Demon Boomers

Posted on slashdot in response to a post by a 20-something who was blaming his grandparent babyboomers for the big mess we're all in. They're all assholes, have all the money and all the power, selfish, entitled, and how they all had decent jobs available when they were his age. Not that a lot of it wasn't true, but he did seem to lump us all together a little more than I thought was warranted. Hence the following response:

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Nice to have someone to blame tho, eh? Frankly, I'd like to see you pissed off. Pissed off enough to do something about it. But I don't really get the sense you're pissed off enough, at least not yet.

Many of the boomers I know are still renting and have recently lost their jobs. Of those who do have houses, none of them are paid for. Even the boomer MDs I know aren't doing all that well-- while they take in a lot of money you'd be amazed at how much it takes to run a doctors office-- office rents, equipment, insurance, staff, services-- and they're getting squeezed on the incoming, mostly by the insurance industry-- the numbers on their tax returns may be larger, but they're also way more in debt than my jobless friends.

Sure, there are plenty of boomers with a lot of capital, opportunist corporate exec hucksters & elected official hustlers, for the most part, who've now pushed all the unskilled jobs overseas because they can circumvent the labor laws (maybe you'd like us to repeal those, so we can get the sweatshops back online-- there's a job fer ya, eh? Oh, but you have an edycation-- you don't want unskilled jobs anyway, do ya?). The thing is, whether boomers or not, historically, older people are more likely to VOTE. But the amount of money that goes into selling them a bill of goods is hard to resist (most of them aren't experts on governance, don't have the aptitude for it and/or are just trying to live their lives as best they can).

I think the real problem is attributable not to excesses of the "previous generation," but to plain old incompetence combined with an overabundance of those hustlers and hucksters, and if you haven't noticed, you're generation has no shortage of all that either. Darned human race, why haven't we all evolved into bleedin' geniuses by now? But those hucksters and hustlers sure know how to survive in a free-market anarchy, boy. Don't they?.

Many of the older generation were simply too ready to trust others to figure out things that were way over their head, and too easily fell for a slick song and dance that sounded good, and then fixated on being a "team player" and just follow their team and its sound-bite dogma right or wrong, because that's as deep as they can understand it. Not as many of them as as edycated as you are, whelp. So they either voted Republican, or voted Democrat, and trusted their team to make things right. If you do what you always do, you get what you always get. Maybe you'll be able to convince your generation to do something different. Many boomers thought so too, once. Years ago, when they were your age.

Maybe you'll just be able to do a better job. You want that job, don't you? I thought you did. Makes me feel better just knowin' that you're out there ready to jump in and fix it for us.