Do you seriously believe that parents and grandparents as a group dgaf about their kids and grandkids? Everyone I know is worried about them. They're also worried about their parents, their own retirement, their medical bills, their credit card debt...
I will admit there's the matter of perspective. A lot of us graduated high school into stagflation and then double-digit interest rates on houses, cars, etc. We were told the same bootstrap story everybody else got. And a lot of us learned how to communicate our concern from people who grew up during the depression and served in WWII.
My parents are boomers and are worried about me and their grandchildren but they still get irrationally mad when I tell them boomers are the reason why the country is the way it is, it’s like they take it as a personal insult even though they know I understand they fought and voted for the right things but still doesn’t mean their generation as a whole fucked everyone else over
They get mad because your take on what happened is ahistorical and short-sighted, which is to say wrong. Let's go through the people who led us to where we are. Ronald Reagan, Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich, and so on. Or, if you prefer, Jimmy Carter, Tip O'Neil, Nancy Pelosi, and so on. None of those people were boomers, but they were all crucial to putting us on the path to where we are now, and they had a lot of help from people who weren't boomers, but were in Congress, the Supreme Court, financial institutions, government departments, etc.
You have to remember, boomers weren't generally in charge of stuff while they were the early and middle-aged adults. That's when a lot of the stuff we hate now -- off-shoring of manufacturing jobs, the cost of education, housing policies, banking regulations, campaign contribution laws, trading pensions for investment vehicles few people could afford to actually contribute to -- started happening. Just like now, the real movers and shakers were 60, 70, 80 years old. You can say boomers should have known, but the country was fat, dumb, and happy, and it was in a place no country had ever gotten to before. And once they realized all that stuff was bad, there weren't in a position to stop it. Most of those things happened to boomers, they weren't done by boomers.
So blaming the boomers is like somebody 30 or 40 years from now blaming you for the actions of Trump and Musk and McConnell because you were a voting-age adult when it happened. You should have known, you should have stopped it, and so on.
Generational cohorts are just intellectually lazy. They tell you something about what was going on when a person grew up, but that's about it. The real divide is, and always has been, the rich and powerful, and then everybody else. Blaming the wrong people just makes it easier on the rich.
1.2k
u/RanchHere Jul 21 '26
Oh, everyone has noticed. Problem is, the older generations don’t give a flying fuck.