09-06-2016, 03:18 PM
(09-04-2016, 07:47 PM)Galen Wrote:(09-04-2016, 05:21 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:(09-04-2016, 02:07 AM)Galen Wrote:(09-04-2016, 01:19 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(09-04-2016, 12:19 AM)Galen Wrote: Yes, for the most part, and it never really ended. What happened is that once the question of their fighting in the Vietnam war to their satisfaction and defeated the hated Nixon they then took the rest of the decade off in a cocaine fueled bout of hedonism. By 1982 they all got religion and half of them went back to Christianity. It was the perfect set up for the Culture Wars and the current situation.
Galen and Eric tend to indulge in what I call 'vile stereotypes'. They have spliced together the worst aspects of members of their opposite cultures into ugly caricatures, and will try to sell their venom as if it represents the culture of their political rivals. They are highly partisan and as such are making no attempt to understand or sympathize with people who disagree with them.
There is a couple of things that you are forgetting. One is that I don't really do red or blue and both teams tend to embody the worst of the Boomers. While their objectives may be different the means often tend to be the same.
(09-04-2016, 01:19 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: The awakening was a brief though glorious dream time. Eric is in some ways an echo of it. Not a total echo. Most blue boomers aren't into astrology or mysticism. Eric has become something of a hawk of late, which is not representative of the old anti-war hippies. Most blue boomers did grow out of the awakening mood, and got into wives, family, jobs and (shudder) disco. They in time outgrew the disco as well. As much as anyone on this forum, though, Eric might give you some impression of hippie culture. I'm a blue boomer too, though. Not all blue boomers are totally alike. Beware vile stereotypes. Don't judge the United States as a scrambled collection of hateful partisan propaganda.
Eric the (Green) is not merely an echo but rather still acts as if its 1968. If he were living in Oregon he would have moved to Eugene which is where all the hippies went, this process started about 1985. In the present Eugene seems to be populated by militant vegans. A friend of mine was working at HP when one of them complained to her about eating a hamburger during a meeting. In typical Xer fashion she started eating hamburgers at this vegan. Militant vegans are the only people on Earth it is possible to eat a hamburger at.
Here is one thing you need to know about politics: Seventy percent of the population doesn't really matter because they are just picking the lesser of evils. The remaining thirty percent are the ones that do matter because they are busy lining up the rest who do about as much thinking as a herd of cattle. This is the crowd that tends to embody the worst of any population because they are doing even less thinking than the herd is.
Bob is looking back on the Awakening as a good time because for most of the Boomers it was. They were simply too blitzed out or self-absorbed to notice much of anything. The rest of us really didn't enjoy the experience.
You are trafficking in stereotypes again.
1. People can be priced into a vegan diet. It is safer and less expensive, and probably healthier. I'm from a farm family, and at my age going vegetarian would be almost as much a denial of the family culture as getting involved in an interracial marriage.
2. People are not voting for the 'lesser evil'; a very bad nominee like George McGovern got 37.52% of the popular vote in 1972. 36.54% of the electorate voted for Alf Landon against the FDR steamroller in 1936. I'm not saying that either was a really bad politician; it's just that everything went wrong with them as campaigners. Do you really want to say that people who voted for Landon or McGovern were parts of the herd?
You are likely to find demographics (college-educated people in 1936 for Landon, blacks in 1972 for McGovern) who 'voted wrong'.
3. The Boom Awakening may have been the optimal time for me to be a teenager. Even my authoritarian parents had to lighten up a bit.
I have encountered plenty of militant vegans myself in the People's Republic of Portland and they behave in much the same way out of the same sense of outraged moral superiority. There just seem to be more of them in Eugene. Ironically, one group that often goes vegetarian and does not generally behave this way are the Seventh-Day Adventists.
Given the rather limited choices, in reality they are voting for the lesser of evils. Clearly there is some disagreement on what lesser evil might actually be. In the end the herd tends to either vote for one of the major parties and refuse in general to consider any other possibility. When I ask people about that they invariably tell me that they don't want to vote for someone who can't possibly win. Sounds like herd behavior to me.
As I said before, it may have been good for you but it tended to suck for anybody else. The usual self-absorbed behavior I have come to expect from Boomers in general.
The militant Vegan wackos are of all generations, and most Vegans actually hate the wackos.
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