Look, I’ve got a long-standing beef with Millennial v. Boomer discourse that I could spend a few hours on, but lemme try to sum it up briefly.
Many of the modern economic problems that affect many Millennials that are often blamed on Baby Boomers (unemployment/underemployment, soaring costs of education, loan debt, comparative lack of opportunities, poverty, etc. etc.) started well before our generation came of age. Most of these same economic issues fucked up Generation X before us, but because they were a smaller generation, people didn’t hear about it as much. And most of these problems grew directly from right-wing political and economic policies that began in the Reagan presidency in the 1980s, before the Boomers were in political ascendancy. (Yes, there were a few young Boomers in Reagan’s administration, but the leading neocons/neoliberals, using the actual meaning of the term, not the tumblr left’s version of it, who led the move rightward were older.) Boomers, by virtue of their age, enjoyed the unique benefits of the post-War (1945-1980) economy and many managed to escape the worst effects of the Reagan Era cuts, but not all did equally (see below.) And many of them, personally, are total clueless assholes about how unique their experience was. I have Boomer parents born in the early 50s, so like I know. But one of the biggest problems I have with Millennial/Boomer discourse is that it de-politicizes and de-contextualizes important social/political/economic shifts that were the direct result of Republican policies. It reduces it all to just a generational conflict in which one selfish group of people just didn’t want to share their toys with their kids. And even if you accept the idea that one generation can personally screw over another via political means, the idea that Boomers would target their own children specifically is particularly odd. Though I’ll also point out that the “who raised us” issue is more complex, as the Boomer generation ends in 1964, and quite a lot of people born in the 90s who could still be considered Millennials, have parents born after that.
As for the idea that Boomers make up the majority of the workforce, actually Millennials are now the largest segment of the workforce, slightly ahead of Gen X, with Boomers well behind. The oldest boomers are 71 now, and the youngest are 53. A lot of the oldest ones have retired and the younger ones are on their way there. X As for having “all the powers in government” that’s a pretty hard thing to quantify. Trump and many of his key advisers are Boomers, but there are a number of GenX and Millennials too. Which is why I get annoyed at the idea that Millennials are somehow innately more compassionate and kind than older generations, because not really. Millennials overall are more democratic/left leaning than older voters, but Trump still won among white millennials. Many baby boomers, too, were very liberal in their youth, and became more conservative with age, especially the white ones. It’s a pretty common thing to happen. It’s not as if that fate is going to magically spare our generation, so most of this discourse is not going to age well.
Which brings me to the other issue, that you can legitimately talk about Millennials and Baby Boomers as distinct groups with similar characteristics and experiences. Most of this discourse is highly race and class based but people don’t seem to acknowledge that. It’s focused around the experiences of middle to upper class white boomers and their kids, who presumably don’t have it as easy. And in many cases, this is probably true. Though if you’ve read any financial news in the last few years, they’ve been talking a lot about the huge amount of “wealth transfer” that has started from well-off Boomers to their kids. But for many other Boomers, this wealth never materialized. Plenty of people never had access to it thanks to their race or immigrant status. So the idea that one generation “owns everything” or needs to “take the blame” blurs the fact that within any generation there are huge differences in wealth and access to power.
Basically millennial/boomer discourse is ahistorical, apolitical, and focused on the experiences and expectations of middle class white kids, and that’s why I’m not here for it.
a good point. reagan and his bunch weren’t boomers, they were the boomers’ parents. the so-called ‘greatest generation’ – they named themselves that, which is pretty illustrative imo. they lived through the great depression and fought in ww2, and apparently liked it? or at least the politicians of that generation seemed awfully fond of being at war.
probably because there’s so much money to be made from it.
boomers, my parents’ generation, were the civil rights marchers and anti-war protestors, the stonewall rioters and the feminist groundswell. the progressive politics too many millennials seem to think they invented were hammered together by the boomers out of 1920′s socialism, vapid freshman idealism, optimistic drug-inspired asspulls, and oceans of blood. just because y’all young folks are farther along that path doesn’t mean you’re more idealistic or pure. so, you know, that’s about fucking enough of laughing at grannies for not being current on feminist terminology. no more of that.
