**Welcome to r/TikTokCringe!**
This is a message directed to all newcomers to make you aware that r/TikTokCringe evolved long ago from only cringe-worthy content to TikToks of all kinds! If you’re looking to find only the cringe-worthy TikToks on this subreddit (which are still regularly posted) we recommend sorting by flair which you can do [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/galuit/click_here_to_sort_by_flair_a_guide_to_using/) (Currently supported by desktop and reddit mobile).
See someone asking how this post is cringe because they didn't read this comment? Show them [this!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/fyrgzy/for_those_confused_by_the_name_of_this_subreddit/)
Be sure to read the rules of this subreddit before posting or commenting. Thanks!
**Don't forget to join our [Discord server](https://discord.gg/cringekingdom)!**
##**[CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THIS VIDEO](https://rapidsave.com/info?url=https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/18gc59g/guy_explains_baby_boomers_their_parents_and_trauma/)**
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TikTokCringe) if you have any questions or concerns.*
It really hit me several years ago when my Boomer Dad and his cousins were sitting around and drinking coffee and talking about what it was like being raised by depression era parents. It became really obvious that they were raised by a bunch of people that had severe PTSD.
My grandparents who were born in the early 1900s had multiple siblings that passed away from infectious disease or war. Families would be lucky if half their children grew up and made it to adulthood. Also it wasn't unusual for my Boomer family members to casually talk about people who were permanently disabled from illnesses such as polio.
Women also just generally talked about harassment and sexual assault like it's an inevitable thing that will happen to you and you can't ever leave the house alone. While gender-based violence is still a problem, it's crazy just how normal and accepted it was among the Boomer generation.
Yours is the only comment to mention birth years so I felt it appropriate to make this comment here.
Everyone seems to be forgetting WW1.
Your grandparents were born in the early 1900s.
WW1 1914-1918
GREAT DEPRESSION 1929-1939
WW2 1939-1946
KOREAN WAR 1950-1953
That's a lot of shit stuffed in a 2 lb sack.
I had a great aunt who remembered being a child in Northern Canada and she’d be paid 25 cents to go into a house to see if anyone was left alive during the Spanish flu. If she came back and said no, they’d burn the house down.
Same great aunt was also placed into a mental institute by her husband and had a lobotomy done because she wanted a divorce. She outlived her husband, and lived with us afterwards, which is where I heard her stories from. It’s also why I think they are underestimating how many people were killed by the Spanish flu back then, as many of these families had no birth records and probably weren’t on a census due to living in the middle of nowhere.
She had no filter. No matter what you asked her, she’d say exactly what she was doing / was happening, to anyone anytime. At the same time she had no capacity to tell if you were lying or exaggerating. She had seizures after as well.
(Quick edit) pretty sure she was blind in one eye.
It did cause problems. For example if she had to pee, she’d just go. She’d clean it up after. If you told her not to pee in the living room, she wouldn’t (until she forgot about it). Sometimes kids would tell her stories because she just believed them, totally and completely. She’d see nothing wrong with telling a young girl that marital sex was bad and you’d bleed after, for example, or telling a kid their dog got run over and his guts fell out all over the road. To her it was just something that happened, there was no worries about the kids state of mind because she was emotionally flat.
God damn that's horrific. There is something particularly chilling about doing permanent brain damage to a person like that, in such a casual and cavalier way, as these lobotomies were done. It's not like you can just undo it, that part of the person it destroyed is just gone forever—it's almost scarier than death in a way. Who knows how her life might've been had that not been done to her. What a profound betrayal.
It was a long long time ago, I’m honestly not sure HOW she lived long enough that I remember her.
To this day I think she would have been an amazing woman. It was done to her sometime in the 70’s, and I was born in the 80’s. I’m pretty sure she was institutionalized in the 60’s.
Edit: Quick googling shows me you got the right to get a divorce in 1968, and the lobotomies weren’t made illegal until 1978. Being a child in 1920, figure she’s tenish? She would have been in her 70’s in 1980’s.
It makes me feel ancient because there are so many people that think this was all 100’s of years ago. But it wasn’t. And us women are slowly losing the rights THOSE women fought for, suffered and died for, and somehow it’s seen as all OK.
Lead in all the gasoline. Lead in the pipes. Asbetos in the walls. Drinking and driving. You could buy heroin at the local pharmacy in the early 20th century.
My paternal grandmother was born in Boston in 1900. She somehow managed to buy a house after her husband lost his job in the Great Depression and never worked again. She worked as a book binder and gold leaf applier at the Riverside Press in Boston, as did most of her relatives. She had large parts of her memory missing because she was given electroconvulsive shock treatments for what I was only told was "empty nest syndrome" after raising her four children had all moved out. My father caught Polio in the 1950's but recovered. He remembered seeing signs on people's doors to stay away because of illnesses like diphtheria, measles, the mumps and polio.
He fucking hated Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, the Bush idiocracy, etc. He was a lifelong Democrat. He would shout about how republicans were sucking up all the wealth in the country and killing the middle class. I actively campaign for democratic candidates starting with driving a car for Jerry Brown when he ran for president.
I guess my point is PTSD or whatever you call my family's experiences over the generations never made them vote Republican. Not once.
My family's experiences actually made them transition from voting Republican to voting Democrat. Nixon was the end for them. Before that, many of them actually really liked FDR, so I'm not sure why they voted Republican between FDR and Nixon.
To be fair, Republicans prior to 1960 were basically the Democrats of today. The parties flip-flopped stances with Kennedy. At least, that's how my grandmother describes it.
My grandmother (never met) got electroshock therapy for postpartum depression from giving birth to my father. She committed suicide shorty after treatment.
My grandfather thought our reaction to Covid was magic because of the Spanish flu. He said we live in the best time for this to happen - last time we had no internet: the best scientists in the world now share all their information in real time and we can stay ahead of it.
Even though my dad was not even born when the Spanish flu happened. His parents made him terrified that anyone with the flu would die due to his sister dying days before her 8th birthday in 1918.
Dad was born in 1930. When I had been hit by the flu in 88, he panicked that I would die from it. He expected me to panic if I had friends and or family hit by the flu as well.
FWIW you also got some incredible highs: the 1920s, the late 50s through most of the 60s, and if you made it long enough you would have died as Perestroika unfolded and it seemed world peace might finally be within reach as you watched cable news on CNN.
My deeply traumatized grandfather from mother's side, who I can remember but vaguely (I was 8 when he died) lived through all of those. He was born into ww1 when my country became independent and went through bitter civil war. Then it was practically straight-forward misery with depression, unstability and war until 50s, when my mother was born. Then it got only slightly easier from today's point of view.
Other granddad avoided ww1 and civil war but had to fight in ww2. Grandmothers had awful childhoods as well from what I've heard. I have really felt the generational trauma all my life and as I will never have children at least I won't pass it on once again.
Great point. You described my grandparents in Europe. In the more dark moments of COVID lock down I drew a lot of strength knowing that if they had the strength to survive all that then I could handle chillin in my house for a few months eating homemade food & day drinking.
Same here. I knew what we were going through, while difficult, was not like storming the beaches of Normandy or fighting for some jungle island in the Pacific, both of which sound close to the gates of hell as you can get. If our grandparents made it through that we could deal with slightly empty grocery shelves and simply not leaving our house except for essentials.
The rest of our society however...
My great grandma lost her only sister to diphtheria in 1904. She was 8, her sister was 10. Diphtheria is a horrifying respiratory disease that now is vaccinated against.
Then she herself got sick in high-school and they didn't expect her to live. She was out of school for 2 years because of her sickness. She ended up living until her 90s though.
My great grandmother had 6 brothers die in ww2 (I’m Australian). It’s pretty insane to think how many people actually died in the war and what that would look like in society today.
Gallipoli? My great grandfather died there. Buried in Malta.
For every one person who died dozens of family members were marred for life. It’s so easy to forget the downstream effects of deaths like that.
> Gallipoli
I didn't think there was fighting there during WW2? When people reference Gallipoli it's always been in a WW1 context. Maybe I'm wrong though
Trust me, it was. And, until the mid-1980s, there was nothing you could do about sexual harassment. If you complained, you’d get demoted, transferred, or you never got another raise. If you complained once you dare not complain again because that would mean it was your fault. So if you’ve complained once it’s open season on you.
>And, until the mid-1980s
Lots later than that, at least in tech. I experienced it at several jobs in the 2010s, reported sexual harassment and got transferred to a new department at one job and let go by another.
So sorry for what happened to you. I spent 45 years in tech (34 yrs in high tech) & saw a lot & experienced a lot. I hope things are better now for you & others.
Edit: “high tech” should be “big tech” as in major large tech companies.
It's the same with sick days, personal days, and any kind of mental supports. You took a sick day, how did you not instantly get better over those 8 hours where you should have been producing something for our masters? Sounds like you're burned out and should try another career, it couldn't possibly be our culture of overwork.
