Posted on 10/01/2008 4:06:00 AM PDT by equaviator
I’m a year younger...I’ll stick with Gen X.
But it does get really confusing.
The Boomers didn’t really start coming in to play until the eighties, from the beginning they slowed down the worst of the leftist excesses of their parents.
The real political hell period that destroyed America and it’s institutional strength, happened from about the mid 1930s to the mid 1970s, since then the damage has slowed and occasionally been reversed as in the second amendment.
Geez .... Talk about Drama Queens.
Let's get a little historical perspective here.
More people died in Ted Kennedy's car than at 3 Mile Island. The vast majority of the U.S. population was nowhere near Three Mile Island. On the other hand, once upon a time on 1 July 1916, the British suffered 57,470 casualties, including 19,240 dead, on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.
AIDS has been around during these times, but it could have potentially affected anybody in any generation. All that was needed to prevent it, once the blood donation procedures were tightened up, was to avoid risky conduct. On the other hand, once upon a time, every summer during the first half of the 20th Century, children faced the possible tragedy of polio no matter what they did.
If Tylenol was potentially poisoned, you went to your medicine cabinet, flushed the Tylenol pills down the toilet and then went out and bought a bottle of generic acetaminophen.
If anything, the list of complaints about being traumatized by the Evening News shows that Generation X has grown up with too little adversity.
Culturally the left wing of the generation ran higher education and cultural institutions. The have moved the country left socially, while conservative boomers sat by helpless.
I think a lot of people missed his message. I am a late stage Boomer and I am very impressed with the productivity of Gen X’ers in the workplace. They are die hard capitalists but they want to be in smaller enterprises where merit does not take a backset to seniority.
I remember about 10 years ago reading that 20% of Gen X’ers had started their own business WHILE IN COLLEGE. They know they are going to be stuck with the entitlements bill from their parents and they bought in to the Reagan vision of growing their way out of the economic mess, and decided to put their heads down and work hard.
This is the message that comes through, that they want to be business owners and leaders, not the group that is left holding the bag when the Boomer mess hits the fan.
Can’t deny that but at least conservatives exist now, and have since the seventies.
During the 50s and 60s there seemed to be almost no opposition to the most radical left.
Walter Cronkite, the creation of PBS, the 1965 immigration act etc. would now run into competent and powerful resistance.
I'd generally agree with that..with a slight tweak.
We want to be the business creators. We want to make things and build things and sell things. The ownership and management stuff we'll do, but that's not the job. That's the stuff we put up with so we can get the job done.
Damn few of us want to be a manager in the traditional sense.
Hey now, the hipsters of the baby boom invented rock and roll, and sex, and drugs. Well of course they would have had to be 3 years old in 1948 to invent rock and roll, and sexual liberation had been pushed for decades (check 1920s Germany), and even LSD went back to 1938 and Ectasy back to the 1910s. Cocaine and pot before that. But they can’t dream and boast, can’t they?
They didn’t invent it, but they sure helped make it mainstream in the US. :-)
I've never understood the reasoning behind that.
"I need some lovin' tonight, Gladys. I've just returned from the WAR!"
"Look Abner, that line worked for the first three years but it's been 18 years since the war ended. I have a headache, I have hot flashes and, no, you are not getting any lovin' tonight or maybe even for the next 6 months."
Nailed it Polybius. Besides, the Sherpa anology is overdone anyway...it’s in books, documentaries, and sermons across America.
Abortion.
The biggest story of Gen X is one they won't write about. But is the most important and fundamental point. Widespread abortion practiced on a whole generation.
Gen X was the first to "benefit" from Roe vs. Wade. The first generation to have 1 out of 4 murdered. Collectively that has a huge impact on a systemic/sociological scale. IMO it has a personal impact on the psyche of the generation. The baby boomers murdered their offsrping.
It's one reason the baby boomers still dominante political discourse today. They culled the herd. The book "Freakonomics" discusses some of the economic/criminology ramifications of the widescale abortion. (but sidesteps the spiritual/moral/social political issues)
From this end it looks like the political mess we are in is directly related to the "sins of the hippie mothers and fathers". Its all connected, mass ilegal immigration to do the jobs our aborted babies can't do. Colleges full of aging hippies who relive their heyday brainwashing and trying to hit on young coeds with little resistance from the culled herd. National Socialist control of every aspect of our lives. etc.
Generation X’ers! It gets late early out here! Provide, provide!
I'm a Gen Xer, and I really wish I could watch television for ten minutes without seeing a commericial of some aging Boomer flacking an erection pill.
Nothing in my lifetime has been as destructive as drugs.
I know of a number of families where the Boomers and their offspring (because of Boomers' drug use) have a lower standard of living than their parents of the Greatest Generation.
I thought that No Country for Old Men was absolutely on the mark, as to the effects of drug use on this country.
Those old law enforcement characters of the GG were baffled at the viciousness and destruction that the drug epidemic engendered, and the high-stakes crime that it precipitated.
You cannot know how much this country has changed because of drug use if you were younger than the Boomers.
We left a mess.
That would explain the unending, tedious, dreary grunge music they spawned........
And America has become a much worse place for it.
Has it made sex or music better in the modern era?
How about drinking and smoking? Both are undergoing neo-prohibitionist movements.
Our civilization is slowly withering on the vine.
I know there is plenty of blame to go around, but the WWII generation & the boomers got the ball rolling much quicker with their all consuming post-war materialism.
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