my generation, gen-x, was political and active on an even larger scale, but having seen that our parents’ idealism didn’t fix things – and being under the thumb of reaganism, which SUCKED SO MUCH – we tried to think outside the box. we looked for ways one person, or a few people, could make a mark without needing to come up with a political party and a crowd of thousands. the punk diy ethic, zines, graffitti being more than just pissing your name on a wall with paint, guerilla everything. traveller bands who chose to be homeless and live on garbage for freedom’s sake. motorhead culture – yes, i’m talking about those greasy mouth breathers in the AC-DC shirts smoking behind the school in all the 80′s teen comedies, those guys were actually counter-culture as fuck. they didn’t think of themselves as political, but when the tv is selling you the idea that a shiny car means you win at life, building monsters out of stripped junkers and weaponized dgaf is pretty goddamn punk if you ask me. i might be biased a little, though, cuz that’s my jam.
anyway, motorcity is the 80′s motorhead counterculture repackaged in neon. i half think the reason it got canceled is because studio execs figured out how subversive it is.
and then there’s you guys, millennials, my darling childs, so angry because for just a few years we were actually living in the future and things were getting visibly better every year, and you had no reason to think it was a mirage, but then it vanished and left you with a mouthful of sand.
of course you want a culprit brought to justice. but that’s not how political change works. it’s not a cop show. you can’t slap granddad in handcuffs and suddenly have a living wage appear.
so my advice – take it or leave it, because i am not in fact your dad, however strong my dadfeels – is to not get distracted by the bullfighter’s cape. generational finger-pointing is flashy, but there’s nothing behind it.
One of the best political cartoons that I’ve seen.
You know what pisses me off about this? Really, REALLY pisses me off? That’s George (H.W.) Bush holding that umbrella. He was president 1981-1989. Do you get that?
It means that the right have not budged an inch on their ridiculous pro-foetus, anti-actual-persons position in THIRTY GODDAMN YEARS. We should not still be having this argument! Thirty year old political cartoons should be bafflingly opaque, not crystal clear!
^ Reblogging again for that comment.
Also a good antidote to the current view of George Bush as “one of the good ones”.
These pervasive exhortations to individual action — in corporate ads, school textbooks, and the campaigns of mainstream environmental groups, especially in the west — seem as natural as the air we breath. But we could hardly be worse-served. While we busy ourselves greening our personal lives, fossil fuel corporations are rendering these efforts irrelevant. The breakdown of carbon emissions since 1988? A hundred companies alone are responsible for an astonishing 71 percent. You tinker with those pens or that panel; they go on torching the planet. The freedom of these corporations to pollute – and the fixation on a feeble lifestyle response – is no accident. It is the result of an ideological war, waged over the last forty years, against the possibility of collective action. Devastatingly successful, it is not too late to reverse it. The political project of neoliberalism, brought to ascendence by Thatcher and Reagan, has pursued two principal objectives. The first has been to dismantle any barriers to the exercise of unaccountable private power. The second had been to erect them to the exercise of any democratic public will. Its trademark policies of privatization, deregulation, tax cuts and free trade deals: these have liberated corporations to accumulate enormous profits and treat the atmosphere like a sewage dump, and hamstrung our ability, through the instrument of the state, to plan for our collective welfare.
“First the White House communications directors were spaced by 24 weeks. Then 12, then 6, then every 2 weeks. The last one, the Mooch…was a week. In four days we should be seeing them every eight hours until they are coming every four minutes. Marshal, we should witness a double event within seven days.”
The notion that political enemies are human, too, sharing our common human hopes and fears, triumphs and vulnerabilities, is often deployed in a way to downplay political division and enmity. In reality, though, the fact that our enemies are human, too, is what makes them morally accountable. If they were inhuman monsters who thrived on death and suffering, then we would expect nothing of them but sadism. The fact that they share our common humanity, that they have experienced love and pain and disappointment and satisfaction just like us, is what makes it so intolerable that they would, for instance, vote to take away people’s access to health care just because they said they would, with no plausible narrative for why such a thing is beneficial as public policy or even as an act of political expediency.
The fact that John McCain would get up off his deathbed to participate in this cruel farce does not make him a hero, it makes him a bad person. He had a perfectly valid excuse to skip the vote. Indeed, he had a perfectly valid excuse to resign his senate seat altogether and wash his hands of this mess. Those would both be understandable human actions. What he chose to do instead was completely gratuitous and cruel, which is comprehensible only as an attempt to bask in the media’s adoration one last time. That motivation is human, and that’s what makes it morally blameworthy. If he were a mystical creature who fed on the praise of journalists, then we could write it off as a survival instinct. Since he is a human being with human moral agency, we are entitled to our equally human moral judgment. And in my judgment, which is my right as a human being, John McCain is an evil man and anyone who is trying to use his unfortunate medical condition to distract from that fact is a fool at best and a fellow villain at worst.