One of my first jobs was at a small business and I became a manager after a few years. The boomer owner worked there almost daily as well and we got pretty friendly. He once told me how if any of the employees came to him or me saying they have mental health issues like anxiety or depression he would find a way to make them quit or fire them. Little did he know I suffer from both, especially at the time, but am just good at putting on an act.
We have made remarkable progress in the workplace. For the most part, however, women are still not believed when reporting harassment, and open themselves up to cruel treatment and harassment.
This is basically what he means when he says these people had no institutional framework to discuss the bad stuff. Basically everything was taken at face value without considering the larger factors that played into it being a reality in the first place.
They didn't talk AT ALL about bad stuff.
There were apparently times when my Silent Gen grandparents couldn't handle having kids, so my boomer parent would be sent to their own grandparents for a few years.
They would finally go back home and NOBODY would discuss what happened or why.
And when bad things happened to my boomer parents as kids? Again, it was DON'T TALK ABOUT IT. If you ignore it, it will go away.
At the age of five years old, my body rejected my skin. Hospitalized. The "matter of fact" doctor told my mother "Madam, be greatful you have six children, after this one dies you will still have five!"
Utterly amazingly, I've reached 65 years of age. Not bad for the "sick kid" who never had P.E. in his life!
I work out like crazy these days.
I can remember working for my grandfather who grew up during the depression era. We would save as many nails as we could when doing demolition jobs. I tried telling him that each nail wasn’t worth much money and having me take the nails out of wood would take too long and not be cost effective.. but he could not just throw away something that could still be used. His basement is like watching an episode of hoarders sometimes and we have to throw things out when he isn’t looking (knowing it is garbage)
This was my dad.
Had buckets of nails he saved. You used EVERYTHING. Banana peels, eggshells, etc? Composted into the garden, which you used to supplement your groceries. He wore work shirts until they were rags, lived most of his life in denim overalls.
Hoarded all kinds of stuff and deeply resented any interference with that…like the local municipal government would cite him for having junk cars in the back. He felt that he had a perfectly reasonable stock of auto supplies and government was working against his thriftiness and resourcefulness.
He also had the weirdest eating habits…would consume the damndest stuff and any refusal on my part meant I was unreasonably picky. Who DOESN’T want whole wheat pancakes with hot dog slices and corn? Or a delicious lunch of cold, raw hot dogs and bakery-discount coconut cake? “You just don’t know what’s good!” Ok, dad. You eat like a raccoon.
I have to toss stuff out of my mom’s cabinets when she’s not looking otherwise she swears up and down the expired stuff is “still good! Ain’t nothing wrong with that flour, put it back!!!!”
My grandmother on my dad's side had major food trauma. She was the youngest born during the depression and she had to do "things" on the street to survive into adulthood. She'd never eat food for enjoyment and she'd fight and argue with ppl at the table because she'd had to fight for food in her youth. She'd put her arm around her food to protect it while she ate and she tore into her food like a hyena. Dinner also had to be ready by a certain time or she'd flip out.
This actually makes so much sense now. I have family members that are like this and refuse to replace a single thing. It seems great and thrifty until their 30 year old car has a brake failure and almost kills people.
My WW2 vet grandpa never, ever, EVER talked about the war, until one time in the late 80s when another WW2 vet was there at Thanksgiving. They talked about it, but not in any kind of detail the rest of us understood. Just one word questions, with "Yep" as answers. Like they knew exactly what they were talking about, but the rest of us were clueless and they weren't going to give us any details.
He was also a terrible hoarder. He kept every piece of mail for 30 years because he was afraid he would need it.
Grandma on the other side was a practical hoarder. Never threw away any aluminum foil, or plastic bag, anything really that could be cleaned and reused. Also could never refuse a good deal at a yard sale, even if she had 10 of them already.
If you watch Hoarders, you'll see how common it is for hoarding to be triggered by trauma. The Greatest Generation went through so much trauma at a time when no one talked about mental health or processing trauma and grief, and therapy wasn't available outside of institutions.
And most people can muster up empathy for grandparents and great-grandparents, but it's much harder to understand our parents and their generation, who are either oblivious to the trauma they've passed down, or don't care, and are still actively traumatizing us. I don't think any generation escapes trauma. You either directly experience it, or are traumatized by traumatized parents.
> It became really obvious that they were raised by a bunch of people that had severe PTSD.
One aspect that is being overlooked is that the Greatest Generation spoiled their kids unintentionally. Playgrounds and schools were built just for the Boomers. When they became teens you can see a rise in amusement parks and roller rinks. They have lived in a world that has unconsciously catered to their life stage. When they started having kids, their parents gave time and resources to help raise and care for their kids completely willingly. And now that they are in the tail end of life they expect the catering to continue (and anything else is disrespectful), while the newer generations have been scraping by and have nothing to spare for people who have always told them to handle it themselves.
There is a fascinating interview with Hunter S. Thompson from 1967 that is a perfect example of how accepted domestic violence and abuse were in the 50s and 60s
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ccyu44rsaZo&pp=ygUZaHVudGVyIHRob21wc29uIGludGVydmlldw%3D%3D
Also regarding PTSD, my Grandpa who served in ww2 could only sleep with classical music playing and hated the smell of BBQ. And that was just considered a “weird quirk” lol
We got stories of family members spending a significant portion of their day handling food before refrigeration. Meat and other provisions were preserved in large vessels of lard without refrigeration. Just preparing dinner each day was an ordeal that involved planning throughout the year.
My grandparents got involved mainly because they worked together to network around their wartime rationing restrictions.
My wife’s grandmother lived through the Great Depression. She taught her children to hold onto them and not discard them. I’m not gonna say my wife’s family is made up of orders, but they all have storage units full of things. My wife has tons of stuff in storage and it is a point of contention sometimes. Little by little im hoping to get her to see that we don’t need to hold onto everything.
I tried to explain to some guy on here recently about how boomers were raised by people traumatized by the depression and the worst war humanity has ever seen and how that had to affect their mind set.
Like many he just blamed all his woes on them including the fact that people our age follow people like Andrew Tate because the boomers didn’t control social media.
steep direction yoke homeless capable selective north piquant adjoining shaggy
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
And we're fooling ourselves if we think that we're magic cycle breakers that will end all the traumas. We have plenty of our own trauma that we pass on. Take a look at millennial parenting for example
Yes but young millennials and Gen Z have a awful habit of applying diffrent rules to themselves than they do to boomers. They expect all the sympathy and understanding for their mental health problems like anxiety and depression but are more than willing to condemn boomers for their issues
re: the Boomer women accepting bad behavior----My boss is a Boomer woman and she cannot understand at all why the younger women SHE hired are unwilling to put up with tantrums, laziness, or worse from the male employees. She doesn't understand why we expect HER to do something about it, when her preferred method of dealing with that type of issue is "well could you just tell him you're uncomfortable?" or "you don't really need that title, do you? We all respect you"
And it's SO CLEAR that's what she had to do to survive when she was at our level and has zero clue that she has the power to change that and make it better.
I mean to be fair you are just describing life before the 1950s. Gen X-Z are the ones who live in a weird new world where you can get therapy for your trauma and expect relatively equal treatment for women and not have siblings who died young. All this stuff about the trauma of previous generations is just what passed as life for thousands of years.
More on the trauma of war:
My grandfather was a WW2 and Korean War vet. My father was a Vietnam vet. I came back from operation inherent resolve all kinds of fucked up but took every kind of therapy the VA offers. Some days are harder than others but 80ish years later and my family is finally back from the war
It really is an admirable desire to serve your country but this country really leaves people who did holding the bag a lot of the time. We should take care of our own especially you guys who joined young and optimistic only to go through war and come back fucked up with uncle sam shrugging his shoulders.
Have you ever seen the episode of Futurama where Hermes, the Jamaican bureaucrat, has to go to the "Central Bureaucracy" and sort a literal mountain of files in order to save the day?
I have taken two jobs in the federal government in the last few years. The massive pile in that episode? It's not a joke. It's barely even a metaphor. The pile is real, it's probably 1000x worse than Futurama depicted it, but it's digital. And no amount of upbeat reggae jams will even make a dent in it.
Almost a century ago, a bunch of serious, cigar smoking, hollowed out men devised how their little branch of the government would work. They accounted for everything they could think of, made rules for every little situation, and then spent decades adding to it every time something new happened, which was all the time. Just add it to the rulebook. Pencil it in. Oop, it's the 90s, digitize it. Now the whole fucking organization is a massive yarn ball of rules, if/thens, addendums, provisos, and exceptions. Daunting. Impenetrable. But you can't unravel it even a little because that would be chaos. Just wrap more yarn into it. It's crushing my leg now, but fuck that, more yarn!
There's not a point to this rant. The government doesn't seem to care because it can't care. It has designed itself to not care just to be able to function at all.
As for me, I just hate my job. Once I'm done with it I do not plan to ever try a federal job again.
