this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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I mean there is a thing going all the way back to the silent generation who had a taste of the depression and so had some knowledge of truly bad times. Even younger boomers had a decent chance of getting a job that you could raise a family with just a high school degree and older ones could be pretty successful. Having a pension was the usual. Losers who managed fast food could still afford a place of their own and a fixer upper car. I saw these things go away as an Xer but I know its still better than those after me. college loans for me was like a car loan. A very nice car, like luxury care, but still a car. So college was doable even for those whose parents could not help out. It was not long after I graduated that college loans became like mortgages for the millenials. You can have a car loan with no car and get by and you can't be doing a mortgage with no shelter to show for it. All the while a college degree debased to where its basically the high school minimum needed for any shot. Its that much worse for gen Z and I don't even want to imagine what gen alpha will have. Thats just economic. Then you take the giant fall back we had with environmental regulations with reagan. There was a lot of environmental consciousness in the 70's and it essentailly evaporated in the 80's with yuppies and greed is good. Granted this is mostly a republican effect but who were the reagan democrats? I get that many boomers are great and its not that the generations that follow are individually so great but the way its shaken out it just gets to be a more and more raw deal for each successive generation.
Not all boomers are white.
this is true. not sure what it has to do with my comment but true.
Your comment makes sweeping generalizations about boomers as if they all had it easy. I want to remind people that this really only applied to a select group of specially elevated boomers. A white man could have what you say, good fucking luck if you were a Black woman though.
Not all white men. I specifically pointed out its not the case with all individuals.
Only white men, though. They, as a cohort, definitely had it easy like no one else. Particularly straight able-bodied Christians.
not true. as a matter of fact creating a black upper class was a key strategy to break the direction and unity of the civil rights movement.
That could apply to individuals, like you said, but you can't apply it broadly like you can apply privileges to white men.
Furthermore, they're doing the same thing today so that literally hasn't even changed.
But defeating the civil rights movement was more about killing off the leaders.
well yeah and your taking the 60's and its not like it would be better to be black in the 50's. What im trying to say is things basically improved until we started periodically regressing in the 80's and beyond. It was like two steps forward one step back and became one step forward two steps back and you can't broadly apply it to white men either but im not talking about people im talking about the time periods and living in one to the other. If you go back to the OP its about getting criticized by the older generation and responding with their own failings. Which existed. I mean the boomer claim to fame is basically the hippie erra. yuppie and beyond was not great but the hippie era was a direct result of the draft. There were some earnest individuals trying to stop pollution and improve human rights but there was also some who just did not want to get killed and enjoyed the drugs.
Boomers were alive in the 50s and 60s.
To be fair, a lot of them came into maturity later in the 70s and 80s, but it's an age range of like 20 years.
Generations are bullshit ttbh
they even came of age in the 60's for the older half. But again this was a period of improvement. civil rights got better in this time and much of it was do to boomers buat again the draft was a big reason for the hippie era. EDITED - just wanted to say generations are not complete bullshit. its like stereotypes. there is truth to them but not every individual will be like that.
Okay, but my point, that Black boomers didn't have it easy, is still true.
Also generations are bullshit - they were made up by advertisers! They're totally arbitrary.
many people don't have have it easy now, including black people. Hippie was a thing, yuppie was a thing, reagan democrats were a thing, Xers not trying in the system was a thing. tic toc is a thing. these were popular among certain groups of people at certain times and define generations. there is no hard or soft cutoff is true and its all approximation and class is far more defining than anything else no matter where you feel (if you actually realize the class your in). Its not completely arbitrary though
It's completely arbitrary, especially towards the edges of the time period. A boomer born 1946 had a wildly different life than a boomer born 1964, and a boomer born in 1964 has way more in common with a Gen Xer born in 1965.
Age cohorts are real, but "generations" are just arbitrary groupings.
yeah I mentioned the same about with the hard/soft cutoffs but generations are as much a thing as nationalities. its a shared experience and trends and such. I laugh because I live near my high school and they have these boards on the fence with all these awards and accomplishments for teams and clubs over the years but there is a big gap for the 80's and 90's. My generation representing.
