Redirection

Monday, February 6, 2023

Should We Blame Boomers For Everything?

Sometimes I do wonder why I keep visiting Gab. It's the home of all negativity in the right wing sphere and some folks are downright hateful, while others come across more as retarded. (Not everything is about Covid, the vaxx, or what rhymes with shoes). 

A favourite pastime for many is boomer-bashing. Now we have had this discussion on this blog before and while some concerns of the younger generations are valid, it's quite simplistic to single out Boomers as the sum of all evil. 

Boomers, at least, in my country lived in unique circumstances when there was high upward mobility, booming post-war economy, cheap credit and an opportunity to make a career without any significant credentials. They didn't create this situation but they did profit from it. That period was quite short, btw, it lasted like about a decade and then it gradually started changing.

Imo, it was hardly their fault but a lucky coincidence. The norm during most of the Western history was downward mobility, not otherwise. Society was very class conscious so that it was very difficult to get a decent job for someone from lower classes even when they had an education. When you read old books and watch old shows you learn that most people didn't own their house. Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, e.g. are renting in the first several seasons. 

Somehow I'm especially irritated by the complaints of those who state that previous generations had an easy comfortable life on one income while now the wife has to work. It's true that most married women didn't work but their life was very far from luxurious. No 2nd car (for many families here in Europe not even one car), no expensive vacations. There are discussions online about life in Britain in the 1950s and those families ate meat like once a week because it was expensive and the only milk their kids drank was from a school program.

My husband's grandparents raised 6 kids in a house which is now sold as one "for beginners", supposedly 1 or 2 people. They had to rent a washing machine to do their laundry. His other set of grandparents had a 2 bedroom house and their only 2 living kids (the others died from childhood diseases as there were no vaccines) shared one bedroom though they were a boy and a girl, all the way till they became adults and got married.

Nowadays folks buy a house with 7 bedrooms for a family of 4, go abroad to luxury hotels 3-4 times a year and then have the cheek to complain that the wife has to work. No sh8t, Sherlock! Oh yes, and their wives didn't have any study debts because they usually had no education and started working at 16. Middle class girls wouldn't work before marriage at all (class difference!) but usually married right after high school, too.

If Boomers are guilty of something then it is raising a generation of greedy entitled brats who value material wealth above all things. They did have MSM and government help with it though, so I'm not sure we could squarely blame them even for that. Thoughts?

 

5 comments:

  1. Every generation inherits the problems the previous generation created while trying to fix the problems the previous generation created. To put it on a victim-scope: everyone is a victim of a victim. Now that being said let's not forget an old-fashioned word ''responsibility''. You cannot become responsible if you are not given responsibilities. In other words too much of an easy life may not be the best way to raise a child (or a generation). Fortunately, life has it's own methods of correcting itself as the wheel keeps turning.

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  2. Yeah, that's true, next post should be titled "Millennials, the most coddled generation:)". Though those who come after them will probably be even worse...

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  3. BTW, on the subject of working wives I should add that in the past men worked 50-60 hours a week and had no "work-life balance" while Millennial so-called men have a burnout while trying to work 36 hours a week.

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  4. The thing that really breeds the hatred is not that they got lucky, although that is true for some. But rather the generations lack of understanding of how good they had it and that things have changed. I have noticed that they tend to think that things are exactly as they were when they were young, race relations, women, immigration, jobs, house prices, the list goes on. But for better or worse things have changed and they have changed quite a bit. Which then leads to a situation whereby they cannot understand the issues confronting the younger generations. I do not find this to be true of other generations..

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  5. Well some of them do come across as quite thick, but could it be an American phenomenon? Because those older people I personally know do little else but complain about how their country got ruined by immigration, how difficult it is for everyone and how the government s*cks:) They are quite feminist though.

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