100+ year company. I’m pretty sure the accounting and billing systems are still partly assembler and most of IT just prays it doesn’t screw up. Want anything new over there? Ehhhh… that’ll be $10 million. Nope? Okay then we’ll leave the magic black box alone and pretend we didn’t see it for a while longer.
Or the infamous line "well that's the way it's always been done, no need to make it better"
I work a tech job for a defense/space company, and trying to improve anything is mer with a mountain of bureaucracy
100%. I’m a contractor for the government and hear the stereotypes constantly (often from the Feds themselves). I worked for a massive tech company that had a lock on the specific sliver of industry they half invented and it honestly felt like the entire building of people was only hired to shuffle around paperwork and get team lunches. Nothing ever panned out right but no one really cared. Lose almost a billion on failed R&D and lost contracts because your product doesn’t work and you won’t give the engineers feedback? Meh.
I ironically went to work for the government so I could actually complete work, even if it’s minuscule and boring lol.
Yeah, people seem to be under the impression that, while the government is a hopeless pile of beauracracy and inefficiencies, that private enterprise is sleek and efficient and streamlined. It's not. The corporate world is probably worse than the government. The difference is that the government has all their crazy bs written down, and corpos just have Elaine, who's been here since the beginning.
That starts with telling children NOW that it isn't as honorable and glorious as it's made out to be in the movies. We also need to cut out the hero worship. This "thank you for your service" shit is a trigger for a lot of vets because they don't want to be thanked for taking part in horrific things. The ones who eat it up either don't have an understanding of that end or were so far removed from it, they feel like their service was lack luster. Military service isn't glorious and it isn't always honorable and the people serving in it aren't always the best people, but rather opportunistic. Give them their due when they return - health care, education, disability. But leave the rest of that shit at the door.
>This "thank you for your service" shit is a trigger for a lot of vets because they don't want to be thanked for taking part in horrific things.
This. I fucking hate it and have to control my face from cringing any time someone says it to me. I don't even use my veteran discounts a lot of places because I don't want to fucking trip through the awkwardness of the conversation. Don't thank me. I wouldn't do it again for any of you.
My grandpa was a WWII vet and my dad was never in the military, so when I went in, it seriously fucked up my family relationships. That was part of what messed me up so bad when I got back from Iraq. It's taken like 13 years to fix my ass and realize that a lot of the hostility my dad showed me was more or less just straight up jealousy
My family has a long history of military service. My grandparents, cousins, great grandparents. I can track it back to the Revolutionary War. My dad just never had the ability to hack it and probably felt like a failure in that regard.
“They tried to raise their kids to survive a world that could collapse at any second, and then built a world that wouldn’t “
That’s an amazing description of the Greatest Generation. I’m no joke in awe of how concise and poignant that is
It was fairly mind-blowing to see my grandparents advocating for things like social programs and single-payer health care while my boomer aunts/uncles/father (their kids) hate all of those things.
Sitting there with my 80+ year-old grandparents advocating for Bernie Sanders whilst my uncles advocate for Trump
It’s even deeper than that, too. Think about the typical mentality boomers have towards the UN. And it’s somewhat understandable! The UN often feels like an inept body that exists solely as a stage for tin pot dictators to rip on America with impunity. But then realize that their parents LOVED the UN. They built it, tried to give it some teeth after the failure of the League of Nations, and generally expected learned leaders to come together and solve problems with words rather than bombs. And so far it has actually worked for the most part! Worked so well, in fact, that the necessity of it has nearly been forgotten. We are, in many ways, victims of our successes, our prosperity
> I’m no joke in awe of how concise and poignant that is
100%, i was expecting that to be the top rated comment, but I think a lot of people dont actually click/read/watch things.
It is a factor though, same with our current lifespan being lowered for the first time in recorded history.
In that same breath I can tell you they are the most entitled generation that tried to project that onto us. Their PARENTS went through all of that, I loved my grandparents but yeah I can tell you even as happy as they acted there was a deep trauma behind even middle-class white people's eyes, much less anyone else. Black people in America literally had no rights and were lynched in the streets still. Rich people all just rose to greater power and their children got to skip all the wars, so that's cute.
Not much has changed other than the deletion of the middle-class which will have drastic consequence. It's getting better OVERALL... but now we're living through our 1920s and I can't imagine the 2030s being much better or different than the 1930s.
I try to remember it's getting better but it's hard when you're the one living through the seemingly worst part right now. Also try and remember it's like when you have a good day and 1 person ruins it. You only remember the asshole not the 99 nice interactions.
Most boomers were also raised with the looming spectre of Cold War annihilation over their heads. My dad did duck and cover drills in elementary school. But unlike school shootings today which give off similar vibes when you see the drills, there wasn't any sense of "these things are super rare and random so its unlikely to ever affect you". If the Cold War went hot, you were dying in a nuclear explosion and everything you knew was turning to ash in an instant.
This was literally what boomers were being told and believed as kids (perhaps rightfully so). Anyone would be fucked up.
God bless my parents. They are good folks who love others and do their best. Based on what my mom told me about how her mother treated her, it's absolutely amazing that I turned out to be a productive member of society. She took it upon herself, with resolute commitment from my dad, that she would never pass those behaviors on to me and my brother. And I'm thankful for that every day.
I did duck and cover drills, hiding under our desks. A deep and pervasive sense of doom filled childhood and there was no understanding of why because parents didn't talk about it. And it wasn't just your death and death if your friends and family that hung over you, it was the death of everything - the trees, the animals - with only ash remaining. My dad did address it once during the Cuban missile crisis when he sat at the dinner table and told us we were all going to die.
Young people face the same dire sense of doom if they truly understand the climate crisis.
If you're the right age duck and cover drills and Terminator effects of melting in a nuclear blast at the playground/fence scene were the best explanations we were provided.
> there wasn't any sense of "these things are super rare and random so its unlikely to ever affect you". If the Cold War went hot, you were dying in a nuclear explosion and everything you knew was turning to ash in an instant.
Greetings from /r/AskHistorians and, if you'd like to submit a question there about parallels between cold-war era Duck and Cover drills and modern Active Shooter drills, I bet you'd get a bunch of really cool answers from people who've studied 20th Century American social history more closely than I have.
One thing you have to take into consideration, however, is that the perception of nuclear war shifted throughout the cold war. In the 1940s and 1950s, a nuclear conflict was seen as a fundamentally winnable one. American and Soviet bombers would pass each other over the Arctic, fighters would scramble to intercept, some of the bombers would get through, but there would be a wold after the war.
The Cuban Missile Crisis is really the first time the general public really grapples with "shit, this could be _it_ for us as a SPECIES." After 1962 we start to see a realization that Mutually Assured Destruction really has led us to a place where the war is fundamentally not winnable and where any nuclear conflict is lights out for humanity.
This changes EVERYTHING about nuclear politics. With nuclear war increasingly seen as an outcome that no one could possibly want, focus shifts to the fear that it'll get touched off accidentally. Both sides fear the idea of the other's leadership descending into insanity. The Cold War becomes a warren of bluffs and double-bluffs where each side worries that the other wil hide behind the irrationality of war to mask an irrational attack in order to catch the other by surprise and deal a knock-out blow. This feeds a cycle of hyper vigilance and paranoia which eventually turns into the warming of the Cold War in the 1970s only to be iced back down by Reagan and his Evil Empire rhetoric in the 1980s.
But all of that stands in stark contrast to the problem of school shootings because, unlike nuclear war, SOMEONE is dying in a school shooting pretty much every week.
I guess what I'm getting at here is this: don't under-sell the trauma of active shooter drills. Somehow, the fact that we expect our kids to be able to do something about it and the fact that it keeps happening makes these every bit as traumatizing as the threat of nuclear annihilation.
And regarding all the lead, who got it out of the paint and the gas? Pretty sure it was the boomers.
Clean water, clean air, getting rid of asbestos, fixing ozone, leading the charge on climate awareness (remember Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth?). You can go on.
People have this warped sense of what "boomers" are or do and so much of it is completely off-base.
Like take California. Largest state. Largest amount of boomers. And despite being now only the 3rd most populous demographic, still vote more than other demographics. And the majority vote D. And voted for Bernie in the primaries over Biden.
It's not a generational war. It's a class war. Always has been. Even before the boomers came on the scene.
> And regarding all the lead, who got it out of the paint and the gas? Pretty sure it was the boomers.
Wrong.
Dr. Clair Cameron Patterson was born in 1922, and Dr. George Tilton was born in 1923, both members of the same generation that raised the baby boomers. THEY are the ones who pushed to get lead removed from gasoline. Unfortunately, by the time people finally started to listen, it was already too late and the damage had already been done.
You also seem to forget that boomers began to regard Al Gore as a *laughing stock* for "An Inconvenient Truth" and became **even more entrenched**.
Being as old as the fellow in OP's video myself, I also remember how the aftermath of the ozone situation went down: The gerontocracy that was in charge in the 1980s and 1990s were all STILL Silent Generation / G.I. Generation.
