Posted on 06/04/2013 6:09:19 AM PDT by Biggirl
Last spring, Frank Turkaly tried to kill himself. A retiree in a Pittsburgh suburb living on disability checks, he was estranged from friends and family, mired in credit card debt and taking medication for depression, cholesterol, diabetes and high blood pressure.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Unless you are employed by the government the higher salary you have earned from decades of hard work makes you a target for every cost cutter in the company. Your knowledge and experience is devalued and every special interest group with a quota demand wants you out. The politically correct rules require you to walk on eggshells, choose your words carefully and be sensitive to everyone around you but anyone can ridicule and attack you with impunity. You are typically ordered to clean up the messes made by young, politically correct careerists who are given authority without responsibility, screw things up and then move on to something else.
Wives and children in this era of self-absorbtion are typically unappreciative of all that you have done for them. You are expected to be a bottomless pit of money and fix things when there is a problem. Other than that none of them care about you.
Social Security is insolvent and may or may not be around when you need it. Probably not.
All you have to look forward to is doing things for other people who will never do anything for you.
I'm thinking maybe 'cause this is the least-churched genration in American history.
Most of their parents are divorced, sex is cheap, and life itself is no longer sacred (numbing affect of legal infanticide).
Not only Boomers but we all face a bunch of carpola in this life. Greed both in Govt. and some in corporate have helped dent or wreck savings for many yet personal responsibility is the biggest issue in this matter. Suicide is not the answer and having a long term focus beyond this troubled life to the one eternal puts it all in perspective. Easy for me to say right? and dare I speak for all situations.
Sometime ago Forbes ran feature about why do we feel so bad when we have it so good. In one of her better articles Peggy Noonan got it right. One of her statements (paraphrasing) was that the Baby Boomers are the first generation in the history of mankind that believed it could create a Utopian society (I recall that she pointed out that other generations understood that his was reserved for the afterlife). Second, she pointed out that the boomers were realizing that they are increasingly responsible for wrongs of society.
You can never draw too much from studies like this because circumstances change so much from period to period and also you don’t know how good information from the past was. First, people died earlier in the past so there were less old people to be available to kill themselves. Second, people may have killed themselves all the time in the past but it was socially taboo and families probably covered it up, perhaps even with the help of police and coroners.
If there is a reason, though, my guess would be that each generation has become more self-centered, starting with the Boomers. And if life doesn’t work out for self-centered people, they are more likely to kill themselves rather than deal with adversity.
As I see it, it's my duty to help them survive, and hopefully prosper, these next 15-20 years. I'm not going without a fight.
There’s a book called Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. You should read it. It puts things in perspective. One thing I took away from the book is that suffering is a necessary part of being fulfilled. A result of never having to suffer while maintaining your decency is nihilism. Nihilism is the disease of the West and specifically the Baby Boomers.
Narcissists, in other words.
If you are a Christian, the perfect opportunity to walk with and as Christ did.
That really sucks.
To hell with baby boomers... At least the good majority of them. Baby boomers are the worst generation. Selfish, freeloading, and all about themselves. Enjoy your cushy pensions and social security. Because SS will be gone for me and my family, pensions don’t even exist anymore.
They sacrificed my future and my children’s future. This political and family structure meltdown was on there watch!
“We know that what men want to do is work — that’s a very strong ethic for them,” . . . The idea that so many of us in this country have been brought up with — that you work hard, you get your house, you get your American dream, everything is rosy — it hasn’t worked out. A lot of these boomers aren’t going to earn as much money as their parents did. They aren’t going to be as secure as their parents were. And that’s quite troubling for the boomers.”
They voted for liberalism and are now getting what they voted for. The boomer generation largely turned away from God and country and they are finding that without God and country there's not a whole lot left. It's hard for me to feel pity for a group that did this to themselves.
You should write a book....I’d buy it.
There's Always Tomorrow is a remake of a 1934 film of the same name. Fred MacMurray is a toy company executive whose wife (Joan Bennett) and kids (Gigi Perreau, William Reynolds and Judy Nugent) take him for granted. Barbara Stanwyck is Fred's former girlfriend, whose own business activities result in a surprise reunion. MacMurray falls back in love with Stanwyck and prepares to leave his family. MacMurray's children go to Stanwyck and politely ask her to back off. She does so, and MacMurray's wife Bennett, who's been out of town during all this, is none the wiser. In the original There's Always Tomorrow, the male and female leads (Frank Morgan and Binnie Barnes) were farther apart age-wise, making their brief encounter all the more poignant.
Though not all baby boomers are as you described them.
There was a lot of Hank Rearden in my stepfather. I just didn't know it until I read the book. My admiration for him, always positive, grows more with each day. He set a great example for me, in the way he lived his life.
“Suicide is NEVER the answer.”
Yes it is.
There really are some people that need a damn good killin’.
Well we cant all be happy, ripe old Senators where they finally exit their cushy abodes with a smile on their face and wheeled away in the stiff horizontal position. The taxpayers get suicided instead for the privilege of funding the barons and nobles in the DC Castle of The Ivory.
The “Boomer” was a twit. They talk about their education and productivity when most of them were receiving wealth and opportunities from parents wealthy enough to give such things to them. I saw a sample large enough to make the generalization. They largely spent their wealth on recreation, became pseudo liberals and as stated became all around superficial, arrogant twits! I can see an increased suicide rate among the “Boomer” population. In general, repeat in general they did not amount to much as people.
Floride? GMO insanity? Subliminal messages on television? Mind control?
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