Honestly, I didn’t think people who still thought this way were real, but a recent brush with pure quill Boomerism on Twitter opened my eyes to the sobering truth that some people really are this out of touch.
Here are expanded versions of both graphs:
Dear Baby Boomers, Millennials may be immature, lazy snowflakes. They may have made poor life decisions. But a) you raised them that way, and b) you gave them school and career advice that is totally useless in today’s job market because c) you turned the West into Clown World.
Now, to err is human. Boomers are hardly the first generation to set out with noble intentions that completely blew up in their children’s faces. Great ambitions meet with spectacular failure as often as they yield great success.
Read closely, though, because here is the key difference that separates Baby Boomers from those prior generations and richly merits succeeding generations’ scorn.
You brag about changing the world, and you did–objectively for the worse. You’ve presided over the West’s slide into Brazil 2.0.
You hold the bilk of the money and all of the power, yet you obstinately refuse to accept one scintilla of responsibility for the cultural and economic collapse that happened on your watch.
Worse, you mock your own children for following your example–straight into poverty.
Worst of all, you murdered half of those children in the womb.
Lacking a more noble motive, enlightened self-interest alone should bestir you to use a portion of your vast power and treasure to make your children and grandchildren whole. Sadly for you, towering diabolical pride, to which you have blinded yourselves, prevents repentance.
My befuddled interlocutor expressed bafflement over younger generations’ resentment toward Boomers and ascribed it to envy.
That accusation is not entirely correct. Envy is hatred of another caused by sorrow over the knowledge that he possesses what you lack, with the desire to see him deprived of those goods.
Most Millennials do not wish to see their parents lose their jobs and homes out of spite. They wish only to enjoy a similar first world lifestyle, which was promised to them but now recedes ever farther beyond reach.
A growing number of Millennials do hate their parents, though. If Boomers possessed an iota of collective intellectual curiosity, they would seriously investigate why their children hate them. As it is, they seem to have chosen the Marie Antoinette route.
Boomers may not understand Millennials’ resentment. They may not like it. But neither ignorance nor contempt will change the fact that the succeeding generations they rely on to prop up their bloated retirements will soon repay their betrayal in kind.
And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse:
Some members of Generation X obsequiously kiss up to Boomers in the hope of getting their table scraps. I call these wretched specimens Lil’ Boomers. They’re not getting Social Security, either.
I remember the "any degree is better than no degree" push of the late 80s/early 90s. People who had no business going to college were getting nagged into going. College was a whole heck of a lot cheaper and better quality back then. (Thankfully not a boomer or a millennial.)
Yep. Wasted a lot of time as a teenager/young adult because the only advice I ever got was "just get a degree."
Not one of them gave any advice that offered aid.
I remember that when I was in high school in the late 00s. They probably still do it now.
I was considered a radical because I told people they were better off going into the military or trade school in the late '90s. The insane college push was a joke for anyone with eyes, but that didn't stop the idiot Boomers from doing everything they could to push us in. I love my parents to death, but what clued me in that maybe they didn't have a clue was when I said "so college is basically just job prep, right?" and had my mother jump down my throat because it was SO much more important without being able to tell my why.
I respect a liberal education, enormously, but I have no illusions about its direct ROI. It's a sad commentary on our culture, but it's nonetheless true. Most kids would be better off learning a trade and pursuing that liberal education part time or on their own. There is a reason, after all, why it's called "liberal" and it has zero to do with politics…
They sold us the lie that college makes people smart.
In reality, college is for smart people.
Clearly Boomerism can be a disease as well as a generational headstone — er, marker. I half expected this dude's final follow-on to be a news story headline:
Headline: "X is the new 30!", where "X" is"
a.) 80
b.) Cryo-Frozen waiting for cancer cure
c.) Bitching about younger generations
d.) Talking about "YOU", "YOU", and more "YOU"
Boomers. The least missed generation.
Crematorium is the new 30.
The only thing worse than Boomerism are the ones in the younger generations that ape them so completely. Act your age, old man.
"Wish I could have one job for forty years like my dad, but it didn't work that way."
And just who is to blame for that?
I deal with Boomers just about every day. They're mostly good people and I have nothing against them. We get along just fine. But any time a social issue comes up they are like the Borg. Every single one of them has the same checkbox opinion on every single issue: and it always mirrors exactly what they were told on television. If you supply them with any contradicting info, even if it's first hand experience, it will be instantly discarded because you didn't deliver it from a cable news station that no one outside of their generation even watches anymore.