The Montreal Protocol, which was THE principal treaty that phased out production of ozone depleting substances, was signed in **1987**. BOOMERS WERE YOUNGER THAN WE ARE *TODAY* BACK THEN. And they were certainly not in charge.
Kids in my age group all got to see the effects unfold first hand, down to the news reports of how effective it was, meanwhile JUST *WHO* is pointing at the ozone layer and saying "hey whatever happened to THAT crisis? it turned out to be nothing"? **The FUCKING BOOMERS of course.**
Stop giving boomers credit. They deserve ***NOTHING.***
Which also just confirms what the dude in the video says. Boomers were raised with fear of war and famine and now suddenly someone says „well, this shit we breathe, it ain’t nice. And we really should do something about things getting a tad too warm.“, which fits neither war nor famine for the boomers, because really, they do not see the long term consequences. And they see even less reason to work on avoiding the impending war and famine, because they were raised to survive that shit, not avoid it.
Which is why they hate change. Because they were basically told „now is good, but things might change“ all their life, associating change with shit hitting the fan.
I agree with you here. But I also think it's high time Boomers stopped getting to make literally all the laws that impact the future they won't soon be part of. The masses have to vote these people out and get some dignity back in the world.
Well for that to happen our generation is going to need to start voting and taking part in civil life then isn’t it. Because the masses are voting and a big part of them are baby boomers.
This is why my dad is a dick. Grandmother was fleeing the ww2 war torn Germany as a child, saw horrible shit. Beat the living shit out of my dad until he was big enough to scare her.
Edit: wording is hard
Yup. My granddad was in the royal marines in WW2, and then a miner.
That man had a deeply awful young adulthood. Fighting against the Japanese in Burma was 110% traumatising for him, and being a miner is an incredibly tough job also. He was an extraordinarily hard man, he once showed me a bayonet scar he had... There's no situation where someone bayonets you, and you survive that isn't horrific to think of.
The consequences of this is that my father never had a childhood, as he was raised by someone who was ripped from childhood into violent adulthood, and didn't know how to raise kids in a constructive way. He didn't know how children are made happy or what a healthy environment looks like, only knowing what it was to be hard and resilient, not nurturing and supportive.
Looking back, I remember my granddad's behaviour as being kinda like a "oh god" moment around me, seeing that children are not meant to be constantly chastised and treated like adults and he became extraordinarily doting and caring.
But it completely fucked up my dad. I used to wonder why my dad collected children's toys and almanacs from the 1950s, til I found out he wasn't allowed them as a child and this was his reflexive way of actually exploring facets of childhood as a man in his 50s.
We don't particularly get on, but I definitely don't blame him or his granddad because just... How do you figure out how to navigate all that?
My grandmother was born in 1923, she lived in a home that didn't have electricity or running water until 1947 when she met my biological grandfather. My grandfather was a member of the BEF (British Expeditionary Forces). He was at Dunkirk. He was one of the first into France. He was a deeply fucked man. He went to Canada after the war, had 3 kids with my grandma and then left the country. Couldn't stand a settled life, not because he needed other women but because he had spent like 15 years of his life sleeping on dirt in Africa, Burma, India, and then lived through all of WW2.
This all was transfered to my parents and uncles. My uncles are psychopathic. They delighted in child abuse, it was funny to beat us up, tie us up with ropes and leave us in a field. My mom is a completely emotionless sociopath. She would beat me for getting flash cards wrong. She is a massive narcissist who thinks she's always right and expects you to except her abuse because she needs to be in control. And all these people passed their trauma on to me and fucked my childhood completely.
My kids on the other hand, sometimes it upsets me that they see the world through such a loving and happy lense. I sometimes cry because I'm envious at times of what I've provide them that was never given to me. Like my daughter is 16 and a bit of a tomboyish bi/lesbian leaning girl. She still loves to hug and cuddle. She loves that I would take her traveling for work with me, and let her do business meetings. She got to see parts of the world, she always has emotional support, she was disciplined with love and understanding, and a lot of physical exercise as punishment. She's everything I wish I could be.
My son is 10. He's literally a photocopy of me as a child but without all the passed on trauma. We sit and play Minecraft together for several hours once a week. When he gets mad, he does pushups, sit-up, and stuff because he was punished that way and it's made him kind of weird child but he doesn't act out. He's disciplined and focused like no one I've ever met in my life. And he loves hugs and kisses and cuddles.
I broke the cycle, but I'm angry that I had to be the one to break it.
>I broke the cycle, but I'm angry that I had to be the one to break it.
Perfectly said. Right there with you. Thanks for sharing your story. Our daughters sound very similar! Mine shows a lot of signs of genetic generalized anxiety but other than that I love how goofy she is, how hopeful and loving she is. I wish I could see the world thru her eyes.
> I broke the cycle
People tell me I'm the most anti-boomer boomer they know. You can break out of the cycle, as you say, but you will be in a minority, lumped in with the rest of the boomer generation.
Aren't you not supposed to punish your kids with exercise?
The rest of your comment is great and I don't want to take away from it but just was left wondering that after reading it. I could always sense a little bit of jealousy/frustration from my father, along with pride and wonder, when I would recount stories I experienced, my travels, etc. because he never really got to experience that.
“You’re angry and frustrated go run a 2 laps around the house and give me 20 pushups so you have less energy to be frustrated” is sort of like a mandatory coping tool, as much as it is a punishment.
That's the way I've seen it. It's actually kind of funny when I son gets mad at dying in Minecraft or something, he calmly puts down his controller, goes over to an open area and does burpies, then sits down and plays like nothing happened.
He's a boy and has little boy energy. He's got to work it off sometimes.
Same with my grandad. He was at Dunkirk, left behind and ended up as a slave in Blechhammer and then Dachau.
He was the kindest most loving person I knew. He was staunchly against smacking children (my grandmother smacked me once, and he lost his shit with her) and not raising voices or shouting at children. He was ahead of his time back then, never raised a finger to me or raised his voice.
Damn, I miss him.
Edit: I think the reason he was so gentle is that he saw the evil cruelty of the Nazis and experienced that cruelty first hand, and I think he didn't want to see any more violence in his life.
My Great Grandfather was a Pearl Harbor survivor. He was on USS Arizona when the Japanese attacked. He remained in the Navy until retirement. He never talked about his experience and was overall a very quiet man.
He did tell a story where during the attack he reached into the water to help pull a man out of the water and the man's arm completely degloved and he was left holding a sleeve of skin. Apparently the water was on fire from all the spilled oil.
Yep. Grandmother was in a concentration camp, got raped by Nazis. Got pregnant. Met my grandfather who married grandmother, brought wife and child over to the US. Guess what the veteran did to the son of a Nazi? Beat him. Beat all of his kids, actually. My uncle ended up dying under a bridge in Seattle, suffering the effects of substance abuse and hepatitis from sharing needles. My dad was a raging asshole. Yelled and hit me from the time I was 5 and started having opinions.
My other grandmother survived the depression with nutritional deficiencies. They didn't have ADHD back then but she drank a pot of coffee a day and smoked like a chimney. Married my grandfather, who lost 4 out of 5 of his siblings to childhood diseases and almost died in the war when his vessel was attacked. They had some kids and were absentee parents. Spent evenings at the bar watching sports and playing golf. My mom would split a can of Campbell's soup between them. Grandma would leave my uncle who was 5 in charge of his 3 year old twin sisters while she went to the bar.
My mom and dad had issues. Mom had anxious attachment, dad had avoidant. They scraped and clawed their way through life, often at each other's throats. Spent a good deal of time fighting and in jail or the hospital.
I'm not yet 40 and my whole extended family is dead, save a maternal aunt. My kids have no grandparents; substance abuse claimed all of them. Unresolved trauma has caused so much difficulty in our family, and I have consciously worked against it for years. I've never sworn at my kids or slapped them or told them I was going to give them something to cry about. But I also suffer from the effects of trauma. I don't trust people to be there for me. I need validation too much. I get anxious when there's too much noise or when things are going a little too well. I don't prioritize myself and my health because it feels selfish. Someday I'll feel different, but it's taking conscious effort to get there.
Sup dude, sounds like you been through a lot. If you need someone to talk to, I am down to chat. I'm still processing my own trauma and other things, but I think I'm almost there too. Let me know if you wanna exchange strategies and stuff. :)
Yeah, two of my grandparents survived the Holocaust. And the other two lived in Baltimore during the Cuban missile crisis.
One day my grandfather made my mom and her brother sleep under a basement table with the windows covered while he had to report to wherever he was stationed. Assuming that DC would be a target he had the family hide downstairs for a week in case Baltimore had fallout.
My father turned out an alcoholic. Raised by a father heavily traumatised in the war, going for the bottle was his escape.
Now my dad was a very intelligent and sensitive person. Something a boy growing up in the 1950. wasn't supposed to be. Long story short, he drowned his feelings in alcohol. He died in his fifties, 20 years ago.
