Imagine...The Fucking of the Boomers...

[catnhatnh]

It's been an ongoing meme that the boomers were an easy slide, over-entitled generation, destined to break the social security system. They were raised in a different, simpler, and more promising time. They graduated to ample jobs and increasing wages and will soon bury later generations under a tidal wave of retirement debt. The spawn of the greatest generation gave little and will take much. Grasping self-centered smucks ready to suck the common weal dry. Bullshit. I'm one of them.

To be a boomer was many things. Born between 1945-1960 the changes came so fast it would be a joke to call us homogeneous. The oldest males of that generation born between '45 and '55 were draft bait for Vietnam where 2.5 million served. Millions more danced for deferments or exiled themselves or otherwise avoided a war the the involved Secretary of State later deplored. The oldest females started in poodle skirts and bobby sox but were on the line protesting when two were shot at Kent State. Oh yeah, some who avoided the Vietnam thing were beaten jailed and a few killed because we thought negroes had rights. Boomers were why that Asian war ended.

And then we went to work.It was a magic time as we married and settled down to chase the dream of a life even better than the one our greatest generation parents had. And when a soap salesman was elected in 1980 we barely noticed except to snicker. How funny that "Morning in America" really meant that the postwar gains of the middle class had reached it's high water mark.

That was it-in 1980 the oldest boomer was 35 and the youngest 20 and their average wage then was what it is now. Productivity rose. Inflation rose. Kids were born and interest, energy, and living cost rose. And payroll never has.

Today simple things from grains, to bacon (pork bellies) to all manner of even simple food are exploited by speculative traders. Oil has been so long manipulated as to make every heating season a fight between freezing to death and eating. The oldest of us are retiring to social security alone since the last thirty years of corporate greed has eaten even whatever meager savings we managed.

So here we sit, dazed and confused. We believed what we were told and started mostly hoping for the best and finished praying against the worst. We ain't and weren't except for a brief half decade fat and sassy. And for my generation I reject the meme...

[redqueen]

1. "when a soap salesman was elected in 1980 we barely noticed except to snicker"

...

‎"The time has come to stop being our brother's keeper." - Ronald Reagan, 1967

"I'd like to harness their youthful energy with a strap."--Concerning student demonstrations in California, 1966

"The entire graduated income tax structure was created by Karl Marx. It has no justification in getting government revenue."--During the 1966 gubernatorial campaign in California

"We should declare war on North Vietnam. We could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it, and still be home by Christmas."--1966

"Welfare recipients are a faceless mass waiting for a handout."--1966

"The time has come to stop being our brother's keeper."--Concerning welfare budget cuts in California, 1967

"A tree's a tree. How many do you need to look at?"--Concerning the expansion of California's Redwood National Forest, 1967

"Let me point out that my administration makes no bones about being business-oriented."--As California governor, 1967

"If it's a bloodbath they want, let's get it over with."--Concerning student demonstrations, 1970

"It's just too bad we can't have an epidemic of botulism."--In response to the Hearst family's free food giveaway to the poor as partial ransom for their daughter Patricia, Kidnapped by the SLA terrorist group, 1974

"We have a different regard for human life than those monsters do."--On the subject of Communists, 1980

"I'm not smart enough to lie."--Response to an inquiry about his qualifications for the presidency, 1980

----------------


I rec'd your post because I agree... but that one statement, about a snicker... that, I had to comment on. And the best comment I could think of was to post an indication of how very not-funny that should have been. I was young, but I remember his election. I remember knowing better than to think it was anything to laugh about.

[BlancheSplanchnik]

4. these are some hella quotes, redqueen. thanks!

I came along at the end of the baby boom, and wasn't paying much attention to Reagan or any politics.

These quotes give a fine outline of him. NOt flattering.


(love your Lucretia Mott quote too)

[DURHAM D]

11. No snicker here.

I went into a total funk the night Reagan was elected. I thought I knew exactly what it meant for us going forward. I was wrong, it has been worse not just for my generation but for all generations. I hate and have always hated that mother f*cker.

snicker? I cried for days.

[Remember Me]

13. No snicker here either

I kept looking at him, looking around me, furrowing my brow and trying to figure out how the HELL that old dope could con so many people, so many of my fellow Americans. They loved him -- and I thought, well, I could see through him.

