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Showing posts with label GenX. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GenX. Show all posts

13.12.16

The Boomers Fizzle

In pondering the world as it is and the direction of things, it occurred to me that Trump's election represents the ultimate failure of the Baby Boomers, since it is unlikely that the political pendulum will swing back as far to the Liberal agenda before that generation fades away.

For those unfamiliar with who and what the Baby Boomers are, they are a large demographic bubble from roughly 1946 to 1964, where there was a marked increase in birth rates following World War 2.  While the Baby Boom occurred worldwide, the term Baby Boomer refers specifically to the generation in the US.  Not only was the generation marked by numbers, but due to post-war economic boom in the US, these people grew up with an unprecedented level of wealth and affluence, and as a group, rejected much of the cultural heritage they had received.

The Baby Boomers were responsible for the explosion of the music industry, relaxation of sexual mores and a general sense of wanting to force the world to accept their sensibilities.  They eventually developed a pervasive sense of entitlement that has informed most of American cultural development in the past 50 years.

To put it clearly and succinctly, the Boomers are a bunch of spoiled brats that never had a consistent rudder in the ocean of Time.  To top things off, their grandchildren are the current Millennials who have recently shown themselves to be devoid of the ability to accept reality with any grace and dignity.

The Boomers were largely responsible for New York and California becoming the cultural centers of the US, if culture it can be called.  The decades' long dominance of liberalism in the media  and arts have largely been centered around those two states, and in the recent national election, they represent almost the last remaining strong-holds of the Boomer Agenda.

As the generation withers and dies, it is watching its life-long efforts fade with it.  Beginning with Trump and filtering down to dog catchers, the Conservative Wave nearly drowned the country and left the vast majority of state and national political bodies in the hands of the so-called Conservative party - the Republicans.  It is rather sad to see such a huge demographic group live long enough to see their legacy completely rejected and the beginning of the dismantling of the Boomer Agenda with the likely appointment of conservative justices to the Supreme Court, which will last well into the next decade if not longer.

The Boomer Agenda started will enough.  The basic idea was to just leave people alone and let them pursue happiness in whatever form they choose, so long as that pursuit did not damage others - in other words fairly libertarian.  Over the decades, though, it became more and more militant, with Liberal ideals literally being shoved down people's throats, with things such as gay marriage and gender-neutral bathrooms.  Rather than leaving such things up to the States, where those decisions rightly belonged, the Liberals forced the entire country to accept their sensibilities under the guise of being "diverse" and "inclusive, obviously forgetting that diversity and inclusiveness meant accepting people who didn't want those things on an equal footing.

This is a hallmark of the Boomer generation.  It wasn't enough that they believed certain things, they had to ram it into every conversation and public forum, so convinced were they that their agenda was correct.  In other words, they were the classic spoiled children that could never be placated.  Every step in their direction brought even louder coercion to take two more steps, usually at the point of a gun and/or risk of imprisonment - e.g. using governmental powers.

Now that senility, old age and death have narrowed their ranks a good bit, the backlash has begun.  The Generation Xers, Boomer kids, are in power now, and like all children, are rebelling against their parents.  Behind them are the Millennials, who like all grandchildren, tend to swing back to the grandparents' ideals - due in large part to the artificial bilateral spectrum.  The Millennials, however, are suffering from the policies of their grandparents.  They are unable to form coherent arguments, are crippled by uncontrolled emotions and have an unshakable belief that they are entitled to get their way.

There is plenty of blame to go around, from social manipulation through the legal system, to absentee parenting on the part of both Boomers and GenXers.  This fouled up situation is echoed by and strengthened by China's Lost Generation, which is another entire article that presents a very similar problem caused by Maoist social manipulation.  In both cases, a lack of formal, traditional education coupled with social laxity and a break with long-held tradition has resulted in barely controlled chaos that will echo for years to come.

Now aging and increasingly demanding once again, the Boomers are reaping what they sowed.  They are finding themselves isolated and disposed of, as their celebrated youth wanes away.  The short-sightedness of the Me Generation is haunting their old age.  Their lack of real vision and use of coersion to get their way has now suddenly reversed as their children move to undo everything their parents did.  Sound familiar, Boomers?

Unfortunately, their grandchildren, the Millennials, will come into power in about a decade or so, and a completely rudderless generation, products of their grandparents' meddling and uneducated attempts to "reform" culture and society, will once again resurface.  The only hope is if GenXers are able to repair the education system in time to instill some sense into their grandchildren, who will inherit the mess the Millennials are sure to make.

The Great Cycle comes around full of echoes of days gone by.  Hope for a return to sanity seems slim, at best, because the Boomers have done such a fine job of destroying all connections to the past in their headlong rush to create a Utopian future that will never come.