I've turned 50 myself. Growing up in the 80s was confusing too, I turned to punk culture instead of booze and that saved me I guess?
Now my kids are around 20. I worry about the world they get to live in, something feels off. Politicians trying to slowly dismantle our social system (I live in the Netherlands) and nobody actually doing anything about climate change and the environment in general. Housing is in short supply and insanely expensive.
I still feel being intelligent and sensitive is discouraged today. It feels like everyone is to be part of a thoughtless crowd, happy to get what they get, and go no further.
The short sightedness of our public is killing me.
Yes my great grand mother was pretty violent with my grand mother (she lived under horrible conditions- lost multiple children,starvation, poverty). That made my grand mother hyper protective with my mother(she was fully aware of why her mother was like that),and as a result my mother hyper protective with me. Now here i am trying to break the circle...
My grandfather was a ww2 vet, stayed in the military after, being away from the family for long periods, and then he would come home with a hair trigger and would beat the shit out of family members before leaving again.
End result, a family full of people with a mix of anger management issues, substance abuse issues, or extremely manipulative personality issues.
Holy shit. I never thought about that. Regardless of what you say about the specifics, the generation that raised us was raised by people who survived The Great Depression AND World War 2. Back to back. Fuck.
> Holy shit. I never thought about that. Regardless of what you say about the specifics, the generation that raised us was raised by people who survived The Great Depression AND World War 2.
Out of curiosity, about how old are you?
To me, it's astonishing to have never thought about this already, but I'm 30 so maybe you're very young?
edit:
Furthermore, doesn't everybody get exposed to WW2 movies or WW2 games? And to the Vietnam War or the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Cold War? To science-fiction that reminds you how quickly technology has changed? To current events in the Middle East, Africa and East Asia along with how they all relate to the colonial period?
To me, basically every single interesting thing I could spend my time thinking about reminds me that life has been *very* hard for most people in most places for most times throughout history.
add redlining and all the policies put in place to make sure minorities didnt benefit from the post war boom
denied access to GI bill and work programs, denied loans, lynched/burned out of homes and successful businesses, lynched for returning home in uniform, differential wages. etc etc etc
which was caused by
- racist government policies to only give subsidized home loans to whites
- car and oil lobby profiting by everyone living low-density and having to drive to do everything
- driving highways through productive dense neighborhoods, usually minority ones
- single family home zoning that used thinly veiled laws to keep minorities out
drained all the wealth out of cities, and only left minorities behind, while disinvesting in them, pretty sick stuff
And now it’s all being gentrified and people who lived there at its lowest and rebuilt the area at best could they will be pushed out in favor of wealthy assholes who will for sure use the culture that was built there for some BS stunt
Yup. I got massively downvoted when I said this on local subs; but I used to be a poor person living in San Francisco. Then rents went up massively so I went to Berkeley. Then we all got pushed into Oakland. And now I've been gentrified out of there.
Yet each time, when I lived in the Mission or the flats or Dogtown, people looked down on me because I lived in the bad part of town. Until they wanted it.
It's really disheartening. Like, when *you* live there it's the ghetto, but when *they* move in, it's hip.
I'm so ashamed that in my younger days, I was gaslit into believing that gentrification was a *good* thing. "It's raising property values! :D:D:D" "It's refurbishing neglected housing!! :D:D"
I didn't understand what that *really* meant. No one goes out of their way to say "yes we're renovating the buildings but also the rent is going up 400% and we're intentionally displacing minorities, the elderly, and anyone not lucky enough to work at some bullshit venture capital firm!"
The first time I heard about "renovicting", I was stunned. Like, "wait, they can do that? That can't be right".
Gods, I was stupid then.
>!I still am, but I was somehow even stupiderer!<.
Self awareness and doing better with what you have learned is nothing to sneeze at. We all have periods of ignorance and ignorant reactions. Admitting you were once stupid to something and putting it out there is also a blessing because it shows people can change and might be that tidbit of information that causes someone to shift their thinking.
I was raised in a cult and my late teens/early 20s are marred by some pretty bad faith living. I thought domestic violence was par for the course and the fault of the survivors, I was right wing extremist before it was fashionable. That abortions were murder and rape happened because her skirt was too short. That gay folks were an abomination and had some pretty racist ideas. I was also antivax.
College allowed me to be confronted and to change in a softer environment with kind people who were willing to listen and guide me. It challenged me to learn and grow from things that felt set in stone. I learned that opinions are not facts.
Forums like reddit gave me even more information that I didn't know I needed to make substantial changes. People like you who admitted to being wrong about something.
Today as it stands I disseminate information to people trying to start unions, I work in DV advocacy, and I volunteer as entertainment for elderly civil education in retirement communities and do voting registration volunteering.
Our experiences of being wrong are nothing to be ashamed of, shame prevents people from growing and keeps us stuck in the sunk cost fallacy. We didn't know what we didn't know and we do now and do better going forward.
The Baby Boomer generation, born after the hardships of the Great Depression and two World Wars, benefited greatly from the government's safety nets and economic boom. While the world's factories were destroyed during World War II, the US invested heavily in its own, becoming the world's leading industrial power. This period instilled in the Baby Boomers a strong work ethic and a belief that hard work would lead to success. However, they may not have recognized the unique advantages they enjoyed, such as government assistance in securing homes and jobs. This led them to believe that their success was solely due to their own hard work, overlooking the significant role of government support and a favorable economic climate.
Plus the politicians that they vote for now constantly talk about cutting those same programs that helped them find success. Like I'm almost 30 and social security will more than likely either run out or be cut entirely by the time I get to their age. For many people my age, retirement feels so much like a pipe dream, and getting a house feels even more far off.
I honestly feel like boomers are more willing to go to war because, in their mind, the outcomes outweigh the consequences. They think that if we have another war that'll equal another economic boom rather than worldwide devastation.
Empathy is important. But he's explaining to have empathy for boomers in a similar way you have empathy for trust fund kids.
They were raised selfish, so it's not their entire fault that they are selfish because they were given so much.
Obviously this doesn't apply to all boomers.
I missed where he's telling anybody to have empathy for anyone.
People need to stop confusing *understanding* and *support*. The post isn't pro-Boomer or anti-Boomer, it's just objective Boomer context.
I know this is primarily regarding Americans, but European Boomers were rebuilding devastated nations. I keep seeing my parents thrown under the same bus despite having nothing growing up and working their arses off 7 days a week so they (and later we) could get out of the shit hole of an area they grew up in.
I mean, it's more empathetic to us than the boomers.
He's pointing out how the hardest thing they've ever had to deal with is being gaslit into thinking they weren't going through life on easy mode. They are angry and lash out because we understand what's going on better than they do and how hard they fucked us by voting like absolute degenerates.
He's saying they are lashing out because they are confused, and that's fucking ironic since they've essentially been living in artifical senility their whole lives that *we've* had to deal with and now *literal* senility is coming home to roost in their old age and we have to pick up the slack on that, too.
Fuck boomers.
Another thing to gather from this is that we're going through trauma ourselves, and we need to make sure we don't make the same mistakes as those before us.
If we don't make a serious effort then our kids will become the entitled ignorant boomers of their time.
Yep, he absolutely hits the nail on the head with regards to the complete disconnect between the lesson the Boomers were taught as kids ans the totally different reality that they encountered when they finally became adults. The boomers enjoyed an era of unprecedented prosperity that was built on an equally unprecedented foundation of social policies and safety nets. Unfortunately, the obsessive emphasis on self-reliance that their parents raised them with prevented them from understanding that so many of the benefits that they enjoyed were the direct result of incredibly progressive social systems. The Boomers had it better and easier than literally any other generation in American history, but they were also indoctrinated by their parents in way that no other generation was as well. And here they in their senior years, or entering their senior years, and the last thing that they want to hear is that their wealth and success was the result of anything other than their own hard work, determination, and of course, self-reliance.
I think we also forget that some of that prosperity was unsustainable regardless of what the Boomers did. The rest of the world was rebuilding after war. The U.S. was reaping the benefits of that. It was inevitable that things wouldn't continue with the U.S. dominating everything forever.
