06-20-2018, 03:33 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-20-2018, 03:37 PM by Eric the Green.)
(06-20-2018, 12:26 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:I worked in factories myself, actually. I'm sure that their decline did not happen because boomers didn't want to work there, or were guided not to work there, or because they preferred to indulge in the awakening. They did not go away because boomers were encouraged to avoid them. Trump is trying, in his misguided way, to answer the desire of Rust Belt people to bring them back. But companies have shut them down and moved them overseas for cheap labor. Some might come back, but not all; we are a global economy now. And somehow cheap labor has to end; and I think it will as third world nations get richer thanks to our companies giving them jobs. But meanwhile, the computer geeks, the other line of roboticism I mentioned, has turned factory work and much other work over to robots. So now ready-made jobs to avoid poverty are going away. What will replace our income, if the CEOs who profit from robotic efficiency aren't required to share the benefits with the rest of us? Our conservative friends tell us that high tech will create new jobs, but it's a cinch they will require more education. Meanwhile, shouldn't there be more support for artistic vocations that don't readily pay a living wage? There are many other kinds of activity that inspire, help and teach people.(06-20-2018, 11:12 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: "Learning the basics" and "avoiding the temptations of the Awakening Era" and "indulging in the Boom awakening instead of setting up a strong economic basis" means that young boomers should not have aspired to anything, but just accepted life as just setting up economic bases for everything. It means accepting life as being robots in factories or computer geeks instead of discovering the potentials of life.
Boomers who had the chance eschewed industrial work that makes possible the material basis of their indulgence. Yes, school guidance counselors told us to do anything but factory work. Factory work is for losers, they all but said. But let us remember that the factory was the most readily-available means of escaping poverty that there ever was.
The mobility of Boomers depended upon automobiles (built, of course, in factories) and gasoline (processed of course in refineries, basically factories for separating gasoline from other stuff). We were oversold on the desirability of the service and retail sectors as areas of opportunity. Let us remember that the Boom Awakening was heavily a middle-class phenomenon associated with well-educated people. Smart people avoided factory work, and the decline in factory employment accelerated. The factories offered plenty of jobs for such people as cost accountants and production engineers.
Computer geeks? Many of them could not be anything else that pays well.
It's not favoring one thing over another; we need a healthy balance. I'm guessing that lots of people in their thirties working in fast-food places would rather, if given a chance work for union wages in an auto plant -- if the auto plant existed.
Quote:Quote:But in less materialist societies than ours throughout history, the arts have been valued and people devoted resources that they had to creating beauty. Instead, Gen Xers and other materialists of all ages (including phoney boomers) want to concentrate only on economics. As Joseph Campbell pointed out, that is the end of the story, not the beginning. Humans do not live by bread alone, but by the word of God. That means inspiration.
The arts flourish in prosperous times because people can buy objets d'art (even if they are 'velvet Elvis' paintings), buy theater and concert tickets, and pay admissions to art galleries. Art festivals flourish today because people actually can spend a couple hundred dollars for a painting or a sculpture. People who have some money from their jobs can decide that there is more to life than watching the idiot screen. If you want to know where life is 'all economics' then look to the world of the peasant farmer depicted in Fiddler on the Roof, where people are greedy and materialistic because such is a survival value. People marry for reasons other than love -- like economic reality. The descendants of the dairyman Tevye who end up in America can live for purposes other than material gain because they have the choice. They are prosperous, and they can buy the stuff in art festivals.
Yes, and yet people have been far less prosperous in earlier pre-industrial times, and yet were able to create and were supported in their creation of arts far greater than anything created today; both folk art and royal, church and aristocratic-supported art.
Quote:That, and the idea that we have all these abilities to experience and share great treasures, but create none ourselves, or not as much, because all the attention is given to the means of transmission and not to the content. And the newest means of transmission seem to cost more too.Quote:Awakenings are the only times that inspiration comes to Americans. It came in the late 60s and 70s. That inspiration during awakenings, including the extraordinarily-innovative turn of the 20th century awakening, fuels ALL progress that happens in all fields too. Where there is no vision, the people perish, and we are on the way to perishing without it. At other non-awakened times, our society is ONLY about material things, wars and technological gimmicks. Sure, the tech stuff can rake in the dough, but what has it created? Just more separations among people.
The tech stuff has given us more access to the great treasures of music, literature, and art. For that alone I praise it. I can listen to the Prague Spring Festival of 1990 through my stereo because of a tiny reader device that I have dedicated to my sound system as a sound source. It is equal in importance to my CD player as a sound source. The problem isn't that technology is sterile; it has an uncanny ability to fill gaps that people perceive in their lives. The problem is that many people see no need for something outside of work that they do so that they can consume mindless entertainment or buy questionable trinkets.
Quote:Quote:Gen Xers should appreciate the freedom they were given and the opportunities that came with being a smaller generation, and stop complaining about being neglected in childhood. Cry babies! It's time to grow up and work with those who want progress, especially the young millennials and Gen Zers. ALL generations are neglected in America, because we all live in a materialist, authoritarian, uninspired society that rejects awakenings and separates people from each other. We ALL grew up in a cold, materialist, rejecting society and in bad families. Child abuse was much worse for Silent and GI children and on into the past. I heard their stories. Gen X is not special in this regard. Being brought up as a boomer victory child in a nuke family with a tired and angry mean father authority figure was NO BETTER than being brought up neglected in a single parent family without the angry, tired father.
Generation X has been a force of positive change in American life. Consider that they have already given America a fine President and will probably give some more if Obama is a portent instead of a fluke. Obama fits the pattern of earlier Reactive Presidents (Washington, Adams, Truman, and Eisenhower) of a realist who knows the limits that morality establishes. Generation X is at least as creative as Boomers because it has less of a political or spiritual agenda. It has brought some ice-water realism, and that is exactly what Trump-era America needs. If Generation X has complained more about child abuse (and it includes those who expose the serial sex scandals of people like Bill Cosby and Donald Trump) it is because it is less inhibited about exposing misconduct of people supposedly wiser and who wield power and celebrity status.
The official abuse? The economic policies intended to punish Boomers for protesting and for rejecting the machine-driven world hit X instead. The crackdown on drugs hit X harder. The cost of education beyond high school skyrocketed for X, while college graduates were more likely to face rigid glass ceilings in the workplace. X has found ways to get around it, like avoiding bureaucratic organizations and starting small businesses. Tax policies intended to enrich elites have hurt young adults, X and Millennials.
X faces a government in which lobbyists are the real power in Congress and state legislatures. They have the most to lose in any war for profit that Trump may seek.
Neither materialism nor spirituality is everything. We need both.
Well, that fine but flawed president was a Boomer/Xer cusper and I always maintain he has both traits. I hope we get another such cusper president during this 4T.
I don't think Gen Xers are as creative as Boomers, nor Boomers as creative as their war baby Boom/Silent cusper elders. Music in particular has done nothing but decline since Gen Xers have been the creators and arbiters of taste. TV and movies have declined and become more tasteless and obscene too. And it's the spiritual and political agenda that powered much of the inspiration of the awakening, and it's from that time that the best arts and pop arts of our time come.
The economic policies have hurt all generations, and we all face the consequences of that lobbyist government. But I don't doubt that Xers were hit harder than Boomers, and Millennials hit harder than Xers. As I said though, X had the advantage of less competition from their populous peers.