Yes, our enemies are human. That’s what makes them enemies. That’s why their actions are unacceptable — because they are just like us. If we can make the morally right choice, so can they. And they have not.
Adam Kotsko, “On the old saw, “Remember your enemies are human too”,” An und für sich (x)
“[…] the complete and inarguable disaster of the Bush administration—a failure of the conservative movement itself, one undeniable even to many consumers of the parallel conservative media—and his abrupt replacement by a black man, caused a national nervous breakdown among the people who’d been told, for many years, that conservatism could not fail, and that all Real Americans agreed with them.
Rather rapidly, two things happened: First, Republicans realized they’d radicalized their base to a point where nothing they did in power could satisfy their most fervent constituents. Then—in a much more consequential development—a large portion of the Republican Congressional caucus became people who themselves consume garbage conservative media, and nothing else.”
Reblogging to read later, you had me at “they’d radicalized their base to a point where nothing they did in power could satisfy their most fervent constituents.”
I object to the claim that periodicals like The Wall Street Journal, Weekly Standard, and National Review mislead their readers unintentionally, and given the long connection between the right wing and conspiratorial thinking(The Paranoid Style in American Politics was written in 1964, and you can draw that line further back to the Confederacy, beyond it to Jackson) I don’t think you can really say this is entirely new, or was ever entirely aimed only at “non-elites”, and Reagan is a product of this, not previous to it. BUT, having said all that, this is mostly polemical rather than scholarly and the devs he talks about are new, even if in different ways than he identifies, so is a good piece I think.
So they go around the world bombing and killing people and then expect us to feel sorry for them?? Nah son, you deserve it.
me if i ever find out any of my neighbors are veterans
Hmmm. I mean, just because the army as an institution is flawed and damaging doesn’t mean everyone in it is a terrible person. To paint every single veteran with the same brush is reductive and to make light of the debilitating mental disorders many have just seems wrong. Like yes, fuck the military as an institution completely 100%, but blaming disabled ex-front-line infantry maybe isn’t the best direction for our anger, perhaps.
A lot of veterans are poor people who were intentionally targeted by scouting programs coming to their schools starting at age 13, and most of them are worse off coming back than they were to start with… let’s be courteous to folks with PTSD
Don’t be an ableist fuckface. Intentionally triggering someone is disgusting.
I thought people on this godforsaken website at least understood this one basic principal, but apparently not, so let me make it crystal clear:
IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO BE SELECTIVELY PROGRESSIVE
You can hate Ann Coulter. But if you suggest that she deserves to be raped, you are a misogynist.
You can hate Woody Allen. But if you say he’s part of a Jewish conspiracy or joke about putting him in an oven, you are an antisemite.
You can hate Michael Vick. But you call for him to be lynched or call him the N-word, you are an anti-black racist.
You can hate Caitlyn Jenner. But if you misgender her, or make comments about her genitalia, you are a transphobe.
And you can hate the military. But if you deliberately try to trigger veterans with PTSD, you are an ableist piece of shit.
You do no get to pick and choose which people to treat fairly when it comes to acknowledging and combatting prejudice.
Not liking a person is not a free pass to disregard anti-prejudicial words and actions. Either you respect marginalized peoples as a whole (even if you don’t like an individual), or you don’t respect them at all. There is no middle ground.
If anyone really like, agrees with harassing veterans with PTSD or anything similar, unfollow me right the fuck now. I don’t want you following me.
You don’t have to like the military, it’s massively fucked up but y’all needs understand that most people in the military are victims of propaganda and are usually poor or part of a minority who are taken advantage of in order to join.
^^^ All of these comments tbh
Mhmm
Wasn’t it Hawkeye in MASH that talked about the fact that, except for a few brass very high up the food chain and very far removed from actual fighting, pretty much everyone in war is a victim?
Kids in poverty without hope of paying for college to dig themselves out of the cycle of being poor are the ones who enlist. Kids who have been busted for small offenses that suddenly make them hard to employ are the ones who enlist. Kids who would give anything to get away from the abuse and neglect of shitty home lives are the ones who enlist. They’re indoctrinated hard about strong they are, how much they’re a part of a greater good, how they’re heroes. Kids who have been fighting and scrapping and hustling their whole lives just to survive. Those kids are the ones with combat PTSD, not the fuckheads to use them like they’re disposable pawns on a chessboard. Most of those kids have basically zero good prospects without the military.