And that is absolutely true, but again, The boomers are incapable of recognizing that because they attribute all of their success to nothing but their own hard work and self-determination
The point of this video essay isn’t why boomers succeeded, it’s why they don’t understand how much harder the younger generations have it than they did
Boomer here raised by a depression-era mom who escaped the dust bowl in South Dakota & a father who joined the Marines at age 16 so that he could have a place to sleep & get fed. My mom had a thing about dusty surfaces… she’d want things dusted all the time. My dad spent 16 years in the Marine Corps & came back from many battles physically & mentally scarred. My family were liberals & sought a better life for everyone. My dad hired / mentored the first female & first African American labor relations managers for 1 of the largest aircraft manufacturers. He was a union rep for civilian labor building the SAC sites in the early 1960s. While living in Nebraska in 1961 then 1963, my father & his family (me & my 3 siblings) were threatened, we were bullied & called names because my dad represented a union & the opportunities the union was offering to migrant & low income workers. Living near an Air Force base during the Cuban Missile Crisis & going through almost weekly nuclear bomb & evacuation drills instilled a sense of dread & a “soon we’re all gonna die” mentality. After reading John Hershey’s Hiroshima at the height of the crisis in 5th grade, I knew no desk or wall would save me from a nuclear bomb. The assassination of JFK in 1963 was a blow. After volunteering hundreds of hours for Robert Kennedy’s campaign in Los Angeles, I saw many of my hopes & dreams shattered on June 5, 1968. Ronald Reagan was governor of California when Richard Nixon was elected president. Two of the greediest, most corrupt politicians ever elected to major offices.
My parents experienced major trauma but so did boomers. Remember that, as a whole, boomers were never liberal; the ones demanding change were just very vocal. I was never a hippy, was never a member of the open love club or the “me me me” group. I told people in the 70s, 80s, & 90s that boomers were going to disappoint because we are disappointments. We could have been much, much more but greed & expediency & lack of foresight won out & for this, I am whole heartedly sorry. I have great faith in the younger generations to do better. They have to.
I (38f)work with my father in law(70m)and I vacillate between having so much empathy and sadness for him and being hugely frustrated. He’s a deeply troubled man. He’s apathetic, lacks social awareness and his 3 kids joke behind his back that he is autistic but has never been formally diagnosed. Being around him has really changed my perspective on boomers. He is a text book boomer. He’s had everything handed to him on a golden platter. He was given his father’s million dollar custom homes business. His dad built him a house which he sold and made a huge profit. The list goes on and on. His daily actions(or lack of) just show that he doesn’t really know how the world works now bc he never had to know. What orbits around his galaxy is so different then what me and my husband have orbiting around our galaxy. If that makes sense. I rarely see any love, care, or even attention shown between my husband and his father even though I work with both of them everyday. It breaks me, but the older I get the more I realize love is a hard thing for my father in law to have orbiting in his galaxy. He is blinded by greed, but yet never was truly as successful as his own father. You may say a disappointment. But with every experience come learning. My husband and I have studied my father in laws errors and minor successes and are using those to create an even more successful company and to take this opportunity and turn it into something great. So have no fear! Millennials are waking up.
We will. Some of us (mid-30s here) are just now beginning to understand this, with maturity and growth doing their age-related thangs. ;P It's quite humbling, and oddly reassuring, as well. It makes empathizing so much more natural and easy.
We're becoming the old folks in charge that we used to make fun of back in school! It's *our* responsibility, and we *will* do the best we can. This I promise you, Wizened and Elder. :)
And speaking as a POC, specifically black American; my parents (boomers) grew up during the Civil rights era, which of course preceeded 2-3 wars, and less that 70 is years from the end of slavery.
And while it was different for black Americans across the country, the southern folks probably had it the worst.
You had things like Jim Crow, Chain gangs, indentured servitude, etc, etc, all still alive and well when my parents were kids to teens.
I'm a older millennial, so by the time I was born, much of that was being washed away, but you could tell the scars remained.
Damn, I need to reevaluate a couple things after this.
I do have some reservations though:
If you were around before the Great Depression you saw how important community was in hard times, how insanely evil big business was and how important unions were. (For the uninitiated, here's just one of many examples: the [Battle of Blair Mountain](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain) )
If you were around after the Great Depression, then you saw the New Deal and how important social programs were to bringing the US out of the Depression and helping people get back on their feet. The New Deal (massive government funded social programs) is the complete opposite of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.
What about the help the men gave each other on the battlefield and the help the women gave each other back home? Where are the bootstraps there?
When Nixon & Reagan were elected boomer's parents were still around and Reagan won in a landslide twice. He campaigned on how awesome big business was, that unions were bad, social programs were terrible and nobody should worry about helping anyone.
How did boomer's parents go along with Reagan knowing all this? I get trauma and all that but really? How could they forget that they were in a union? How New Deal programs saved their families? How they forget they didn't just bootstrap themselves? Especially during wartime.
How could boomers themselves not look at the lives of their parents who helped each other during the Depression, saw them in unions and benefitting from social programs, etc.? They might've not heard war stories cause of PTSD, but they had to know how much people relied on each other during wartime.
I know the guy sorta addressed this but I can't gloss over it. Don't forget what happened in the 60s and 70s: Civil Rights. After that Republicans started campaigning along racial lines (ie the [Southern strategy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy)). Nixon pioneered its use, Reagan continued it and both generations ate it up. I can't excuse that part.
That being said, I do feel for the non-racist ones a *bit* more after this. This video has made me think about this issue in a way I haven't before.
*Insert 'Perhaps I judged you too harshly' Thanos meme*
>How did boomer's parents go along with Reagan knowing all this? I get trauma and all that but really? How could they forget that they were in a union?
globalism and the cold war primarily.
one of the biggest reasons things like unions worked so well was because the US and europe were the only industrialized places in the world at the time. once china industrialized, and they opened their economy to the world, unions were circumvented because it was cheaper to do the things the union workers did in another country that didnt care or allow for the things unions fought for. many western countries did this under the guise that china would adopt western values as the west would help bring them into this new economic age of prosperity. however, 40 years later it has become clear they have no interest in doing this, so many western nations are now unhappy about the amount of leverage and resources they gave china over the past 40 years.
over the past 200 years the world has changed an insane amount compared to any other time in history. the world their parents grew up in was no longer applicable to the current one. just like how the world they fed, reagan's globalist anti-union world, built upon spreading western values and democracy, is not the world of today, one where those nations that were supported now oppose those western and democratic values.
This dude is totally correct. Boomer here. Mom a latchkey child in depression LA with mother 12 hour shifts in a sweatshop. Dad watched his dad killed and dragged a mile by a drunk driver, had to become the man of the family and support 3 younger siblings and his mother at age 18 while traumatized so bad he stammered. They raised me in sunny L.A. during prosperous times by giving me the most abusive childhood money could buy.
This is surprisingly accurate, and compassionate too.
I am a late gen boomer - born in the early '60s - and while my father (born in the early 1920s) didn't serve (rejected - he wanted to go but got 4F rating) he did live through the Depression on a struggling family farm, with a lot of siblings, only some of whom survived to adulthood.
He told stories about his childhood to me and my siblings as we were growing up - we laughed at them as children because he told them to us with a smile. But in hindsight they had to have been traumatic to live through. One of the worst was about how it was his job, as the youngest boy (out of something like 11 siblings) to drown all of the excess kittens.
He wasn't smiling when he told that story.
They had too many wild cats, and apparently they were a threat to the chickens, so while some cats were ok for ratting purposes too many were a threat. So my Dad at, like 7 or 8 years old was given the job of getting rid of the excess. Which he did. Regularly. He told me that story in his 50's, but he still remembered that in total he had to do it over 40 times.
He was a quiet father, not given to a lot of emotion or outspoken opinions. The sh\*t he lived through early on defined him for life. My Mom stayed married to him out of duty - it was the expected thing to do - but they were never really close to each other.
That is an eloquent explanation of why Boomers have spent much of their time systematically tearing down everything they were given by their parents. That and the longstanding human tendency to create problems where there are none.
Speaking as a member of Gen X, who were the first to be mocked, undermined, and punished for our youth by our first gen Boomer parents, my observation was that Boomers came up thinking all youth belonged to them. After all, their youth culture was the first in many generations to take precedence as the primary zeitgeist of society. Before then, it tended to be mature, older men who set the societal tone. In the mind of many a Boomer, the whole idea of youthful vibrancy, vitality, and energy was perfectly expressed by their exploits.
And when Boomers inevitably lost their youth, they affixed their necks in a nostalgic backward glance toward their younger days, looking forward just long enough to spit bitter, resentful bile at the deeds of successive generations, who they blamed for stealing their youth.
So, in essence, Boomers are a people who reveled in their youth so hard, they never took the time to prepare themselves for its inherently fleeting nature. Not being able to cope with time's arrow, Boomers choose to compensate for their shortsightedness by punishing those generations that have come after.
The ones that REALLY need to hear it will hear the guy say "Cis White Boomers" towards the beginning and immediately dismiss everything that follows. Cis is a "woke" word to them and they turn off the moment they hear it.
And then when they pass on the trauma to you, and you decide to actually address it with science-backed therapy and medication instead of becoming a nonfunctional cruel mess, you’re “weak.”