Then later I could see we really created a problem for ourselves letting a whole generation grow up under 12 years of Republican rule. :puke:

[Raster]

20. Ronnie the Raygun truly signified Mourning in America

[mistertrickster]

26. Right. I thought Americans would wake up after Reagan, but it just got worse. nt

[Tsiyu]

32. I cried as well

I was calling him the anti-christ, I was so sick even about the possibility of his being elected. My rightwing inlaws at the time just about kicked my ass.

At the time I worked at Scottish Rite in Atlanta. When all these babies started coming down with AIDS, and Reagan completely ignored the disease, I felt like my country had been abandoned by any reason and left to demons..I still do.

[Blue_In_AK]

16. I didn't snicker either when RR became president.

I was living in California when he was govenror, so I knew what we were in for. The day he was elected president was a very depressing day.

[freshwest]

17. I didn't laugh or snicker when RR was installed. I was terrified. And everything I feared happened.

[CanSocDem]

23. Absolutely.

Your quotes illustrate why it is somewhat disingenuous to include 6 and 7 year olds, in the time of Reagan, with the 18 and 20 year olds at the time, who were the true boomers.

The election of RR was hardly a "snicker" to those of us who were aware of his tenure at the U of Ca and his infamous "...let there be a bloodbath" pronouncement. We knew very well, who he was and who he represented long before he became POTUS. As has been said before on DU, he was the beginning of the end.

.

[CrispyQ]

24. The day he was elected, I call "my 1980 moment." I became completely disillusioned.

And when the hostages were released on his inauguration day I had such anger at the Americans who voted for this puppet, who were so ignorant that they didn't see how they had been manipulated. I was also angry at them for rejecting Carter's message of conservation & energy independence. I didn't vote for 20 years.

I often wonder where we would be energy wise if Carter had won re-election. Maybe not so far as I would like to think, but certainly farther than where we are now, do you think?

~heavy sigh.

[hunter]

27. Reagan didn't take down the Soviet Union...

... he took down the USA.

[midnight]

2. I like the part about the boomers being some entitled group...

Oddly many are figuring out they have been robbed by the hedge fund thieves of their retirement, others are being kicked hard for wanting health care, or an increase in their wages to keep up with the cost of living. Maybe this will be a powerful group that says no more to being lied to, or cheated out of a dignified way of life...

[CrispyQ]

25. Scan the photos of Occupy movements across the nation. All ages are represented!

It's not just kids, like the media is portraying. Even on this site, it's common to refer to the OWS movement as kids.







...and lastly, this guy's not a kid!



The pain is inflicted across all age groups. Raising retirement ages & cutting medicare & SS only leads seniors to work longer, which in turn affects the job market.

I know a lot of seniors & soon-to-be-seniors, that don't need income as much as medical benefits. If my medical is taken care of via medicare (or better yet, a single payer system!), I would be happy to work a few hours at the bagel shop across the street & let the kids have the higher paying IT job, but if I have to work for medical benefits, then I need the higher paying IT job, because it offers benefits, whereas the part time bagel job does not.

Divide & conquer is the best strategy TPTB have & it's worked very well for them so far.

[pink-o]

3. The whole idea of us bleeding through Social Security really works my last nerve.

Look, RW talking point idiots: I know math is hard and facts have a liberal bias, but consider this simple equation (simple enough even for them) There's a whole huge demographic of us, right? Which means we as a generation have been working and paying into the system for a long time, enriching it with our contributions. Personally, I've been a taxpayer since I was 18 years old, almost 40 years of SS deductions and the shear numbers of the rest of us (most who're still working) should mean that the SS system should be overflowing. If it isn't then don't blame us, we've been contributing for a long, long time.

Furthermore, WTF is wrong with the GOOPERS that they DON'T wanna give us our SS payments? In a rational world, you'd be encouraging us oldies to get the hell outta the workforce and throw money at us to leave our jobs for younger workers. Instead, the R idiots in Congress just talk about raising the retirement age. Ass clowns! :grr: :grr: :grr:

Sometimes I feel like Boxer the workhorse in Animal Farm. Just keep plodding along till we're too old to hack it, then off to the Glue Factory with us.

[Scuba]

7. Plus, plus, plus. Thanks.

[tech3149]

9. What almost no one mentions about the boomer gereration

Is that we were the first generation to fund both our and our parents SS.

[DURHAM D]

10. + 1 Million

Not just SS but their Medicare as well.

My parents knew it and spoke of if often. They were generally put out with their contemporaries who refused to acknowledge that their boomer children were funding their retirement perks.