Enlisted kids are, by and large, victims. And they pay for it their whole lives with damaged bodies and damaged minds. Get your shit straight. Protest high ranking officers all the way up to the president, but leave combat vets the fuck alone.
Also, we’re not so far removed from the Vietnam War, which HAD A DRAFT. You didn’t get to choose to go, you didn’t go because you had no other options, you went because you were legally required to go.
My dad was drafted and fought in Vietnam. His family was poor, so unlike the wealthier members of his extended family, he couldn’t buy his way out (paying a doctor for a medical deferral) and he wasn’t in college. The only choice my dad had was to voluntarily enlist with the Marines, which gave him a 90 day deferral period.
(Which he freely admits was because he had just bought a motorcycle, and if he was going to die, he was going to die after he spent a summer riding his bike.)
My dad has PTSD. Sometimes, he’ll even admit it. But the resources that are available for Vets today weren’t for Vets from Vietnam. It’s called the forgotten war for a reason, and soldiers who returned home from Vietnam were vilified and attacked. A lot of them didn’t choose to go, and they certainly didn’t choose to be hated for fighting a war that they didn’t believe in. They didn’t have the option.
And I know I am a tumblr old, and my parents were older when they had me, but for the kids out there? My dad could be your grandfather. I hate these kind of comparisons, because human decency people, but think about how you’d feel about this post if the people advocating the disregard of combat Vets’ feeling were talking about older Vets from Korea and Vietnam?
IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO BE SELECTIVELY PROGRESSIVE
yes, that. a world of that. stop using progressive ideals as an excuse to be a vicious bastard. and if i catch you blaming individual soldiers for the wars that used them, i’ll give you such a Disappointed Dad Look you’ll feel six inches tall for a week.
i worry that the way we talk about stonewall decontextualizes the event itself – that saying “the first pride was a riot” implicitly disconnects the raid on stonewall from the fact that similar raids on gay bars had been happening for decades prior, and that lgbt activists had been actively resisting police violence all the while, at the risk of their lives and livelihoods and reputations.
police oppression of gay people did not begin in 1969, and gay resistance to police oppression did not begin with the stonewall riots. that’s not to minimize the extreme importance of stonewall, of course, or the indelible contributions to our history and safety that were made by activists like sylvia rivera and marsha p. johnson and miss major griffin-gracy and stormé delarverie. but they were standing on the shoulders of decades and decades of leaders and activists who had come before them, who had fought and died and endured total brutality at the hands of homophobic police.
gay bars, as much as they were allowed to exist in the decades prior to stonewall, were persistently targeted by undercover police officers and by violent raids. in los angeles, from the mid-1940s onward, the LAPD employed out-of-work actors to pretend to be gay and infiltrate these spaces, solicit men for sex, and then book them on charges of public indecency.
the police department would give these officers quotas to meet on a weekly basis – round up and jail a certain number of homosexuals, or else. frequently, they would arrest men simply for appearing gay, or for having the bad luck to walk through a park or use a bathroom known as a gay cruising spot. this policy was a cash cow like none other, because these men would always plead guilty, would always agree to pay hefty fines in order to settle the matter and keep it quiet and avoid having their reputations ruined.
and the police would stop at nothing to bully people into pleading guilty. it was commonplace for police to handcuff their charges, shove them into the backseat of their cruisers, and then drive in circles for hours, looping to the outskirts and back, intimidating and harassing them all the way. by the time they finally pulled up at the police station and booked their charges, they would be so shaken by the abuse they’d just experienced that they’d plead guilty without a second thought, cough up whatever money they could spare in order to go free.
in less extreme cases, police officers would simply verbally abuse the men they’d arrested, but just as often, the officers would physically beat, sexually abuse, or rape these men. oftentimes, the sexual abuse and rape would be part of the arrest itself – an officer would solicit sex from a man, the man would turn him down, and the officer would force him into sex anyway and then report that the man had initiated it.
like, this was daily fucking life for lgbt people for decades before stonewall. and fledgling gay activists fought it with everything they had, early. in 1952, the los angeles mattachine society established the Citizens Committee to Outlaw Police Entrapment after one of their founders, dale jennings, was stalked home by an officer, sexually assaulted in his own bedroom, and then booked for public indecency. rather than simply plead guilty, jennings chose to contest the charges and take them to trial – a totally unprecedented move – with the aid of socialist lawyer george shibley. and the jury voted 11-1 for acquittal, and he walked free. in 1952. seventeen years before stonewall.
but this shit kept happening, everywhere, for decades – new york city didn’t end its policy of police entrapment of lgbt citizens until the mid-1970s. and all the while, there was organized resistance. all the while, organizations like the mattachine society and street transvestite action revolutionaries fought back.