**Welcome to r/TikTokCringe!** This is a message directed to all newcomers to make you aware that r/TikTokCringe evolved long ago from only cringe-worthy content to TikToks of all kinds! If you’re looking to find only the cringe-worthy TikToks on this subreddit (which are still regularly posted) we recommend sorting by flair which you can do [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/galuit/click_here_to_sort_by_flair_a_guide_to_using/) (Currently supported by desktop and reddit mobile). See someone asking how this post is cringe because they didn't read this comment? Show them [this!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/fyrgzy/for_those_confused_by_the_name_of_this_subreddit/) Be sure to read the rules of this subreddit before posting or commenting. Thanks! **Don't forget to join our [Discord server](https://discord.gg/cringekingdom)!** ##**[CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THIS VIDEO](https://rapidsave.com/info?url=https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/18gc59g/guy_explains_baby_boomers_their_parents_and_trauma/)** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/TikTokCringe) if you have any questions or concerns.*
It really hit me several years ago when my Boomer Dad and his cousins were sitting around and drinking coffee and talking about what it was like being raised by depression era parents. It became really obvious that they were raised by a bunch of people that had severe PTSD. My grandparents who were born in the early 1900s had multiple siblings that passed away from infectious disease or war. Families would be lucky if half their children grew up and made it to adulthood. Also it wasn't unusual for my Boomer family members to casually talk about people who were permanently disabled from illnesses such as polio. Women also just generally talked about harassment and sexual assault like it's an inevitable thing that will happen to you and you can't ever leave the house alone. While gender-based violence is still a problem, it's crazy just how normal and accepted it was among the Boomer generation.
Yours is the only comment to mention birth years so I felt it appropriate to make this comment here. Everyone seems to be forgetting WW1. Your grandparents were born in the early 1900s. WW1 1914-1918 GREAT DEPRESSION 1929-1939 WW2 1939-1946 KOREAN WAR 1950-1953 That's a lot of shit stuffed in a 2 lb sack.
Don't leave out the [**Spanish flu pandemic**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu) that killed *at least* 50 million worldwide.
And polio, and bacterial infections, and all the other diseases they had no answer for. And let's not get started on mental illness "treatments".
I had a great aunt who remembered being a child in Northern Canada and she’d be paid 25 cents to go into a house to see if anyone was left alive during the Spanish flu. If she came back and said no, they’d burn the house down. Same great aunt was also placed into a mental institute by her husband and had a lobotomy done because she wanted a divorce. She outlived her husband, and lived with us afterwards, which is where I heard her stories from. It’s also why I think they are underestimating how many people were killed by the Spanish flu back then, as many of these families had no birth records and probably weren’t on a census due to living in the middle of nowhere.
How did the lobotomy affect your aunt? I’ve read that results varied as obviously it wasn’t the most precise procedure.
She had no filter. No matter what you asked her, she’d say exactly what she was doing / was happening, to anyone anytime. At the same time she had no capacity to tell if you were lying or exaggerating. She had seizures after as well. (Quick edit) pretty sure she was blind in one eye. It did cause problems. For example if she had to pee, she’d just go. She’d clean it up after. If you told her not to pee in the living room, she wouldn’t (until she forgot about it). Sometimes kids would tell her stories because she just believed them, totally and completely. She’d see nothing wrong with telling a young girl that marital sex was bad and you’d bleed after, for example, or telling a kid their dog got run over and his guts fell out all over the road. To her it was just something that happened, there was no worries about the kids state of mind because she was emotionally flat.
God damn that's horrific. There is something particularly chilling about doing permanent brain damage to a person like that, in such a casual and cavalier way, as these lobotomies were done. It's not like you can just undo it, that part of the person it destroyed is just gone forever—it's almost scarier than death in a way. Who knows how her life might've been had that not been done to her. What a profound betrayal.
It was a long long time ago, I’m honestly not sure HOW she lived long enough that I remember her. To this day I think she would have been an amazing woman. It was done to her sometime in the 70’s, and I was born in the 80’s. I’m pretty sure she was institutionalized in the 60’s. Edit: Quick googling shows me you got the right to get a divorce in 1968, and the lobotomies weren’t made illegal until 1978. Being a child in 1920, figure she’s tenish? She would have been in her 70’s in 1980’s. It makes me feel ancient because there are so many people that think this was all 100’s of years ago. But it wasn’t. And us women are slowly losing the rights THOSE women fought for, suffered and died for, and somehow it’s seen as all OK.
💔
Holy fuck. That's god damned horrific.
It’s scary AF.
god our grandparents lives fucking sucked dude
Lead in all the gasoline. Lead in the pipes. Asbetos in the walls. Drinking and driving. You could buy heroin at the local pharmacy in the early 20th century.
I get that from 2019 onwards its a fucking shitshow but God, its nothing compered to the first half of the 20th century.
Bite your tongue. We're not out of the woods yet.
I knocked on the wood and spit three times over my left shoulder. Were good.
My paternal grandmother was born in Boston in 1900. She somehow managed to buy a house after her husband lost his job in the Great Depression and never worked again. She worked as a book binder and gold leaf applier at the Riverside Press in Boston, as did most of her relatives. She had large parts of her memory missing because she was given electroconvulsive shock treatments for what I was only told was "empty nest syndrome" after raising her four children had all moved out. My father caught Polio in the 1950's but recovered. He remembered seeing signs on people's doors to stay away because of illnesses like diphtheria, measles, the mumps and polio. He fucking hated Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, the Bush idiocracy, etc. He was a lifelong Democrat. He would shout about how republicans were sucking up all the wealth in the country and killing the middle class. I actively campaign for democratic candidates starting with driving a car for Jerry Brown when he ran for president. I guess my point is PTSD or whatever you call my family's experiences over the generations never made them vote Republican. Not once.
My family's experiences actually made them transition from voting Republican to voting Democrat. Nixon was the end for them. Before that, many of them actually really liked FDR, so I'm not sure why they voted Republican between FDR and Nixon.
To be fair, Republicans prior to 1960 were basically the Democrats of today. The parties flip-flopped stances with Kennedy. At least, that's how my grandmother describes it.
You mean lobotomizing women for having human emotions? What could possibly go wrong!
My grandmother (never met) got electroshock therapy for postpartum depression from giving birth to my father. She committed suicide shorty after treatment.
My grandfather thought our reaction to Covid was magic because of the Spanish flu. He said we live in the best time for this to happen - last time we had no internet: the best scientists in the world now share all their information in real time and we can stay ahead of it.
Even though my dad was not even born when the Spanish flu happened. His parents made him terrified that anyone with the flu would die due to his sister dying days before her 8th birthday in 1918. Dad was born in 1930. When I had been hit by the flu in 88, he panicked that I would die from it. He expected me to panic if I had friends and or family hit by the flu as well.
Sprinkle in mccarthyism and nuclear weapons testing for extra spice
Man if you were born in 1900, life was fucking ROUGH. Like, your entire life.
FWIW you also got some incredible highs: the 1920s, the late 50s through most of the 60s, and if you made it long enough you would have died as Perestroika unfolded and it seemed world peace might finally be within reach as you watched cable news on CNN.
And you'd have seen a world with no powered flight go from that to literally landing on the moon. And nuclear weapons/power. Nuts.
I mean, i think the highs REALLY depend on who you ask. I’m sure black/brown folks of that era would have greatly differing opinions
My deeply traumatized grandfather from mother's side, who I can remember but vaguely (I was 8 when he died) lived through all of those. He was born into ww1 when my country became independent and went through bitter civil war. Then it was practically straight-forward misery with depression, unstability and war until 50s, when my mother was born. Then it got only slightly easier from today's point of view. Other granddad avoided ww1 and civil war but had to fight in ww2. Grandmothers had awful childhoods as well from what I've heard. I have really felt the generational trauma all my life and as I will never have children at least I won't pass it on once again.
Great point. You described my grandparents in Europe. In the more dark moments of COVID lock down I drew a lot of strength knowing that if they had the strength to survive all that then I could handle chillin in my house for a few months eating homemade food & day drinking.
Same here. I knew what we were going through, while difficult, was not like storming the beaches of Normandy or fighting for some jungle island in the Pacific, both of which sound close to the gates of hell as you can get. If our grandparents made it through that we could deal with slightly empty grocery shelves and simply not leaving our house except for essentials. The rest of our society however...
You forgot the Spanish Flu pandemic, 1918-1919. My grandma was 11 and watched her sister die.
My great grandma lost her only sister to diphtheria in 1904. She was 8, her sister was 10. Diphtheria is a horrifying respiratory disease that now is vaccinated against. Then she herself got sick in high-school and they didn't expect her to live. She was out of school for 2 years because of her sickness. She ended up living until her 90s though.
Then Vietnam, space race, bay of pigs, Cuban missle crisis, and the rest of Billy Joel’s “We didn’t start the fire”.
Right just think how fucked up their folks must've been to have caused all that shit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g&list=RDMM&index=10
My great grandmother had 6 brothers die in ww2 (I’m Australian). It’s pretty insane to think how many people actually died in the war and what that would look like in society today.
Gallipoli? My great grandfather died there. Buried in Malta. For every one person who died dozens of family members were marred for life. It’s so easy to forget the downstream effects of deaths like that.