Marshall McLuhan called them the "TV generation" who always wants to build things in their own image and ignore old roads and ways because they are a unique generation unlike any before. Even in old age it is too embedded into their collective individual consciousness that they could have ever been steered wrong or went down the correct path. They are always right and wholly unique, just like everyone else in their generation.
Simply try an experiment. If they bring up the 1965 Immigration Act and how "no Boomer could vote for it" be sure to mention that no Boomer ever repealed it and have consistently blocked any younger generation from doing so.
That is their entire legacy: holding up or creating disastrous ideas and preventing anyone else from fixing them because the man on the TV told them it was naughty to do otherwise.
And the whole envy thing is rich. They're the ones that destroyed everything their parents built because they knew better and then salted the earth so no one could double check the remaining scraps.
Boomers hated that their parents built so much and so tore it down and rebuilt a funhouse version of reality that should have been condemned decades ago. Millennials detest Boomers because they built a funhouse version of reality that they are slowly learning isn't real. One of those has justified anger.
I should also add that "Greatest Generation" was never an insult, but "Boomer" has taken off as one. Even "Millennial" isn't an insult anymore. The knives are sharpening.
The Boomer generation was a failed experiment whose time has run out.
"…they are a unique generation unlike any before."
True. No other generation so thoroughly and purposefully wrecked an entire civilization.
Smug GenX is the worst because they have seen the truth and dismissed it for lies and clown world.
Smug Gen X, oblivious Gen Y, and angry Millennials are pretty bad, but they're also not in charge.
Interesting that no one has mentioned the lovely 20 trillion in national debt we Boomers were so kind enough to leave the rest of you. You'd think we'd get some thanks for that. You're welcome.
Hey, without debt, you can't have credit. It's the gift that keeps on giving 😉
There are none so blind…..
…as those who watch TV.
Social security is over. Before, you worked till you died or were crippled. That's how it's going to be again. Not least of all because the Boomers couldn't keep their nations running.
That's gonna go great with less available work, too.
Well, why don't you want to do hard manual labor for 50 cents an hour like Pedro? He's more REAL MURAKIN than you with his work ethic. No whining about being 70 years old, either.
At least by the time GenX is 70, the Boomers will mostly be dead and they can't tell us that.
Your comment brought up something I've been contemplating about the next election.
There are two ways to win: turn out your base, or burn out the other guy's base.
The youth vote has been vital in the last three presidential elections, and Millennials almost handed Bernie the Democrat nomination–they probably did, in fact, but that's another story.
Trump is going to need the youth vote again, especially if he's up against Sanders. If I were advising him, I'd say what you said. Then I'd come up with a plan to let taxpayers opt out of Social Security.
No, you won't get those monthly checks when you turn 65, but you won't have a chunk taken out of your paychecks over the 45 years prior.
Opt out of SS *and* debt jubilee (college debt, for one.) Even allowing bankruptcy would be preferable to what exists now. Both need to happen, so light the fuse now.
That'll make the arena hot.
Absolutely.
I'll go ahead and continue this little tangent with the comprehensive Millennial bailout package I'd like to see:
>Social Security opt-out
>Debt jubilee for unrepayable student loans
>Make balances forgiven through current IDR plans immune from taxation.
>Make student loans dischargeable through bankruptcy.
>Require educational institutions to cosign all federal student loans.
>Tie federal university funding to graduates' ability to repay their student loans. Trump's campus freedom of speech EO opens the way to this. It's a good start.
Anything I missed?
"Anything I missed?"
Just 'Trumpslide 2044'.
Brian,
The breakup of big tech with regulations limiting market size and foreign investments
Decentralize education and give priority to the trades. The vast majority are better off as septic tank repairmen etc
Exempt moms from income taxes for life if they have 4 kids or more
Reduce taxes for numerous families and shift them to childless couples.
Let the cat ladies and neckbeards pay the high taxes they crave
xavier
xavier
Those depressing flat wage curves, though.
The Big Local Employer has outsourced employee tier 1 tech support to India instead of paying Americans to help other Americans.
Younger Boomers founded BLE, but one died fairly young of cancer (less than 60). There's one for the Boomer death clock.
What am I saying, dying in your late 50s is young? GenX are dropping like flies thanks to stress. GenY and Millenials can't be far behind.
You want to see a really depressing curve? Search for Wages vs. Productivity.
