Parents' death

[Captain Genet]

How does a generation change after most of its members lose parents?

Especially with millennials, they are described as "boomerang young adults" who move back to their parents after a relationship fails. What will they do when mom and dad are gone?

[pbrower2a]

(07-08-2021, 05:25 AM)Captain Genet Wrote: How does a generation change after most of its members lose parents?

Especially with millennials, they are described as "boomerang young adults" who move back to their parents after a relationship fails. What will they do when mom and dad are gone?

I can speak in my case as a Boomer, losing both parents about two years apart, one from Parkinsonism and one from degradation of his capillaries. Neither was exactly a sudden death, so I had some idea of what was coming. My mother kept her rationality to the end except for jealousy (goes with the territory. My father had disposed his car, and we basically traded off some care-taking roles such as ensuring that she had omeone helping with meals. I also got her to take more exercise than she really wanted to do... but I saw that necessary for maintaining some dignity. 

After my mother died I did everything possible to keep my father's morale up. I got him to go to church again (it meant something after his old association with his Masonic lodge went sour. I would have been delighted to get him involved with the Lodge again, if with a different lodge. I got him to take some trips, and encouraged him to get involved with a widow. Whatever it takes. But eventually he took a fall going into the garage for a soft drink (I would have been glad to get it for him, of course), and after that his mental state deteriorated severely. He became violent and abusive. He asked me to come watch Opening Day on cable TV. Darth -- I mean Justin -- Verlander was pitching for the Detroit Tigers, and of course brilliantly as usual. Instead of discussing the game he tried to get me to take him home even though he was still recuperating from the broken knee. I refused. He told me that he was a coward and a disgrace... and for a long time I could not watch a Detroit Tigers game, then a part of my life for about fifty-five years. One day I dutifully visited him and my cousin was there with his son... and he tore me apart in their presence. I was in tears, and I don't go into tears easily. By then I recognized that there wasn't much left there.

I did see him on the last day of his life... on a Saturday night. He was dying, and I knew it. He could no longer regulate his body heat, and I figured that I would get a call the next day telling me that he had died. (None of this prissy "passed away" stuff for me). That night I tried to get the aid of a clergy... any clergy. So I had to play the role, reading the 23rd and 33rd Psalms. (The first of course is one of the best known, and the 33rd I know from a German translation in a setting of a Bach motet). 

I have problems, being on the autistic spectrum, so I have to be nudged away from troublesome situations. Maybe my parents overprotected me... and whatever passed for elder wisdom was something that I had to supply on my own part. Now I am one of the old geezers, and I have little guidance. I still am on the spectrum.

[Captain Genet]

I'm sorry to hear what you went through, PBrower 2a. After my father's death, I got more accepting of certain views for a few years. In 2015 I spent many hours browsing Mencius Moldbug's website, because of his cynical authoritarianism reminded me of Dad. But eventually, after 5 years or so, I got back to my centre-right communitarian views I held before Dad's death.

While starting the thread, I was thinking about:
https://www.futuretimeline.net/21stcentu...illennials

Now millennials despise libertarian economics, but this might change when their parents are no longer around and the millies inherit their money.

[pbrower2a]

(07-09-2021, 02:37 AM)Captain Genet Wrote: I'm sorry to hear what you went through, PBrower 2a. After my father's death, I got more accepting of certain views for a few years. In 2015 I spent many hours browsing Mencius Moldbug's website, because of his cynical authoritarianism reminded me of Dad. But eventually, after 5 years or so, I got back to my centre-right communitarian views I held before Dad's death.

The hard lesson that I learned from my father's descent into a vicious personality that would have been good only for a prison term had he not Lost It due to mental degradation is that many people are what they are only because they are under social constraints against releasing the monsters. My father was a manager, and tearing someone down in the presence of others is something that one just does not do. Praise publicly and punish or even correct privately. Maybe criminals are free from such restraints, but the rules that apply among long-term jailbirds necessary for survival in prison or among Mafiosi do not work in a society in which people are expected to defer to customers, clients, and bosses for the maximization of profits at the expense of individuality and self-esteem. I have been a substitute teacher more than anything else, and as you can imagine, discipline is much trickier than is teaching the material. I have the fear that underneath a veneer of civility and Christian ethics (in view of my personality I would have been better off being raised Jewish) I have that Monster lurking -- something bigoted, cruel, selfish, and angry. For4tunately for me I have little arm strength and must run from fights, and I am unlikely to throw stuff as my father did with a large radio. 

