I'm thinking of composing a post about how baby boomers didn't have it so good.

[raccoon]

Not all of them, anyway. How they don't ALL have a sense of entitlement, as the dipshit simplistic MSM would have you believe, how they weren't all spoiled with lots and lots of material things, etc.

It's adding insult to injury to tell someone who didn't have it nearly as good as SOME people from other generations that they did have it good, they're spoiled, etc.

I don't care if this post or my proposed OP sounds like a rant; if you were in my shoes, you'd be ranting yourself.

[femmocrat]

1. It is impossible to generalize about an entire generation.

This is the generation who had to go to Viet Nam and who bore the brunt of the economic turndowns of the 1980s.

While many did have an idyllic childhood, we grew up fast and had our own difficult times.

[htuttle]

10. True

For example, some Gen-X'ers put on suits and went to Wall Street. Others got mohawks and went to Sex Pistols concerts.

[juno jones]

33. Xers are a little young for Sex Pistols.

Lord knows we were told by the time we got old enough for such things that punk was dead due to the death of Sid Vicious etc.

We're more Black Flag. And we invented grunge. The real stuff, not the radio edit. It came out of not wanting to put on suits and be brainwashed into MBA's.

As for the ones who put on suits, they were asshole Reagan cultists anyway. Thanks MSM for turning that old fuck into a hero for youth.

The 80's were a wasteland. However, I'm not sure the recent decade was any better.

[htuttle]

42. I guess I forget that I'm from that in-between generation

I was born in '63. I think they are calling us 'Generation Jones' now. They used to call us boomers, but seeing as I was only 5 years old during Woodstock, I never saw myself as a boomer. I was listening to the Pistols in High School, not the Beatles.

And actually, all of the Sex Pistols were old enough to be boomers, weren't they? :shrug:

[juno jones]

52. '63 here too.

I always called us the 'blank generation', ala Richard Hell, as we seem to take on the taste of whatever is closest in the pot. I too listened to Sex Pistols in HS (Might have been the only one in my school who did :) ) but was still too young(and isolated) to see their one tour. Most of the original punkers were born circa '55-'58, so yeah they were boomers.

Generational divisions are great from a bird's eye view approach of history, but on the ground, it all gets a little muddled. I had 'greatest' gen parents, was (barely) old enough to remember boomer hippies (and agree with their anti-war, iconoclastic stance) and experienced the ennui that is the hallmark of gen X.

:fistbump: Here's to not belonging in any easily defined cubbyhole of thought...

[Stinky The Clown]

49. "It is impossible to generalize about an entire generation."

And yet so many try.

With Boomers often the target.

[roguevalley]

50. my parents worked like slaves to care for four kids and we were

dirt licking poor. It was tough. It was hard. I wouldn't change a day. I remember when a nickel meant the difference between eating and not.

[xchrom]

2. I'm a proud boomer -- people don't like it can kiss

My 'entitled' ass.

[Tansy_Gold]

3. Well, taking pride in something you had nothing to do with is a little extreme, but

it's true that not all of us lived a privileged life or expect to have anything handed to us on a silver platter.

Generalizations are generally (sic) dumb.



Tansy Gold, who is not dumb.

[Common Sense Party]

5. Me encanta tu sigline de Machado.

[Tansy_Gold]

34. Ah ¡muchas gracias!

Es algo que recuerdo de mis días en la escuela secondaria, hace más que 40 años.


(For those who wonder -- the sigline quote is something I've remembered since high school Spanish, more than 40 years ago. "The eye that you see is not an eye because you see it; it is an eye because it sees you.")


Tansy Gold

[Common Sense Party]

37. I've got a book of Machado poetry around here somewhere.

He had a great turn of phrase. Almost makes me miss my Spanish major college days.

[Tansy_Gold]

43. You reminded me. I have Soledades, purchased in 1969

when I was in Spain. It's been a very long time since I read it, and I'm not sure my Spanish is quite up to it these days.

I, too, was a Spanish major, briefly, but I have few fond memories of those days.

And I still have the textbook we used in Spanish III and IV in high school, complete with Peanuts cartoons ("Carlitos").


Tansy Gold, remembering. . . .

[xchrom]

11. I didn't have anything to do with being man or gay

Or an only child or adopted ... Yet I find
I'm proud of being all those.

Shrug -- your mileage may vary.

[Tansy_Gold]

44. If pride is the opposite of shame, then of course I have no problem with it,

because certainly none of us should be ashamed of the way we were born or any of the other circumstances of our existence that are beyond our control.

