this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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I wasn't exclusively talking about hippies, there were other counter culture groups and movements.
But the thing I think you missed is that even if most baby boomers weren't hippies and protesters, all of the hippies and protesters were boomers.
It isn't a generational issue at all, it's a human issue, where you have people that fall into loose groupings of motivations and thinking, which seem to be either "nature", or carried across generations over time. Some people, likely the majority, will be the conformists, and the rest fall into varying degrees of heresy.
There are plenty of baby boomers and later generations (us gen x old fucks are old fucks now too) that don't sit around bitching about "kids today".
Some of the baby boomer resistance got worn out and stopped fighting to some degree, but that's totally different than the entire generation just becoming conformist.
Truth? People are just idiots in general, and every generation has them. But until you spend time really hanging around a given generation, you only see and hear the loudest of them. I spent two decades of my life taking care of the elderly and dying. You ended up running into a big cross section of baby boomers and older generations doing that during the nineties and early noughts.
That's part of the problem. Most of us never get a chance to get paid to sit and listen to someone. We only hear the tiniest sliver of a generation. Even with my hundreds of patients to listen to, that's still a tiny sliver, it's just bigger than most people get. All that usually happens is you get access to family and whoever is in the news/talk show circuit. Online, you tend to only get the extreme ends of things being the loudest.
It isn't a generation issue at all.
When a large generation is voting to block progressive change it is a generational issue on the macro scale.
I am fully on board with the idea that shouldn't lead to discrimination on age, shouldn't lead to assuming all boomers are the problem.
Nor that all those younger are progressive.
But politically it is a generational issue. When talking about politics it is legitimate to talk about demographics and voting blocks and how we might get them on side. Or at least prevent them doing further damage.
Obviously my side is primarily the "stop wrecking the planet" side with a healthy dose of "poverty and homelessness are a stain on any developed nation". So boomers voting the way they do is a problem and has been for some time.
They are yet to stop voting in people who make the world worse. That generation is still a problem. It has been since the 70s.
Either we get enough of that generation to change direction or, more likely, we have to out vote them.
wait, it's like not a generational issue, and isn't using generation as a shorthand for specific demographics still useful in everyday language? how else would you refer to such a group of individuals, i'm drawing blanks.
I'm saying it isn't about when you were born, it's about how you think.
The demographics don't matter because every generation has the same basic humanity within it.