Probably because my adult life has been under the thrall of people who have power, indulgence, and gain (get it -- P.I.G., as in the ruling class in George Orwell's Animal Farm... after I read that I invariably get a taste for ham and pork chops) above all else, including all decency toward the rest of humanity I could see danger in any ideology other than humanism. I got cynical about almost all institutions except those that educate (little is more  practical, and even our most rapacious elites know this... and people who are legitimately well-educated are more likely to find abusive behavior by economic elites intolerable, as has been shown in authoritarian societies), preserve or promote knowledge, or do creative activity. Corrupt and inequitable as America got in the neoliberal era, which is practically my whole adult life, I could only be abused and exploited by the economic elites and those in government who do their bidding. If there were ever a time in which to question the assumption of the value of life over an extended time, this was it, even without the overt totalitarianism of fascism, Marxism-Leninism, Apartheid, or Islamism. The rapacious elites could even corrupt churches that told people (this is secularized Calvinism) that God blesses the rich and powerful and those who are not rich and powerful deserve their poverty and subjection. 

The system could corrupt even me to some extent to believe that happiness was largely material, even if I was wise enough to see through advertising. I recognized the word luxury as a scam because even if a vice (it means excess, waste, and ostentation) it was being offered as a virtue as if it were something more valuable, like love, wisdom, or integrity. The other Orwell masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, demonstrates above all else  the complete debasement of life that comes from debasing language so that people can only obey elites or destroy themselves... and if a literary critic finds that the romance between Winston and Julia has no sizzle it is because the system ensures that people cannot develop intimacy because the language has been stripped even of the means of expressing intimacy. Without deep intimacy, love does not exist but the primitive sex drive (either whoring or outright rape) becomes animalistic. 

We all know about the metaphorical School of Hard Knocks. The only good thing to say of it is that it has open enrollment without any need for pesky College Board scores or grade transcripts that can deny entrance to any schools other than diploma mills, and does not cost huge cash outlays. One learns one's lessons the hard way, and that is the recognition that against those who have the wealth and bureaucratic power one is almost certainly a pitiable lose, and that any good that one gets out of life comes at the expense of selling out everyone else to the rich-and-powerful. It's a return of the Gilded Age without the opportunity for starting a small business to evade being treated badly as an employee. 

My response to "Suffer for my greed, you peon! Know your place under MY thrall" is "I HATE LIFE"... well, at least as that person defines life for me or tries to.      

Quote:While starting the thread, I was thinking about:
https://www.futuretimeline.net/21stcentu...illennials

Now millennials despise libertarian economics, but this might change when their parents are no longer around and the millies inherit their money.

There isn't so much inherited wealth that one might expect to make life easy. Much of it is in real estate, and residential real estate is valuable only if one can sell it and pocket the difference while downsizing. Nursing homes devoured my parents' assets and ensured that I would have a harsh old age. At this point I often regret that I was even born -- or at least that being a human being in an inhuman social order is less satisfying than being a beloved pet or cherished horse. 

Lonely as life can be, I look at the harsh social order, and I am glad that I had no children for the System to abuse and exploit economically through old-fashioned sweating or through becoming cannon fodder in Wars for Profit. 

Libertarian economics have become largely irrelevant, mostly because the elites who once saw Big Government as a welfare state failed to see the profit possible in it... until they found Big Government a means of enforcing the terms of crony capitalism, the new American Way of Life. Although I would not adopt their extreme anti-intellectualism, I have come to recognize the Old Order Amish as having the only economic order that works without gross injustice. Their world has no use for bureaucracy, so it has no capi9talist equivalent of the old Soviet nomenklatura.  Yes, it is possible to exploit people even if one does not own the assets, as the Soviet nomenklatura did... and that is the message behind the modern fable Animal Farm. 

I do not see America  reverting to libertarianism except in the wake of such a calamity as a war that destroys everything but a remnant of the people consigned to starting over with technology of the pre-electrical era. If Phoenix is largely unscathed and a place like Minneapolis is rubble, they will largely go to Minneapolis or the like because one needs air conditioning to tolerate Phoenix. One can dress for the cold, if necessary in animal hides. People will re-learn how to mill grain and build their own huts. People will get their information from printing presses that operate on muscle power. People will re-learn how to use horses in drayage and in farming.  Such a war is unthinkable -- perhaps until AGW makes a mess of the world order and compels people to fight for survival by taking over "virgin lands" when their peasant holdings are inundated. Think of all the potential for apocalyptic war around 2100! That, I fear, is the next Crisis, one that will make this one look like a High by contrast. 