But rather like those who go around with the "proud to be an American" bumper stickers, I almost sometimes wonder if that kind of exaggerated "pride" implies that those who are not (choose the group) are expected to be ashamed of themselves and envious of the (chosen ones).

But that's just me.



TG

[slackmaster]

4. People can't choose the timing or circumstances of their birth

[madmom]

6. Another boomer here who was/is many things, but privileged was not one of them!

[elleng]

7. IMO its our CHILDREN who are spoiled, if any one generation.

we observed our parents working hard, and followed that ethic when we could.

[fizzgig]

38. but who's fault is that?

who raised these spoiled brats?

i watched my boomer parents work hard and follow their work ethic, but they also actively taught me that i am not owed shit and have to work to get what i want.

[Orrex]

8. One thing I remember from my Gen-X youth

Back in '82 or '83, my sixth-grade class had a science class about "Environmental Crises," in which the teachers enumerated a bunch of problems ranging from "population/food crisis" to "vanishing species" to "greenhouse effect." In retrospect, it was a pretty progressive topic back in those days.

However, throughout the discussion, the Baby Boomer teachers kept saying "and your generation will have to work to solve these crises."

I remember wondering why they were passing the buck, and I resented it pretty acutely even at that young age. I mean, if they can identify all of these problems, then why the hell don't they do something about it? After all, they're the ones in power, right?


Of course, it wasn't until some years later that I realized that "they" had been handed a big plateful of problems by the generation that preceded them, just as we Gen-Xers will hand it all off to our successors.


If there's anything left to hand off...

[Frosty1]

29. The reason they knew they couldn't solve those problems

in the 80's was because the republicans were in charge!

[Orrex]

39. That's a very reasonable suggestion and, sadly...

the influence of those poisonous Reagan years clearly reaches into the present, since we still can't discuss any of those "environmental crises" today without first having to wade upstream against a torrent of Conservative "corporations first" bullshit.

[hlthe2b]

9. There are so many differences among boomers....

especially among those born during the early, mid, and lateest years of the period, that the generalizations made are ridiculous.

[Warpy]

12. We older boomers were lauded as the first generation

to grow up without hunger as a common fact of life. That really was true for most of us. While our parents might have been poor in material things, they always managed to get something onto the table three times a day, something their parents hadn't been able to manage.

So in that way, I suppose we were spoiled. So are Gen X and Y.

However, liberals went out of power in 1969 and we older boomers have taken every economic dislocation full force. We saw the greatest decline in men's wages this country had ever seen and that flood of women into the workplace wasn't exactly voluntary. We had to work twice as hard to get half of what our parents did under the New Deal and most of us are facing a bleak retirement, if we can retire at all.

I think nearly every generation that comes along blames their elders for the world they are stuck with and blames the younger generation for being spoiled and not understanding how hard their parents had to work to spoil them.

However, few of us are consulted when it comes to determining how the world works and none of us controls the circumstances of our birth.

The simpleminded MSM has a great stake in keeping generations separated and at war. It makes great copy and anger sells papers and advertising slots. In addition, a lot of older boomers did challenge the established class order and corporate structure and they'll just never be able to forgive us for that.

This is what infuriates me so much about boomer bashing posts, the fact that some fools actually buy the notion that one generation oppresses another when it's the class structure in this country that does the oppression.

Part of growing up is recognizing who your enemies really are. Hint: it's not Mom and Dad or any of their friends.

[raccoon]

13. Great post. This bears repeating:

"However, few of us are consulted when it comes to determining how the world works"

[mistertrickster]

18. It's the class structure that does the oppression. CORRECT!

Just because Marx was used to create totalitarian states in the old USSR and China doesn't mean his economic analysis is not true in an important respect.

Capitalism is built on paying workers less than the wealth they produce. The excess wealth goes to "capital." Sometimes that works pretty well, like in the 50's when increases in productivity were spread evenly throughout society. It hasn't worked well since Reagan & Co. deliberately declared class war on labor.

