Thank God for you, Miss Marple. I honestly regret that my generation didn't have more moms like you. I had Daddy, Step Dad #1 and Guy-My-mom's-Married to #2. I had 42 moves. I had homelessness. I didn't have siblings or morality training or access to an education. Sadly, I'm not the only one. Many, *many* of my generation suffered the same, third-world childhood that I did right here in the good ol' US of A.
We're not asking for pity, understanding, or sympathy. We just want to keep our damn money so we can raise our own families and put aside for our own retirement. We don't want Grandma to rot in the street. But it sure seems crappy when the grandparents are expecting us to pay for their RV and their green fees. Sadly, because so many Boomers with the entitlement attitude really do exist, the rest of you get painted with a rather broad brush.
If you don't want to get splashed with that paint, don't bristle and tell us to stop fighting. Say, "I am a Boomer and I refuse to screw my kids!" Be a mama bear and defend your cubs, darn it! Why do so many Boomers who actually agree with us simply tell us to be polite and more specific instead of bashing down those who threaten their children's future?? As one mother to another... I just don't understand it!
The older boomers are just now reaching retirement age. In a sane world, the next few years would feature the younger boomers and Gen-X workers moving into the positions from which the retiring boomers experienced the prime earning years of their career.
Rather than allow such handovers, and thereby ensure the continuance of a self-sustaining economy, our policies have shifted to maximize golden parachutes for the soon-to-be retired, while diminishing the job prospects for younger citizens through outsourcing, work visas, and unfettered illegal immigration.
The next few years are going to be economically difficult for those citizens with a mortgage and children.
The only solution is for younger voters to get informed, show up and vote -- vote to cut government back to its Constitutional minimums, to cut taxes accordingly, to re-establish the US as a sovereign nation free of the WTO and UN, to shift some of the tax burden away from the producers (via the income tax), to the importers (via tariffs) and to consumers (via consumption taxes).
Things will have to get much worse in the next few years to make that happen, but the Democrats and RINOs in Congress and the state legislatures have ensured that things will get much worse.
The good news is that the total retired boomers and silents combined will be outnumbered by eligible voters in the work force as soon as 2008. Younger voters are trending more conservative than older voters, but they are less likely to vote or be politically active.
The chances of convincing the most selfish voting bloc in our history to vote against their best interests in their retirement years are slim to none.
The odds are much better to convince younger eligible voters to show up and vote to save their nation, especially as conditions for them worsen over the next few years.
Are there lots of selfish Boomers? You bet. There are also lots of selfish "Greatest Generation" people; go down to Miami and interview the retirees if you don't think that's true. And there are probably lots of selfish people in your generation as well.
The whole problem is selfishness, regardless of age. The "cultural revolution" which swept through the country when I was young was fueled by an abandonment of the church by OUR parents and a materialism fueled by Madison Avenue and Hollywood, aided and abetted by our good friends in the press. The people like me were never on the front cover of Time Magazine; it was the group who went to Woodstock, rioted at Kent State, fled to Canada....they were the ones the media chose to be the emblems of my generation.
I am so sorry you had such a chaotic growing up. My first marriage ended in divorce when my husband abandoned me, and when I remarried I was determined that my son would NOT grow up with such a set of problems. My husband adopted my son, we had a daughter together, and we have been married for 30 years. We did our best to give our children the sense that family is always there and not something ephemeral.
Your family didn't turn out the way you would have liked, but I will bet it isn't the way your mother would have liked it to have been, either. We can't go back in time, so the only answer I have is to make YOUR family the example.
There is so much sadness and anger about this, and understandably so. I wish I could wave a magic wand and fix things, but I can't. I do think, however, that the media and the left are fanning the flames of resentment.
My wife's family was Navy enlisted. She didn't move quite as often, but experienced the broken home with an alcoholic father. We both vowed not to put our kids through that kind of life experience and we stood by that. My sons are 18/22/25. The 22 year old has been on his own since age 18 and will finish a business degree next June. He just took his real estate broker's license exam Wednesday and filed his paperwork to open his own business yesterday.