Libertarianism does not fit a bureaucratic order in which plenty of people have nice jobs because the tycoons prefer that people shuffle papers so that they can afford Buick, Chrysler, and Honda vehicles; spend money on McMansions; wear flashy clothes; and enjoy two weeks' paid vacation. The alternative is that smart people might start reading Karl Marx or some Christian version of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and drawing conclusions unsettling to the elites -- and find plenty of disgruntled people among the proles to make a revolution possible.

[David Horn]

(07-08-2021, 05:25 AM)Captain Genet Wrote: How does a generation change after most of its members lose parents?

Especially with millennials, they are described as "boomerang young adults" who move back to their parents after a relationship fails. What will they do when mom and dad are gone?

As a represenative of an elder generation, I've warned many of my age group to keep help down to the most basic level.  Generating an ongoing dependence when independance should be the goal, harms both generations.  No, we should never throw our children to the wolves, but pampering isn't wise either.

[Anthony '58]

My mother died on October 30 of last year (at the age of 88) and my father died on January 24 of this year (at the age of 90).

Thank G-d for them - they were both "Always Trumpers" - they never lived to see the "damage" that the Biden Administration is doing.

[pbrower2a]

(11-11-2021, 09:59 AM)Anthony Wrote: My mother died on October 30 of last year (at the age of 88) and my father died on January 24 of this year (at the age of 90).

Thank G-d for them - they were both "Always Trumpers" - they never lived to see the "damage" that the Biden Administration is doing.

My father was a life-long Republican. He was distressed when I became a liberal Democrat about the time of Watergate. Maybe I met people very different from those that I knew as children in rural Michigan. 

He saw through Donald Trump for his cruelty, demagoguery, hollowness, and narcissism. People of little substance often get full of themselves, and I could explain that. He voted for John Kasich in the primary election, and as Trump won primaries and consolidated the nomination he got even more arrogant. Donald Trump is everything wrong with the Idealist pattern --- arrogant, ruthless, and self-indulgent as salient vices while being weak on erudition and expression of a viable morality. I concede that he is decisive, but he is decisively wrong.

Yes, I am a Boomer, and I am satisfied that a Boomer who has a well-defined culture and a capacity for moral discretion and can express such decisively and convincingly -- but has toned down the arrogance, learned to recognize the validity of restraints upon fanaticism and narrow-mindedness, and has come to recognize material excess as a trap can relate to people not Boomers. I can assure you that Boomers who have done real work have learned what they cannot get away with among others who don't have everything made for them because they are born with silver spoons in their mouths. People who realize that there is more to life than 'sex&drugs&rock-n-roll', bureaucratic power, class privilege, and material indulgence can relate to people who have endured hardscrabble lives.

Note well: the GI childhood was rarely one of material ease, especially if one's parents were marginal farmers or industrial laborers. The Millennial childhood of the children of toilers isn't as easy as that of kids born into the Boomer childhood of the small-screen Ward,June, and "Beaver" Cleaver. Someone like Donald Trump cannot relate to Millennial adults who have not had easy lives. Trump got elected under freakish circumstances, and the American electorate turned on him.

I at least understand the people who believe that life can be best only if people accept the streamlining of regulations, tax cuts for investors and executives, the evisceration of labor unions, wage cuts, reductions in welfare, and the further concentration of wealth and power because such will create more productive capacity, create more opportunities in industrial work, allow more opportunity for the formation of small business and of course ensure that there will be more income to go around. That's trickle-down economics, which has some defense. What Trump and most of the Right now stands for is an aristocratic order in which entrenched elites keep getting richer by limiting opportunity and creating and intensifying scarcity for minimal wages and maximal prices. The aristocratic elite fares best when it makes the lives of proles and peons worse, which implies pathology of economics, politics, and human relations. Note well that the bulk of America's immigrants from the Irish potato famine to the chaos of the First World War left aristocratic societies in which they had no chance for a better life. Trump is for making America resemble a nightmare that your grandparents or great-grandparents fled.

Donald Trump can roast in Hell, so far as I am concerned.