[janet118]

20. Right on, warpy!!!

;-)

I, too, am sick and tired about listening to boomer bashers. Heck, if the older generations had listened to what boomers were saying about the environment, the distribution of wealth, cooperative living, military spending and "small planet" nutrition we'd be a stronger, healthier and more independent nation today. The so-called "greatest" generation benefited from Roosevelt and Truman's massive programs that created a strong middle class. Yet they were the most vocal critics of Johnson's civil rights and war on poverty programs. I agree with Warpy. Boomers didn't grow up hungry but they weren't spoiled either. It's time to end this generational war and look to corporations and the people who run them as the real enemy of the middle class and democracy.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

27. Yes, Warpy, it frosts me when younger people accept the media characerization of boomers

Here's one boomer who

1. Grew up as a preacher's kid in a family that sometimes ran out of food at the end of the month and had to subsist on Bisquick pancakes and peanut butter sandwiches for a couple of days

2. Never had fashionable clothes in high school

3. Went through college and graduate school on a combination of scholarships and work

4. Was never a hippie or a yuppie

5. Spent three years temping and teaching part time while my generation was supposedly sipping white wine and munching on brie in loft apartments and talking about their stock options.

6. Had exactly two full-time jobs before deciding that my academic career was at a dead end (besides which, I hated what had happened when the bean counters took over academia) and it was time to go free-lance

7. Never owned a house or a new car

8. Is being hemmed in by rising health care costs and downward pressure on prices in my field

9. Never, ever voted for Reagan or any other Republican except Mark Hatfield (whom I appreciate for his opposition to Reagan's war in Central America and commitment to mass transit)

[Frosty1]

32. Every generation blames the one before

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GTYVa6baKQ

[blues90]

35. You're right , it is the class structure.

This also involves what part of the US you were born in and even what part of each state.

Parents were not the enemy. For the most part parents do try to offer their children something a bit better than they had , children may not realize this at the time. The parents depending on the class status had a certain understanding from their past, ie , their own tools they knew about.

My parents were born in 1917. Met in Chicago in their 20's. They wanted out of the city so they got a large travel trailer and hit the road . My older sister and then me and my younger sister were all born at this time living in a trailer in trailer parks.

We did finally have a real house by the time I was 6.

[mistertrickster]

14. As a boomer myself, I think we actually did have it pretty good. Compared to today.

1. The economy up until the mid 70's was hot. The manufacturing base was still strong and wages were high. I got a part-time college job with UPS earning almost 8 dollars an hour. Thirty years later, the part-time jobs are paying hardly more than that without figuring in inflation.

The entire "60's counter-culture" could only happen because there was so much wealth floating around that people didn't have to work nearly as hard to get it. I remember picking up hitch-hiking hippies who told me they just rambled from town to town and worked factory jobs for six weeks so they could live on their earnings for the next six months.

Try doing that today.

2. College costs were subsidized by taxpayers to a far higher degree then than now. Reagan deliberately de-funded colleges with a "bait-and-switch" to allow colleges to keep copyrights and patents on research innovations, in other words, to tie their income to "free marketplace incentives," students be damned.

The result is that college expenditures increases -- the amount that colleges spend per student -- are about the level of inflation, with some increase for higher technology costs like wi-fi and computer labs. College costs to students however have sky-rocketed by some 300 percent as tuition increases are passed on to students through loans and the gov't (taxpayers) continues to pay less.

When I went to a big state-school in the Midwest, my in-state tuition was 365 dollars a semester, and I could take as many credit hours as I could handle. To figure inflation, a postage stamp was 15 cents then, and now it's three times that. So . . . do you know of any state schools where you can take 18 to 21 hours for a 1100 dollars, or 50 to 60 dollars a credit hour? Even community colleges aren't that cheap now. When I take graduate-level courses at my local college, it's 300 dollars a credit hour.

This is a direct result of conservative de-funding, so the rich can get vastly richer.

[livetohike]

15. My dad was a steelworker who also had to moonlight as a bartender

at a local bar. We lived in a small three bedroom ranch with one bathroom (for six people). We had one telephone in the house and a black and white tv. We had one car. I babysat for 50 cents/hour from age 12 until I left for college. I was lucky to go to a state college through student loans and scholarships.

Any spoiling came from my Grandparents who would slip a dollar bill into my palm from time to time so my parents couldn't see. With that money, I would buy material so I could sew myself some new clothes. We had a dress code in high school then and slacks weren't even permitted.

Most of my friends were raised the same way - working class kids.

[raccoon]

16. Sounds quite similar to my experience, and that of my classmates. nt

[Gregorian]

17. We didn't have ipods, we had fields.

There are an array of things that could all be listed out. And even put on graphs. These things came and went over time.

What we had that was brilliant was a slower, smaller, quieter world.
What we have now is instant communication, a world with more of a singular mind. A kind of oneness of the human race. That is also brilliant.