I agree with most of this article, but, especially the commbox, it's too much blame on Boomers. Right off the top, the marxist dialectic feeds off of and advances by creating two groups and pitting them against one another, employer/worker, rich/poor, man/woman, now Boomers/Millenials. I'm seeing more and more of the latter now and my spidey sense is tingling. I know dialectic when I see it and I refuse to be dropped in one of its buckets.
Here's the thing… yes, Bommers as a group are largely responsible for what happened under their watch. But they arose at the peak of Satan's reign. The 60s countercultural revolution will go down as seismic in impact, on the order of the fall of constantinople to muslims, or the protestant revolt, to mankind's detriment, and it was completely orchestrated. Call them illuminati, freemasons, communists, or kaballistic jews, it doesn't matter. They used the military industrial complex and various UN organizations to subvert society by debasing the culture and particularly corrupting the young — which at that time were the Boomers. Can you blame a 15 year old for getting into eastern thought along with the Beatles, steering him away from tradition and christianity in the process?
Esalen institute, tavistock institute, UNESCO, CIA, on and on you can research this culture takedown, of which the Boomers were the primary victims. Yes, sometimes victims turn into victimizers, but you're missing the most important piece of the puzzle to ignore who orchestrated this.
Ultimately, of course, it was Satan, and our Blessed Mother, who predicted this cultural/ moral breakdown starting in the 1600s as Our Lady of Quito, then Our Lady of Fatima, told us how to avert it. Well too late to avert it, but we can still minimize the fallout: amend your life and strive for Christian, read: Catholic, perfection.
I find it providential that these weeks' Mass readings are from Jeremiah, who prophesied Babylon's conquest if Judah didn't change her ways. Maccabees is also a perfect parallel for what we're going through.
Queen of Prophets, pray for us.
Star of the Sea, pray for us.
Undoer of Knots, pray for us.
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.
Alright. There's an argument to be made that the Baby Boomers were hornswoggled by a satanically influenced society. There's smoke there, but there's some fire.
You have surely been to confession recently, this being Lent. One must express contrition before receiving absolution and perform penance afterward to make the wronged parties whole.
Xers, Ys, Millennials, and Zoomers do not want to be at odds with our parents and grandparents. We would rejoice were the Boomers to acknowledge their sins and repent.
That would merit forgiveness. Justice requires doing what can be done to make the wronged parties whole. The Boomers wield wealth and political power undreamed of by Rome, Athens, and Egypt of old.
It's almost too late to repair the damage they're complicit in, but not yet.
An enemy cannot be defeated if not properly identified.
To put it simply, it's Marxism. Not "Jews", which is nebulous, nor "Boomers", which is imprecise. It's ideological colonization. Boomers are people, flesh and blood. Marxism is a metaphysic, and we know on which plane the battle is really fought.
I see an antetype in St. Maria Goretti, innocent girl murdered, forgiving her then-unrepentant murderer on her deathbed. He later repented, became a lay brother at a Capuchin monastery, attending her beatification decades later. Beautiful story, utterly unfathomable to the secular mindset.
You forgive even when the offender isn't contrite. Then the Holy Spirit is unleashed. If that murderer found redemption and healing, there's hope for our unrepentant society. But demanding Boomers' contrition is not the Christian way. We need to expiate their sins, which might means becoming living holocausts — though pure and unblemished, I, for one, certainly am not.
Marxism was objectively less damaging to Russia than Liberal Democracy has been to Western Europe and the United States.
Tell me, should Christians in the 1940s have forgiven Nazi Germany for the Holocaust without acting to stop it or demanding that the Nazis repent of their ways?
With all due respect, I think you're making the same error I pointed out before. "Nazi Germany" is a concept. Nazism should be opposed and overcome with good, through evangelization and displaying heroic virtue.
Individual people, such as Nazis in the 40s to answer your question, yes, they are to be forgiven the same as unrepentant centurions, "for they know not what they do". Whether or not they're contrite. Then you try to bring them the light, given that they're enshrouded in a blinding darkness.
Marxism killed 40 million or so people in Russia last century, 300 million worldwide counting abortion. Liberal democracy, tempered by Christianity (even protestant, as in the US), was far from that bad. Untempered and severed therefrom, you have Marxism, because to reject a God to whom we're beholden to is to reject all authority and hierarchy, which leads right to egalatarian garbage that ironically requires authoritarianism to enact. Not to mention an elite, disbelieving in heaven, that will try to fashion a socially engineered utopia that strongly resembles hell on earth.
"I think you're making the same error I pointed out before."
If you think that, you are at a woeful disadvantage in this debate.
Christ is King of the Jews. You may consider the Jewish nation a nebulous concept. Scripture, Tradition, the Magisterium, and the ADL do not.
