We oldsters, 60 somethings, who came of age in the 1960’s and 1970’s, were the children of the baby boom. We “turned on, tuned in and dropped out”, we said “Hell no we won’t go!” to Vietnam, we were the flower children, we voted for George McGovern, we fought for civil rights and the environment, we were the generation that got women out of he kitchen etc. etc. etc. Now the youngsters, college students and 20 somethings, feel that we are the barriers to all social progress with our outdated ideas and prejudices.
Back then we knew everything! We were going to change the world! We had all the answers! (sound familiar?)
Now we are dismissed as reactionary conservatives.
I guess we grew up.
I am reminded of the Billy Joel song : “We Didn’t Start the Fire” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g
We didn’t start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world’s been turning
We didn’t start the fire
No we didn’t light it
But we tried to fight it
It’s interesting to be older now and read things like this. And I’m seeing more and more anti-boomer sentiments lately like “get rid of them so we can have their jobs” and “they’re not needed any more”.
Total lack of respect for their elders, I tell ya.
When my 18 year old argues politics, she gives the answer of an 18 year old. Of COURSE minimum wage should be $15/hr. Why? Because then people could pay for more things. Well, if Disney had to pay you $15/hr, they’d either cut your hours or cut the number of employees, or raise ticket and food prices. Oh.
I think a lot of people become more fiscally conservative once they see their first paychecks and tax returns.
I feel like the oldsters who are at home a lot watching the news who are angry and anxious and well frankly not well informed. I am amazed at the sweet cookie baking grandmas who I have seen spout some serious hate on FB.
Although I am not for taking anyone’s rights away -at times I feel like the world will be different when this generation dies off. But maybe not. Maybe the cycle just starts over like the song says.
I think the minimum wage is way too low. I think it should also be pegged to the cost of living - probably on a county wide basis. My son just got back from a summer in Wisconsin and he couldn’t believe how much less basic groceries like meat and milk cost there.
Economics is one course I’d always meant to take, but it always conflicted with something else - usually required courses in my major. That said, I’ve read conflicting educated opinions about raising the minimum wage - so I don’t think “take an economics course” is going to solve that one.
I should say that now at almost 50 -I fell more removed from my elders than I did at 20. I think I perceived the elderly as uninvolved then. Just kind of benign. Now I look at them in a different light.
@TomSrOfBoston - Joel Stein, the author of the column you linked to, is a humor columnist. It even says so at the top. I don’t particularly find him all that funny, but that’s besides the point - his columns are always tongue in cheek, but not as obviously satirical as, say, Andy Borowitz or The Onion. My point is - this is not a “real” editorial in TIME, but one intended as humorous. So I would advise against taking it as any representation of “what young people think of old people.”
If we could only tweak the “circle of life” so that “youngsters” would adopt our wisdom and we could keep our younger bodies (particularly the eyesight and waistline parts). I think I’m very open minded, but my children would probably only rate me moderate. That’s better than how they view their dad though :))
@Pizzagirl I fully realize that article was written tongue in cheek. But it does represent an underlying attitude among the younger generation that oldsters are a barrier to social progress.
Those in the younger generation that I know would never describe me or my H, or any of our friends, frankly, like that. I actually don’t know any reactionary conservatives whom I associate with these days. I have a few FB friends, people I went to high school with, who fit that bill but they all live in the U.S. Maybe that’s the connection!
Seriously, though, my Ds and their friends know what their parents, and grandparents, have done and continue to do re: social justice type issues, e.g., gay marriage, gay adoption, pay equity, volunteer work as a part of everyone’s lives, giving back when you are one of the fortunate, donating to charity, etc.
I am on my sorority’s house corp board, so a bunch of fifty and sixty something women. We were working with the chapter president on a certain policy, which was written in a very heteronormative fashion. The president brought this up in a manner which suggested that she thought we were going to mumble that we didn’t have lesbians in the house in OUR day, What has happened to the youth of America, etc. We all just kind of went - oh, that’s a great point, we agree totally with you, and here’s some thoughts on how to present this to the national board. it was very matter-of-fact. You could tell she was taken aback because she expected us Old Ladies to object, but we all kind of shrugged our shoulders because the presence of students in same sex relationships was no big deal.
Those are my circles. Few people in my circles are reactionary social conservatives.
I think the article itself was tongue in cheek, pointing out the very human foibles. The cry of the 60’s generation was don’t trust anyone over 30, after all lol…now that that generation is well into their 60’s and 70’s, it points out we forget we all will get old:). What is really funny is when I hear people my age (I am in my early 50’s) and older, complaining about younger people, the Millenials and so forth, with a whole list of bad things, all they want to do is text on their phones, hook up on tindr and so forth, are lazy, don’t want to work… meanwhile, our generation was one supposedly raised by tv, who would become violent thugs because of violence on tv (and cartoons! Ever see some of the clips from the anti tv crowd of then, testifying, we all were going to become mass murderers because we saw the Road Runner dropping an anvil on Wile E Coyote…and the obvious thing there is forgetting we were once young, too:).
If a low low wage country like China has a large percentage of factory workers being replaced with robots and McDonalds wants to use robots in diners, most jobs will start being at risk.
If you take the article seriously, then you have to be careful about older people and which ones are seen as being reactionary and so forth. Despite what people think, in the boomer generation (that I may or may not be part of, at least my dad was a WWII vet:) there was a split. Most of the kids protesting and such were kids who were from relatively well educated backgrounds and many of them were college students (or later went to college), but there were a lot of kids from blue collar backgrounds, rural kids and generally among those who had a high school education or less, who weren’t part of the hippy/flower power generation (and I am not saying all college educated kids were hippy dippy or socially liberal, any more than all blue collar kids were conservative, these are generalities).
The demographics of the angry, older white voter if you look at polls of people’s attitudes are the older people who are less educated, more rural, etc, it isn’t like all old people are reactionaries wanting to bring back the old days, it is a portion of older people who meet this characteristic. And even though the baby boomer generation had a much higher level of education than the prior generations, there still were a lot of people in that demographic who weren’t that highly educated, we talk about how bad our education system is yet educational attainment among the millenials (or any post the boom) is on the whole higher than the boomer generations and going back, lot less people not getting a high school diploma, lot more kids who went to college and/or graduated, lot more advanced degrees.
And polls clearly show this divide, with social issues there is a steep divide between those let’s say over 50, those between 35 and 50, and those before 35. Some of that is age (younger people tend to be more liberal), but a lot of it I suspect is education and exposure to more things. The other thing to be careful of is conflating different elements of being conservative, for example, from what I have read and personal experience, young people under 35 find the whole social conservative position, with things like gays, abortion and sex, to be distasteful, yet many of them economically are moderate to even conservative. A lot of the perceptions of older people is based around the social issues,though (there are a lot of older people who are socially arch conservative, who economically might be more ‘liberal’ than the kids are), and when they say “holding us back” it is around the furor over social issues that I suspect is the cause.
