03-14-2017, 12:56 PM
(03-14-2017, 11:57 AM)beechnut79 Wrote:(03-10-2017, 10:22 PM)gabrielle Wrote: I like Boomers a lot more now that they are getting older. I used to dislike them when I was young, but maybe it's really that I just don't like middle-aged people. Now that I am one myself, I know it can be a rough time; the perks of youth have fled and the responsibilities have piled on. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy--or sometimes an asshole who descends into a destructive middle age crisis (I know a few people who have). But get a little older and you can mellow out and enjoy life again.
But anyway, because of all the abuse they are getting lately from some of the younger males on these forums, I want to use this thread as an opportunity to say I appreciate the older Boomers here and enjoy reading their posts, which are generally intelligent and articulate. Some of their detractors, in contrast, spout incoherent, typo-ridden messes, and others are glib and insulting without saying much of any value.
I can't help in many ways feel as though we might have a better, or at least a kinder, gentler world today had the Boomer stuck with their youthful idealism throughout their lives? Does society's recipe not allow for that? As a Boomer cusper myself, I have had much disdain for the road most, or at least a significant portion, of my generation travelled. Seemed to be thm who caused much of our current malaise. When you try to build a life on rocky planes you will inevitably get unstable bridges. That is where we're at today, not only due to crumbling physical infrastructre, but that applied to the society as well. If we could remove the rocks, imagine what could happen. Yet, it will take effort, yet it will be well worth it.
The fault with Boomer idealism in the 1960s was its poor connection to reality. Adjust it some to make pragmatic and logical appeals to people who want a better world for themselves and their children, and it might establish some lofty purposes. No "Peace-Love-Dope" stuff, though.
The Right-Wing Boomers have dominated recent history, and they show everything that can be wrong with an Idealist generation -- the sorts of people who believe that their exploitation is some lofty, noble purpose. See the loud Transcendental proponents of slavery not as as a necessary evil but instead as a marvelous way of doing things.
People who believe that no human suffering is in excess so long as the right people reap the benefits are likely to end up sidelined, disgraced, or even killed. I can imagine an insular, irrational, inequitable, and corrupt leadership that disgraces itself in some military or ecological disaster being overthrown in a revolution that insists upon reason, equity, purity, and community as in the French Revolution.
Was the regeneracy of the 1930s anything like the 'Gay Nineties'? Not in the least. America is not in the mood for an Awakening, and won't be for at least thirty years. But we can have a better America, one in which more people have a chance, and one more ready to meet any clear and present danger. We can still also have America becoming an Evil Empire that the rest of the world must overthrow if there is to be any semblance of a good future as was so with the Axis Powers.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
