06-05-2022, 08:59 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-05-2022, 09:04 PM by JasonBlack.)
disclaimer: keep in mind I'm being relatively conservative with blame here, as I didn't think it was fair to lump them in with the current woke nonsense, as that is primarily the doing of Gen X and Millennials.
imo, boomers get a lot of blame for things that millennials need to blame themselves for. Be that as it may, there is one area in which boomers as a whole were an absolute fucking disgrace: education
1) Teaching us to view the stable, loving nuclear households they grew up in with contempt
2) Not only did they fail to prepare us for the real world, they flippantly made excuses about how that wasn't their job in the first place
3) Utter nonsense rhetoric like "follow your passion", "if you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life"
4) Virtually no education on budgeting, credit, planning for living arrangements after college. as with their views on nuclear families, the very concept of focusing on money was held in contempt by most of them.
5) Lots of talk about "compassion", very little gut level understanding of what it is or how to practice it. Correspondingly, millennials picked up on the bleeding heart sing-around-the-campfire side of compassion, but they learned little of the more quiet compassion and decency that help people in your community with whom you have face to face interactions get along.
6) Irresponsibly pushing expensive degree programs on confused late teens who where never educated about other options like military, trades or just something as simple as...spending a year or two in the workforce before you make such an important decision
7) Worse yet, many of those degrees would have obviously failed to produce jobs to anyone 30+ with even a modicum of ability to research
8) Anyone remember job training programs? ...yeah, not many of those around these days.
9) An attitude about relationships which was similar to point 3: utterly selfish, irresponsible and all centered around "passion", as if relationships were meant as nothing more than an amorous dalliance, rather than a family structure necessary to provide healthy environments for children and ensure that society had more stable, well-adjusted citizens.
Whether it was the more conservative "because I said so" boomers, or the more liberal "he needs to find his own path" boomers, both my parents and about 80-90% of my teachers can only be accused of intellectual laziness and sheer neglect of duty with regards to giving millennials (and Gen X, and, to a lesser extent, Zoomers) the tools to deal with reality as it is, rather than as it should be.
I'm one of the lucky ones in that I've always been an intensely cynical person who wants people to put their money where their mouth is, but even so, knowing what not to do doesn't automatically mean you know what to do instead. At 30, I'm just figuring out all kinds of things someone could have easily told me 15 years ago, but I was let down by a host of elders during a time when I actively sought out guidance, and my 20s were a lot harder than they needed to be as a result. Meanwhile, several of my other friends are much poorer than me with a smaller network of stable contacts. Many more are in ten (even hundreds!) of thousands of dollars in debt, and a few have even killed themselves. Millennial women, who are rapidly leaving their last fertile years, have even more reason to be angry about this than I do, because you can recover from poverty or a bad economy. You cannot recover your lost window to have a child. I'm not being dramatic when I say that a huge percentage of boomers have blood on their hands.
PS: by and large, I'm grateful to have the parents I do, and in most other areas, I would give them high marks in terms of performance, but with regards to this topic in particular....hell no. A D+ is generous, and they were far from the worst offenders.
imo, boomers get a lot of blame for things that millennials need to blame themselves for. Be that as it may, there is one area in which boomers as a whole were an absolute fucking disgrace: education
1) Teaching us to view the stable, loving nuclear households they grew up in with contempt
2) Not only did they fail to prepare us for the real world, they flippantly made excuses about how that wasn't their job in the first place
3) Utter nonsense rhetoric like "follow your passion", "if you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life"
4) Virtually no education on budgeting, credit, planning for living arrangements after college. as with their views on nuclear families, the very concept of focusing on money was held in contempt by most of them.
5) Lots of talk about "compassion", very little gut level understanding of what it is or how to practice it. Correspondingly, millennials picked up on the bleeding heart sing-around-the-campfire side of compassion, but they learned little of the more quiet compassion and decency that help people in your community with whom you have face to face interactions get along.
6) Irresponsibly pushing expensive degree programs on confused late teens who where never educated about other options like military, trades or just something as simple as...spending a year or two in the workforce before you make such an important decision
7) Worse yet, many of those degrees would have obviously failed to produce jobs to anyone 30+ with even a modicum of ability to research
8) Anyone remember job training programs? ...yeah, not many of those around these days.
9) An attitude about relationships which was similar to point 3: utterly selfish, irresponsible and all centered around "passion", as if relationships were meant as nothing more than an amorous dalliance, rather than a family structure necessary to provide healthy environments for children and ensure that society had more stable, well-adjusted citizens.
Whether it was the more conservative "because I said so" boomers, or the more liberal "he needs to find his own path" boomers, both my parents and about 80-90% of my teachers can only be accused of intellectual laziness and sheer neglect of duty with regards to giving millennials (and Gen X, and, to a lesser extent, Zoomers) the tools to deal with reality as it is, rather than as it should be.
I'm one of the lucky ones in that I've always been an intensely cynical person who wants people to put their money where their mouth is, but even so, knowing what not to do doesn't automatically mean you know what to do instead. At 30, I'm just figuring out all kinds of things someone could have easily told me 15 years ago, but I was let down by a host of elders during a time when I actively sought out guidance, and my 20s were a lot harder than they needed to be as a result. Meanwhile, several of my other friends are much poorer than me with a smaller network of stable contacts. Many more are in ten (even hundreds!) of thousands of dollars in debt, and a few have even killed themselves. Millennial women, who are rapidly leaving their last fertile years, have even more reason to be angry about this than I do, because you can recover from poverty or a bad economy. You cannot recover your lost window to have a child. I'm not being dramatic when I say that a huge percentage of boomers have blood on their hands.
PS: by and large, I'm grateful to have the parents I do, and in most other areas, I would give them high marks in terms of performance, but with regards to this topic in particular....hell no. A D+ is generous, and they were far from the worst offenders.
ammosexual
reluctant millennial
reluctant millennial