I would say it's personal. Some people don't mind concrete as much as I don't need instant communication. So for this boomer, I'm distraught as hell about what is happening now. But for others, it's a better time to be alive. Better appliances!

[pipi_k]

19. We had food and clothing and shelter, but we weren't pampered either

A good percentage of our clothing were hand-me-downs from our older (girl) cousins.

Furniture was second hand as well, except for one time I remember we got a brand new washer from Sears. That was exciting.

My mother's "Roper" gas stove must have been 20 years old when she inherited it, and her "Sunbeam" toaster lasted longer than some marriages.

Every year after Thanksgiving, mom would get out all her saved up aluminum TV dinner trays and make up meals from the leftovers and freeze them.


And I remember one of my aunts...actually a great aunt...who, every time she came to visit, would give us kids each a dime. Whoa...we thought we were RICH!!!


My kids, born in 1970 and 1972, didn't have it any better. After their dad and I were divorced, we lived on Welfare in a shitty apartment in a shitty neighborhood. The girl next door was a hooker, and many times there were men fist fighting on the front porch right outside my kids' bedroom, but anyway...their clothing came from the Salvation Army and Goodwill. One particular embarrassment happened when the man who would become my second husband discovered my pantry ruse...I had empty boxes and packages in there to make it look like we had food.

We had nothing for such a long time. Now I have lots of stuff. Food. Clothing. A home I own. Decent vehicles to drive. In a way it's a bit disconcerting, but OTOH, I wouldn't want to go back to having nothing again.

[arcadian]

21. Sounds like some class warfare scapegoating.

The elites are good at it, and their mouthpieces, the MSM tow the line.

[applegrove]

47. So we are not allowed to talk about selfishness in the USA today? Shouldn't

that be on the top of the agenda seeing as how all the GOP policies are about rich people not having to pay much in taxes. They don't even want to pay like 38% tax. And the mass of supporters are over 50. Can't we even discuss this?

[Thirtieschild]

22. Depression/Dust Bowl baby

In 1956 one week of work at minimum wage would pay for one semester of tuition at a state college in Texas: minimum wage $1 an hour, tuition for one semester $40. I worked first in the journalism library and later for the college news service for a lot less than minimum wage, 35 cents an hour. When I grew up five of us lived in a four-room house, one bathroom, unheated bedrooms, heat in the living room turned off at night (even when it was below zero outside), one car, one telephone, no tv (no reception). We didn't feel deprived because we didn't know anything else.

Our three oldest children are late boomers (b 1958, 1960, 1962). They had more than I grew up with - one tv, two telephones, two bathrooms, eventually two cars - but they were by no means spoiled. Their children, however, are very privileged - cars for their 16th birthdays, big college funds, cell phones, laptops. I'm not sure what all of this says except that in our family succeeding generations have more.

[mistertrickster]

23. The other problem with the boomer generation . . . it seems as though

the younger generations have taken a lot of our bad traits and abandoned the good ones.

We brought the idea of guilt-free sexuality to a national prominence, and now it seems like there are more births outside of marriage than in it. Single moms and runaway dads wasn't supposed to be the idea.

We made "self-fufillment" the highest goal, and a lot of our children seem to be happiest by fulfillment in front of an X Box.

We protested and carried signs for the altruistic ends of stopping war and protecting the environment, and later generations use our tatics at tea-bag demonstrations in which they inveigh against government and immigrants.

[havocmom]

24. Mom made $1.00 an hour in 1963. Dad seldom paid the $30.00 / month child support

And I never felt poor, just aware some had a lot more than we did. Lots had less than we did too. Mom always managed to slip some special foods on the doorstep of less fortunate people she knew when holidays rolled around. We spent lovely hours making cookies to mail to my older brother in the service and to give to some widowed neighbors.

When I went to Jr High, and it was too far to come home for lunch, I did without lunches from then until I was on my own, and had lunch when I could afford a mid-day meal. It did not seem to be a serious deprivation to go without lunch. Gave me quiet time away from classmates. Gave me time for more reading & writing.

Entitlement? Nope. At my present age, I STILL have SERIOUS trouble asking for what I need, let alone want.

It's a class thing. It is in every generation. But the boomers' parents had a higher probability of improving their lot than previous generations. But not all boats lifted and lots of boats didn't get lifted much.