The notion that ideas have moral agency apart from the men who put them into action is laughably crude idealism verging on superstition. You may as well charge a copy of Das Kapital with murder.
As for heroic virtue, it's wearisome how Christian Conservatives are always eager to police their own side but never find time to rebuke the Church's enemies.
It's easy to identify the enemy in an encirclement. Direct your fire outward instead of inward, and you're bound to hit the mark.
You didn't address my main points, aside from the term "Jews" being nebulous, which, from the standpoint of 2019, it is. Do you mean hasidic Jews? Reformed Jews? True torah Jews?Atheistic cultural Jews? All different groups with different beliefs.
Scripture refers to the Biblical Jewish nation, which no longer exists. Tradition refers mainly to talmudic Jews, which coalesced in the latter half of the first millennium A.D., and were in many ways the true enemies of christianity and mankind, up until this day tbh. But recent fracturing (as all religions have experienced in recent centuries) has muddied those waters, an internal crisis which many rabbis have lamented. The ADL is a Zionist weapon bearing no validity on this subject.
You didn't address my points re: Catholic teaching on forgiveness in the absence of repentance, for which Christ himself was the model.
As for the moral value of ideas, re: issuing condemnations of Das Kapital, are you aware the Church banned books regularly throughout the centuries, exercising her prudence? All evil actions start with evil ideas. I may be misreading you, however. Are you suggesting ideas are inherently morally neutral? This can't be what you mean so I concede my misunderstanding of you.
I do agree with you that too many of us point fingers within our own ranks, to the exclusion of external evils. That is far from prudent or virtuous. Yet ultimately I'm with Mother Angelica, "If Catholics would stand up and actually be Catholic, the world would change overnight".
The real problem is droves of Catholics, especially Boomers, who think the Church can live at peace with an unconverted world.
"You didn't address my main points…"
Because they're incoherent and tangential to the topic. The Boomers bear responsibility for actions that will result in foreign invaders coming to tear our children apart with power tools. By all means, forgive them. The point is that they can still use their political and economic power to avert that catastrophe, therefore they should.
"…aside from the term 'Jews' being nebulous, which, from the standpoint of 2019, it is."
I mean the ethnic group, which can be identified with the same DNA tests the chief rabbinate of Israel uses to determine Israeli citizenship. The rest of your objection is pure quill nominalism. No one definition of the term "game" encompasses everything from chess to volleyball to tic-tac-toe. That doesn't mean games don't exist.
"Are you suggesting ideas are inherently morally neutral? This can't be what you mean…"
"Morally neutral idea" is a category error. Ideas can be true or erroneous. Only actions can be moral or immoral.
"The real problem is droves of Catholics, especially Boomers, who think the Church can live at peace with an unconverted world."
Yes. We are the Church Militant. Our general vocation is to consecrate the world to Christ. If you reject the Modernist heresy, then burning not just books, but heretics, should be on the table.
Here's the source of our disagreement imo, on which point we'll have to agree to disagree:
"Ideas can be true or erroneous. Only actions can be moral or immoral."
Abortion is largely legal because of the efforts of Bernard Nathanson, who in the late 60s/early 70s shone a spotlight on back alley abortions, which were claiming thousands of women's lives per year, thus, legalizing abortion would save their lives, because they're going to kill the baby anyway, so why not allow them to do it safely. Problem is, he flat out lied, completely making up the number, which was barely double digits. People believed the lie and we know the rest.
Another lie is the "clump of cells" nonsense. Flat out made up by people who knew full well they're dismembering recognizable babies, crushing skulls, etc.
Can you really blame someone for taking action based on a lie they had no reason to suspect was a lie? Are they not the victim of brainwashing? Even with the unprecedented investigative tool called the internet that we're lucky enough to have inherited from its Boomer inventors, we're still grossly deceived by malicious lies to the detriment of the good.
A lie is an idea – an evil one, contrary to truth, sired by you-know-who. It's not neutral, and the Bible teaches this repeatedly without ambiguity. Spreading the lie, an action, is also evil, as is taking corrective action based on the lie, but the root is again at the metaphysical level of idea.
"BoOmErS sUcK!!" is a dialectical bucket that I, for one, refuse to be caught in. It's feckless finger-pointing that only incites counter finger-pointing, ad infinitum, as the Marxists march onward. I know a satanic psyop when I see one. It's also just an ad hominem. What's are the fallacious ideas abounding amongst the Boomers? Attack those, not them.