[catnhatnh]

12. My Dad was a Union Guy with a Small pension...

But his SS meant he lived OK on money paid for by boomers. When he was paying into the system he was paying on an income of less than 10k per year or $750 per year and ended around $4000 per year...which was about a quarter of what he received his first year of retirement. He lived for more than 10 years after retiring and received more than his payments and accrued interest would have been. And I was glad for it and wish he had lived longer. I'm not sure he realized it. To my mind maybe the extra was for those organizing years when his union was weak-when he finished the company standard was the current Teamster contract plus five cents an hour for the mechanics who were required to have a tractor trailer license-he said the mechanics could do a drivers job (move a truck) but a driver could not do his (fix a truck). He Was the greatest generation and always believed with union wages the SS fund would always be flush.

[DURHAM D]

15. My Dad was a WWII vet and a part of what you call the Greatest Generation.

My parents hated that term. They felt it implied that their generation was better than those who came before and those who came after.

And further that that attitude created and supported public policy which allowed their generation to feel "entitled" at the expense of their children and grandchildren.

[unblock]

5. sidebar, but there's virtually no pork belly speculation these days.

now that there's good year-round demand for bacon, there's little need to freeze and store pork bellies for months and months, and therefore very little time-based price risk. ergo, very little need to create a pork belly futures contract in the first place.

the cme delisted pork bellies futures contracts in july 2011.

[catnhatnh]

6. So bacon rose over 33% last year....

while no other pork product has risen so rapidly because pigs have ceased to have the same amount of bacon yielding portions per pig?

[unblock]

18. so financial speculators managed to do it without an instrument with which to financially speculate?

while it's certainly true that a futures market enable rapid price movements by speculators as well as producers, it's quite difficult for speculators to do this without a futures market.

that leaves producers, who can simply jack up their prices in response to things like the skyrocketing price of corn feed and chinese demand for bacon. apparently they live and die on cigarettes and bacon there.

oh, and without a liquid futures market that lets them hedge, producers have to charge their customers a premium for whatever price risk they face. though as mentioned before, the price risk isn't nearly what it once was given that they normally trade fresh bellies year-round instead of frozen.

can't say i know as much about the price of non-bacon pork products, but not all parts need show the same price changes because different parts face different competition and different consumers. if the price of pork chops go up too much, i might just buy a steak instead. but if bacon goes up, i'm just paying more for my bacon, dammit!

[PoliticAverse]

8. Pork Belly futures stopped trading July 18, 2011.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_belly#Pork_belly_futures

[Remember Me]

14. Excellent essay -- I'm bookmarking it for later

for when the resentful whatever younger generation starts on one of their anti-Boomer tirades.

I have come to believe that the folks who run the international economy decided to yank the rug out from under us so that we never again had the ability to organize and mobilize like we did to stop the Vietnam war. If you remember, it was not long after that that we hand funaway inflation in the 20+ percent range and the economy simply ... changed. It became no longer possible to raise a family on one income. And so forth.

[lovuian]

19. Yes it is screw you Boomers

I think they forgot we were the Protesters of the Vietnam war some of us fought in that war

If they want protesters ...we can show them protesters!!!

I loved Ryan's constituents yelling at him

http://youtu.be/Glzma7r-BOI

If they screw with us ...they haven't seen nothing yet

http://youtu.be/7jvwtr2fN1U

We ended the Vietnam War We ended the draft and we got Nixon to leave the Whitehouse

OWS has that look to it and it scares the heck out of them

the Republicans are in a massive implosion

[southernyankeebelle]

21. Am a boomer. While I never was on the protest line I did support civil

rights and stood with the protests. I grew up in a large family and I worked as a kid to help my family to put cloths on our backs and food on our table. I always felt it was a duty to help your family. I wasn't a spoiled brat. We were lucky to get one gift at christmas. We made sure we had a wonderful christmas meal that the whole family could enjoy. It was family time.

[Enthusiast]

22. kr Great post, catnhatnh!

Boomer too.

[WillyT]

28. Most Excellent Post !!! - K & R !!!

:yourock:

:hi:

:kick:

[malthaussen]

29. My Boom was more of a bust...

... by the time I graduated from college, the employment situation was already bad and getting steadily worse. That old supply and demand thing has been the biggest impact on US labor since the end of WWII. The "idyllic" '50s and early '60s were driven by the scarcity of workers and the high demand for them. And I did not snicker when Ray-gun was nominated nor elected: I was too sick to snicker.