The Boomers are also the first generation to dismiss responsibility en masse for their actions.  This one decision is now the Bogeyman they face in their waning years.  Having cast away their past, they are now cast away by the future.  There is a certain justice in this.

9.12.12

Boomers Fall Down Go Boom



The 60s...all we needed was love.  Everything that had come before was wrong and we were going to set it right.  We revolted against the old order: the manners, the consumerism, the individualism.  Our parents had soiled the Earth with their greed, and it was up to us to set things right.

Our music was subversive.  We met in dark underground caverns to listen to the poet/warriors.  We found power in our numbers and fought against war.  We used drugs to expand our minds and explore new frontiers of Self.  We tried to tear down the System from the outside in.

We had a better way.  We would share the Earth and live in peace, and everyone would be happy because there would be no want.  We knew better than all of human history how to set things right, so we needed no rules.  We couldn't trust anyone over 30 because they WERE the problem.  We had our Weathermen to tell us which way the wind was blowing.



The 70s...we became mainstream and thought it was pretty cool.  Our music became money factories.  Our caverns became discos.  Our mod style became leisure suits and free love became free sex.

We tarted up a bit with our cultural leaders wearing make-up and costumes.  Glam and glitz replaced poor and grit, and we got lost in the power of our collective consumption.  Drugs were no longer mind-expanding but recreational.  We had stopped a war and to congratulate ourselves, we became intensely self-centered, admiring ourselves with a narcissistic orgy.



The 80s...we were passing 30 and starting families of our own, but we were still enamored of our selves.  We didn't want the responsibilities of adulthood, but we couldn't figure out a way around them.

Instead, we decided that we could fight the System better from inside.  We threw ourselves into corporate take-overs and high finance.  We used our numbers to lobby for deregulation so that we could amass the wealth we thought we needed to change the world.  We became the captains of industry we despised just years before, but it was OK because we had our ideals and goals.

But we got lost in the hype.  We liked the wealth and the power, and instead of stopping wars, we started them.  Small at first: Haiti, Panama.  We were drunk on the power we had taken control of and used it for our own advantages.

We realized that the drugs we once used to expand our minds, then used to enhance our pleasure, were now a commodity.  And if they were illegal, they brought in a lot more money.  So we created a war on drugs, and while we were at it, a war on poverty and a war on anything else we could find.  The anti-war generation had become the biggest war-mongers in history.

But it was OK, because we were who we were and we were special.  If we acted the same or worse than our parents, then it was all for a good cause.  We needed to do these things in order to fix the System we had once reviled.  And if we made a little money long the way, all the better.

Of course, while we were in , rather than this convulsion of greed and avarice, we forgot that we had spawned another generation.



By the 90s...our kids were coming into their own, and they weren't so optimistic.  They gave up.  They looked at what we had done and concluded that there was no hope to change anything.  Instead, they withdrew into a virtual world, one far more consuming and addictive than any of the drugs we played with.  They didn't care what the future held because we had already consumed it, and the futures of their children, while we were at it.

In our orgy of self-regard and congratulations, we had done far worse damage to the world than any of the generations before us.  We had become a plague of locusts on the face of the planet that we had once proclaimed so important.  Oh sure, we cleaned up the rivers, but we fouled the DNA.  We stopped littering, but started pumping noxious chemicals into ourselves.

We spawned an industry of youth in which we competed directly with our children for the same attention, rather than maturing gracefully and leaving our childhood behind.  We were the most spoiled generation in history and the world has suffered from it.  Dr. Spock had raised us and an army of psychologists and social workers had cajoled us, and we thought the sun shone out our tail ends.

Our ecology movements became big business.  Greenpeace, WWF and global warming were now sticks with which to beat money out of people, not to achieve anything, but to assuage our consciences that we were still living up to our ideals.  And anyone who disagreed became a target of war by the anti-war generation.

And now Dweezle and Moonbeam have kids and that generation has not only given up, they are rightfully pissed off.  They will pay dearly for our narcissism and insincerity.  They will bear the burden of our complete lack of integrity and intense self-admiration.

They are rightfully pissed because we spent their inheritance, corrupted their society, and trashed their Earth.  There are no frontiers for them that we haven't already trampled and befouled.  We had the party and they have to clean up for the rest of their lives.

Even now, as we stand in the ruins of our greed, losing our McMansions and sucking up medical resources to fight our sagging faces, we still have the gall to demand that the world owes us something more.  We want more taxes, more resources, more of everyone else's productivity to protect us from ourselves.  We are the privileged and the pampered.  We are the best and brightest.  Our self-esteem has become a ravenous beast devouring the world to feed it.

Is it any wonder our children are expanding euthanasia.  They want us gone before we pull down the last vestiges of civilization with our idealism.

They Rage Against the Machine, and we are the Machine.