen the towers collapse! It scared the living shit out of me. I’m glad that there’s no longer any one group that holds sway over an entire nation like that; I’m glad that teenagers are more “ironic”, for lack of a better term. When I was 21 and someone told me that my generation couldn’t possibly feel the same way about Nirvana that theirs did about the Beatles, my response was “Good.”
I think that’s it. Thanks for answering!
*One exception. When I was 15, my mom announced, “I’m going to get figure skates for Rilchie.” My dad started grumbling about when he was 15, and my mom snapped, “When you were 15, there was a WAR! There were no skates in the shops; you had to make do with the ones that strapped on!”
That’s going to be your baby to rock. I’m retired! Maybe you will become a teacher. You obviously have a sense of history.
You’ve just taught me two things that I did not know already.
I understand what you’re saying. But I resent what others have implied, or even stated outright, that because I wasn’t there for a historical event, that it can’t mean anything to me.
Yes, those people are wrong. If you have a chance, go to the bridge that is off to the side about halfway between Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts. That’s where the American Revolution began. It is very moving and not very far from where Thoreau wrote Walden and Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women. And there’s much, much more. There is even a museum that has one of the lanterns that Paul Revere had in the Old North Church. It is thrilling!
“The Lost Generation” was Gertrude Stein’s name for those who were in their flaming youth or prime during the 1920’s. Some refer to the generation between the G.I. Generation and the Boomers as “The Silent Generation.” I haven’t looked it up, but I think the approximate dates would be those born from about 1922-1942.
I can remember strap on skates! We had skate keys to tighten them to fit our shoes.
I’m glad that we could reach an understanding. You and I are more alike than we are different, I think.
Pax
Nah, I’m a writer. (Hopefully soon to be published.) I’ve got what I think is a pretty good 9/11 reference in my book. I’d love to have my characters react to Gulf War 2.0, but that’s too touchy a subject right now.
::
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Have to check that out, then!
D’oh! You’re right; it is the Silent Generation.
He also had a Little Orphan Annie decoder ring. Still does, in fact; I made him put it in the safety-deposit box. And my mom keeps saying that she thinks there are some Movie Night Dishes in storage, but I haven’t been able to find them.
Okay then! Pax.
Except that’s Paul there both with the writing and the singing.
I must be older than Methuselah. I remember it going up.