The Boomer group, like so many other groups, is way too vast and diverse to make sweeping generalizations about it. (Including that one, lol)

-- Mal

[Zorra]

30. It's their own fault. I'm of the "boomer" generation.

We got a lot of good things done in the 60's and early 70's. Probably the biggest thing we did was putting into motion the evolving process of raising the awareness of the nation that the government was totally full of shit after the Gulf of Tonkin incident. We raised the consciousness of the nation for all time by making it OK to question authority and bringing into the light all kinds of issues that were not mentioned as a matter of decorum before the shit totally hit the fan in the '60s. Civil Rights, Women's Rights, the insanity of war, the destruction of the environment, the greed and thoughtlessness of corporations, etc, all these things were enculturated into the national consciousnees forever by the 60's movement that may be considered a primitive ancestor of the current OWS movement.

While an aware group of leftover "radicals" from the 60's and early 70's were screaming our heads off at the rest of our generation to wake up and smell the fascism after the end of the Vietnam War, many boomers were busy turning into apathetic yuppies and disco zombies. While Reagan was busy dismantling the country, they were apathetically dancing the night away to the comfortably numbing sounds of disco, blissfully not paying any attention to us when we were screaming at them to look around them and see what was happening to the country.

I'm really not sorry if this is offensive to anyone. I totally blame you for the current state of the world. You watched in bovine stupefaction and mocked us as relics of a dead ideal as you welcomed a new era of fascist control under Reagan.

They didn't want to hear it. All that hippie shit was over and done with. I'm still pissed off about this, and I refuse to take any heat for the failure of my generation to carry on and close the game because me and a few others out there never stopped.

I thank God for the awesome younger folks and the leftover freaks and boomers participating in OWS. I finally have real hope again before I die, and I no longer feel like we wasted so much time over the last 30 yrs. You have made it all worthwhile.

OWS kids, you are so awesome. Learn from the mistakes of my generation. Never become apathetic, and never, ever give up. Maybe 40 years from now, maybe your kids and grandkids won't have to take to the streets and get mauled by cops like those of us who really care have done in the past and are doing right now to protect our rights and the rights of future generations.

Let's close it out this time. Don't let the bastards grind you down.

"Same Old Bar" (1980)

Here it is September, and I'm sittin' in the same old bar,
See your picture in the paper, and I'm wonderin' just who you are -
Some old politician man, sellin' bombs across the sea
Are you the Pentagon, an Oil Man, or AT&T?

Well, I'd rather have a good dog, than a brand new car,
and I'd rather have a forest, than a street in my backyard
Hey, Mr. Workingman, you been workin' too long too hard -
Won't you just sit down for awhile, make the bossman show his cards.

They take our money, and they fly to the moon
I hear they're raisin' the cost of living soon
Television propaganda keeps us dancing to the same old tune,
Lower taxes for the rich man, they'll be goin' down again in June.

Now here it is December, still sittin' in that same old bar,
Seems like nothin' ever changes, can't change the way things are,
Same old middle class blindness, same old upper class lies
People when you gonna listen, seems like you been hypnotized,
People when you gonna listen, people when you gonna rise.
people when you gonna listen, people when you gonna rise.

Peace and Love

[diane in sf]

31. I'm a boomer, we came out of college in the mid 70s and there were no real jobs for at least 5

years.

[GliderGuider]

33. We boomers completely missed the real message of our apparent good fortune.

In the end we have turned out to be a herd of cattle that were being fattened by the Power Elite for later slaughter.

OK, everyone, stay in single file as we go up the ramp, no pushing or shoving, everyone will get their turn under the bolt gun.

[lunatica]

34. Reagan's election was a turning point in my mind

We were about to finally grow up as a country and realize we had to join the world rather than rule it with our jingoism and deluded version of ourselves. Then Reagan came along and wrapped himself and the US in the flag and the American people preferred the delusion and voted for him. It was a terrible day.

It's turned out to be much worse than I though. I really believed something like Bush could never happen here. Reagan was the turning point.

[NNN0LHI]

35. I remember watching the "Morning in America", ad while standing in line at the unemployment office

I was one of the long term unemployed at the time. Wasn't much of a high water mark for me and my family or most of my friends. Not by a long shot. Had our natural gas for heating turned off several times during the 1980's because we couldn't afford to pay the bill. I would have to say the high water mark for me was 1979 if there was one. It was pretty much all downhill after that.

Those born in 1955 like myself missed the draft by one year. We were 18 in 1973 and the draft ended a year before we would have become eligible.

And I don't sit here dazed and confused wondering what happened either. I know exactly what happened. I lived it and watched it happen right before my eyes. It has been like watching a head on train wreck happening in slow motion for the last three decades.

Don