it’s super, super convenient for heterosexual society to claim that there was just one inciting incident, and one moment of spontaneous, courageous resistance, that sparked the gay rights movement as we know it today. but we can’t fall into that trap. there were decades of brutal, violent police oppression, and there were decades of structured, well-organized resistance to that oppression.
for a long time, the gay struggle against police violence was the only fight there was. in the late 1940s, at the dawn of formal organization, nobody was agitating for their right to live openly as gay or avoid employment discrimination or get married or adopt children. the movement emerged in opposition to the systematized detainment and torture and rape of gay people by police.
and that is why lgbt people don’t owe the police shit, and why any police department with the audacity to demand time and space in a pride parade needs to be met with loud, unequivocal resistance. not because of one raid or one riot, but because of decades and decades of unapologetic brutality.
@allthecanadianpolitics Relevant to the recent Toronto Pride discussions. If people think this was exclusively a US problem, they are sorely mistaken about Canadian history.
Good information. Thank you.
Adding onto this, around the same time Stonewall was going on all of this was also going on in Canada:
If any one is looking for a more in depth read about state violence against queer people in Canada, I recommend The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation by Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile.
“From the 1950s to the late 1990s, agents of the state spied on, interrogated, and harassed gays and lesbians in Canada, employing social ideologies and other practices to construct their target – people who deviated from the so-called norm – as threats to society and enemies of the state.
Reconstructed from official security regime documents released through the Access to Information Act and interviews with gays, lesbians, civil servants, and high-ranking officials, The Canadian War on Queers offers a passionate, personalized account of a national security campaign that violated people’s civil rights and freedoms in an attempt to regulate their sexual practices. Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile disclose not only the acts of state repression that accompanied the Canadian war on queers but also forms of resistance that raise questions about just whose security was being protected and about national security as an ideological practice. “ (Source)
Also the Gay archives in Quebec is a group trying to create a gay history so we know our roots in Quebec.
And the exposition “Revolution” at the Museum of fine arts has a section dedicated to the riots of lgbtqa activists and the decriminalization of homosexuality by the Pierre Elliott Trudeau government.
And let’s not forget that just before the Montreal Olympics they arrested 200gays to “clean the city” before the event…
Tired of the old “your problem doesn’t affect me, therefore it’s not real” game? Try one of these fun alternatives!
Your problem is real, but since it doesn’t affect me it’s not important
Your problem is real, but first let’s talk about this other, more urgent problem that neither one of us can meaningfully engage with
Your problem is real and important, but I’ve framed it as a subset or consequence of a problem that does affect me, so the best way to address your problem is to focus exclusively on my problem
Your problem is as urgent as you say it is, but I’ve decided that it’s an inevitable consequence of humanity being intrinsically awful, and I’d lose Enlightened Cynicism points if I actually tried to do anything about it
Your problem is awful, but I’m reluctant to act on it because of some purely hypothetical consequence that I have no evidence is even a thing, yet am firmly convinced would be worse than the status quo
Bonus round:
Your problem’s solution is clearly a radical restructuring of all of our cultural, political and economic institutions, and advocating any less drastic or more immediately fruitful approach represents a cowardly capitulation to the Man and makes you Part Of The Problem™.
These are all good but the last one in particular sounds like it can butt up against one of the difficulties that intersectional feminism encounters.
The ‘me first, you later’ problem occurs where people argue that your cause isn’t a good one to champion right now because it’s too extreme and would require too much work, or because you and your community are too far away from the norm. It doesn’t matter that those things are rarely true, what matters is that you’re centering people who aren’t straight, white, or cisgender and that’s worth fighting over, apparently.
And I say this in response to your bonus round, @prokopetz, because claiming that we cry capitulation and ‘Part of The Problem’ is exactly the way that people like to dismiss intersectional activism.
I still like this way of framing the discussion, I just wanted to articulate this one point of friction.
Oh, absolutely; spuriously accusing folks of engaging in derailing tactics is, itself, a time-honoured derailing tactic. The “bonus round” entry is meant more to refer to the rhetorical trick whereby, if you can’t find an excuse to dismiss a problem, but you also don’t want to adjust your actions to account for it, you instead generalise that problem until whatever you were planning on doing anyway can be framed as somehow addressing its root cause, resulting in a sort of sterile one-size-fits-all activism where abstract opposition to the Great Evil is more important than doing stuff that actually helps people.
just moving along like everyone else 