Nationalities at least have a basis in actually existing nations. There's literally no basis for generations.
Age cohorts exist. People born the same year have stuff in common. Generations aren't like that, they're just arbitrarily defined over arbitrary time spans.
That's hilarious, do you also say that with your "death to America" hexbear buddies?
Read this very carefully. Do you think this applied to Black people in 1960?
yes. do you believe all black people in 1960 were on welfare? Do you believe no black people in 1960 had decent jobs. Discrimination is about relative opportunity of the time and believe it or not they do not have it better now. Heck we are losing much of what came out of the 60's.
I believe that Black boomers didn't have everything handed to them like white boomers, among other oppressed groups.
Times are easy or hard depending on who you are and your place in class society.
I never said boomers had everything handed to them. In a nutshell I said times were overall easier and have been getting worse since.
Times were not overall easier for everyone under segregation. You're just looking at history through a white lens.
no but segregation now is worse. do you think it ended and do you think its better with more pollution because your going to be surprised how segregation works?
Yes, many forms of racist oppression have either stayed the same or gotten worse, particularly the prison industrial complex and with police killings just replacing lynchings.
But are you telling me that Black boomers had it easy under segregation and Jim Crow?
Jim crow. The last of them were overturned in 65. They started in the millenia before. Thats actualy a good example of how things where improving in general for them compared to the generations after.
You realize that also means they got to suffer until those improvements happened? And then, of course, ending Jim Crow didn't really fix everything. For Black boomers things got a little better for a while and then got worse again.
so it would be better to suffer and not to improve. As bad as jim crow was getting out of it was a good thing and going back to it is not a good thing.
Zero clue how you got this from my comment??? Ending Jim Crow was good, but claiming that Black boomers had it easy is fucked.
they did not have it easy they just lived in a better time when things were getting better. Right now we are coasting on things from that period and before and much has been reveresed.
If you live during a time when things get better that, by definition, means you also lived during a time when things used to be worse.
exactly and that is the point is things used to be better. again the change was in the 80's but they really did not degrade enough as started being felt more in the new millenium.
Incarceration rates started skyrocketing in the 70s and only got worse from there. Did you forget about the war on drugs and who the primary victims were?
The meme is that boomers had it easy. Black boomers objectively didn't. Black people have never had it easy in this country.
war on drugs. that is one of the eighties backsteps. doubling down on the bs. Where do you get the easy. its a question of relative direction and quality of the times. if you say never then you are saying whats happeing now a days is just fine. its all the same. again its driection. the voting rights act was from 1965 but the 2013ish gutting of it is showing up now in many of those states that were limited by it and they are now making last minute laws right before elections to curtail peoples right to vote. its not a good situation. its going backwards.
It started in 1971 under Nixon. The guy who said "You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*gger, n*gger, n*gger.” By 1968 you can’t say “n*gger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N*gger, n*gger.”
You are correct. It felt like nixon did not have the support in congress and the public such that he was sorta forced to do some things including conservation and he was sorta a one termer so his damage was a bit mitigated but it was really the start given we only had one of carter. The deregulation and tax decreases under reagan really got things going. It funny as im not sure before nixon but its the start of republican presidents not really winning elections free and clear. nixon (watergate), ford (in due to nixon), reagan (iran/contra), bush sr (coattails of reagan), bush jr (hanging chads florida supreme court decision), trump (voter suppression, gerrymandering, froeign interferance, at this point its everything and anything to get those technical electoral college wins)
Lol of course not, so I'll repeat myself and say it's funny how this never comes up in the "death to America" and "such and such is the West's fault" of the other hexbear posts you comment in. I know you're being a contrarian teenager right, but that's the kind of stuff that makes hexbear posters look dumb.
So mad about it that you had to mention it twice unprompted.
"Fellas, does mention common refrains of someone you're talking with make you MAD??"
I have no idea what you're even trying to say.
This thread is a circle jerk about how boomers had it easy. I just wanted to remind people that it was only the white ones that had it easy, and in particular, the able-bodied straight Christian men.