[mopinko]

25. i think by definition, most of us come from large families.

not much spoiling going on there. i went to a school that was built because of the boom. catholic grade school with 40+ kids in a class.
i was #6 of 7 kids. we ate regular, but that is about it. more to our circumstances, i guess.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

26. entitled? baby boomers? Please! what about the Greatest Generation

that came before us? they are the ones that consider themselves entitled...

[bvar22]

28. Some things were possible in the 50s,60s, and 70s....

..that are no longer possible.

*an individual willing to work part time COULD attend a State University and graduate debt free.

*A non-college educated person working a blue collar job COULD:
-enjoy reasonable job security

-raise several children in relative comfort

-provide adequate Health Care for his family

-BUY and pay off a comfortable home in the suburbs

-take a REAL vacation every year

-Buy a relatively new American car every couple of years

-retire in relative comfort.

I am using these elements as Economic Indicators.
They were common for a White Male, not women or minorities.
They are no longer possible for White Males.
It is STILL worse for women and minorities.

[EFerrari]

31. Most of that ended in the mid seventies, about the time my husband and I

got married. Wages flattened out and real estate became insane.

[elocs]

30. I never felt entitled, but we boomers were the generation given the promise

that we would have more than our parents had and in so many ways it will be our parents who are better off than most of us will ever be.

[AllentownJake]

36. Your elites had it better than their parents

That is more the issue, than anything else.

[robdogbucky]

40. 4 of us

moved into our Mother's Irish immigrant parents' house when our Da' was severed from our family, all of us in the Boomer window of demographic. We didn't know any better as our neighborhood had plenty of split homes and working class poor with frequently 3 generations all under one roof.

All of us attended the neighborhood Catholic grade school and three of us had to work to pay tuition for the Catholic HS we had to attend. The youngest then got a reprieve with a scholarship to a prep academy out of town. His was a decidedly different experience from the rest of us. I for one developed a strong class consciousness in that HS, as over half of the students there were silver spooners with us working class kids trudging home and to after school jobs by bus, foot and hitch-hiking, while the others drove away in the cars they had been given, laughing and smoking, obviously enjoying their privilege.

The war, social revolution, inflation, generational conflict and technology contributed to our feelings of inferiority to some degree and I think we all paid an emotional price into adulthood and carried a firm conviction to never put others down no matter what their station and to never trust those raised with privilege. When there are 7 or more at the dinner table and no one gets seconds until Grandpa has his, one learns to wait and be grateful for what we did have. Mom had gone to work and between that, Grandpa's pension from the Post Office and our having jobs as soon as we could, we managed. We sure were busy and that was most likely an advantage. You cannot dwell on things when you have to keep moving, hustling, working.

By the time we all hit college, we were adults and we took care of business. We all did it with loans and scholarships and jobs.

Looking back on it, I would not trade it for another's life. But privileged, spoiled Boomers we were not.


Just my dos centavos


robdogbucky

[butterfly77]

41. Kick &Recommended..

[gleaner]

45. I'm a boomer ...

came from a middle class family and I am now a lower middle class adult thanks to George Bush. You can't generalize about people. I never knew any rich kids and the people I did know worked hard to live and to try and change the way the country was heading; to stop the war and try to build a social network for people who needed the help.

I don't know where the shining myth came from that we were all floating around on a cloud of drugs and money all the time. That is not the way it was. There were some very grim times courtesy of a very grim government, just like now. What my mother told me is true. The more things change the more they change the same. Or the alternate version, if things were the same they wouldn't be different.

[applegrove]

46. The people showing up at teabagging parties and such are not young. They are boomers. Of course they

do not represent all boomers. But the white older folk make up a good portion of the wingnuts. The GOP slices and dices the country up into soccer moms and such. Shouldn't we look at all demographics in questioning what has made some people so selfish? Cause some of the teabaggers and birthers are over fifty. And some have had the wool pulled over their eyes but some of them are just selfish. They don't want to pay taxes.

[raccoon]

51. Thank you for saying that, "Of course they do not represent all boomers."

"but some of them are just selfish. They don't want to pay taxes. "

Right, and they are mentally challenged.

[MisterP]

48. ah, all a lot of that generation did was try to change the world and stood up to patronage cops

furiously trying to crush their skulls

nobody's ever proved that the hippies became the yuppies due to any "shared goal of hedonistic pleasure"

Gen Y will probably bring some heat in the 10s, even those who'll be fired for taking any time off activism--and conscientization is a prerequisite to mobilization...remember, they did grow up under Busholini