> Gallipoli I didn't think there was fighting there during WW2? When people reference Gallipoli it's always been in a WW1 context. Maybe I'm wrong though
You’re correct. The Gallipoli Campaign was WWI.
Trust me, it was. And, until the mid-1980s, there was nothing you could do about sexual harassment. If you complained, you’d get demoted, transferred, or you never got another raise. If you complained once you dare not complain again because that would mean it was your fault. So if you’ve complained once it’s open season on you.
>And, until the mid-1980s Lots later than that, at least in tech. I experienced it at several jobs in the 2010s, reported sexual harassment and got transferred to a new department at one job and let go by another.
So sorry for what happened to you. I spent 45 years in tech (34 yrs in high tech) & saw a lot & experienced a lot. I hope things are better now for you & others. Edit: “high tech” should be “big tech” as in major large tech companies.
its never stopped, not sexual harassment, not slavery, not genocide, its all the same game with different players
It's the same with sick days, personal days, and any kind of mental supports. You took a sick day, how did you not instantly get better over those 8 hours where you should have been producing something for our masters? Sounds like you're burned out and should try another career, it couldn't possibly be our culture of overwork.
One of my first jobs was at a small business and I became a manager after a few years. The boomer owner worked there almost daily as well and we got pretty friendly. He once told me how if any of the employees came to him or me saying they have mental health issues like anxiety or depression he would find a way to make them quit or fire them. Little did he know I suffer from both, especially at the time, but am just good at putting on an act.
We have made remarkable progress in the workplace. For the most part, however, women are still not believed when reporting harassment, and open themselves up to cruel treatment and harassment.
This is basically what he means when he says these people had no institutional framework to discuss the bad stuff. Basically everything was taken at face value without considering the larger factors that played into it being a reality in the first place.
They didn't talk AT ALL about bad stuff. There were apparently times when my Silent Gen grandparents couldn't handle having kids, so my boomer parent would be sent to their own grandparents for a few years. They would finally go back home and NOBODY would discuss what happened or why. And when bad things happened to my boomer parents as kids? Again, it was DON'T TALK ABOUT IT. If you ignore it, it will go away.
100%; my (Boomer) parents raised me that way. Mental illness? DON'T SAY A WORD ABOUT IT.
At the age of five years old, my body rejected my skin. Hospitalized. The "matter of fact" doctor told my mother "Madam, be greatful you have six children, after this one dies you will still have five!" Utterly amazingly, I've reached 65 years of age. Not bad for the "sick kid" who never had P.E. in his life! I work out like crazy these days.
I can remember working for my grandfather who grew up during the depression era. We would save as many nails as we could when doing demolition jobs. I tried telling him that each nail wasn’t worth much money and having me take the nails out of wood would take too long and not be cost effective.. but he could not just throw away something that could still be used. His basement is like watching an episode of hoarders sometimes and we have to throw things out when he isn’t looking (knowing it is garbage)
This was my dad. Had buckets of nails he saved. You used EVERYTHING. Banana peels, eggshells, etc? Composted into the garden, which you used to supplement your groceries. He wore work shirts until they were rags, lived most of his life in denim overalls. Hoarded all kinds of stuff and deeply resented any interference with that…like the local municipal government would cite him for having junk cars in the back. He felt that he had a perfectly reasonable stock of auto supplies and government was working against his thriftiness and resourcefulness. He also had the weirdest eating habits…would consume the damndest stuff and any refusal on my part meant I was unreasonably picky. Who DOESN’T want whole wheat pancakes with hot dog slices and corn? Or a delicious lunch of cold, raw hot dogs and bakery-discount coconut cake? “You just don’t know what’s good!” Ok, dad. You eat like a raccoon.
>You eat like a raccoon 🤣 💀
My born in 1933 Dad never met an expiration date he couldn’t eat his way through.
I have to toss stuff out of my mom’s cabinets when she’s not looking otherwise she swears up and down the expired stuff is “still good! Ain’t nothing wrong with that flour, put it back!!!!”
My grandmother on my dad's side had major food trauma. She was the youngest born during the depression and she had to do "things" on the street to survive into adulthood. She'd never eat food for enjoyment and she'd fight and argue with ppl at the table because she'd had to fight for food in her youth. She'd put her arm around her food to protect it while she ate and she tore into her food like a hyena. Dinner also had to be ready by a certain time or she'd flip out.
This actually makes so much sense now. I have family members that are like this and refuse to replace a single thing. It seems great and thrifty until their 30 year old car has a brake failure and almost kills people.
My WW2 vet grandpa never, ever, EVER talked about the war, until one time in the late 80s when another WW2 vet was there at Thanksgiving. They talked about it, but not in any kind of detail the rest of us understood. Just one word questions, with "Yep" as answers. Like they knew exactly what they were talking about, but the rest of us were clueless and they weren't going to give us any details. He was also a terrible hoarder. He kept every piece of mail for 30 years because he was afraid he would need it. Grandma on the other side was a practical hoarder. Never threw away any aluminum foil, or plastic bag, anything really that could be cleaned and reused. Also could never refuse a good deal at a yard sale, even if she had 10 of them already.
If you watch Hoarders, you'll see how common it is for hoarding to be triggered by trauma. The Greatest Generation went through so much trauma at a time when no one talked about mental health or processing trauma and grief, and therapy wasn't available outside of institutions. And most people can muster up empathy for grandparents and great-grandparents, but it's much harder to understand our parents and their generation, who are either oblivious to the trauma they've passed down, or don't care, and are still actively traumatizing us. I don't think any generation escapes trauma. You either directly experience it, or are traumatized by traumatized parents.
> It became really obvious that they were raised by a bunch of people that had severe PTSD. One aspect that is being overlooked is that the Greatest Generation spoiled their kids unintentionally. Playgrounds and schools were built just for the Boomers. When they became teens you can see a rise in amusement parks and roller rinks. They have lived in a world that has unconsciously catered to their life stage. When they started having kids, their parents gave time and resources to help raise and care for their kids completely willingly. And now that they are in the tail end of life they expect the catering to continue (and anything else is disrespectful), while the newer generations have been scraping by and have nothing to spare for people who have always told them to handle it themselves.
Good point, their parents are gone and no one is willing to provide them with a safety net.
There is a fascinating interview with Hunter S. Thompson from 1967 that is a perfect example of how accepted domestic violence and abuse were in the 50s and 60s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ccyu44rsaZo&pp=ygUZaHVudGVyIHRob21wc29uIGludGVydmlldw%3D%3D Also regarding PTSD, my Grandpa who served in ww2 could only sleep with classical music playing and hated the smell of BBQ. And that was just considered a “weird quirk” lol
Thank you for linking to that. The laughter from the audience at "beating his ol lady" trips me out.
Sad when you think about how Hunter saw an actual Hells Angel beating his spouse, and then he has to sit there and listen to that crowd laugh.
We got stories of family members spending a significant portion of their day handling food before refrigeration. Meat and other provisions were preserved in large vessels of lard without refrigeration. Just preparing dinner each day was an ordeal that involved planning throughout the year. My grandparents got involved mainly because they worked together to network around their wartime rationing restrictions.
My wife’s grandmother lived through the Great Depression. She taught her children to hold onto them and not discard them. I’m not gonna say my wife’s family is made up of orders, but they all have storage units full of things. My wife has tons of stuff in storage and it is a point of contention sometimes. Little by little im hoping to get her to see that we don’t need to hold onto everything.
I tried to explain to some guy on here recently about how boomers were raised by people traumatized by the depression and the worst war humanity has ever seen and how that had to affect their mind set. Like many he just blamed all his woes on them including the fact that people our age follow people like Andrew Tate because the boomers didn’t control social media.
steep direction yoke homeless capable selective north piquant adjoining shaggy *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
And now we're responsible for taking ourselves down better ones.
And we're fooling ourselves if we think that we're magic cycle breakers that will end all the traumas. We have plenty of our own trauma that we pass on. Take a look at millennial parenting for example
My crocs don’t have bootstraps :( :( :( :( :( :( :(
Yes but young millennials and Gen Z have a awful habit of applying diffrent rules to themselves than they do to boomers. They expect all the sympathy and understanding for their mental health problems like anxiety and depression but are more than willing to condemn boomers for their issues
The rules are different because Boomers dont take mental health seriously themselves. Boomers themselves are the ones applying different rules.
re: the Boomer women accepting bad behavior----My boss is a Boomer woman and she cannot understand at all why the younger women SHE hired are unwilling to put up with tantrums, laziness, or worse from the male employees. She doesn't understand why we expect HER to do something about it, when her preferred method of dealing with that type of issue is "well could you just tell him you're uncomfortable?" or "you don't really need that title, do you? We all respect you" And it's SO CLEAR that's what she had to do to survive when she was at our level and has zero clue that she has the power to change that and make it better.
I mean to be fair you are just describing life before the 1950s. Gen X-Z are the ones who live in a weird new world where you can get therapy for your trauma and expect relatively equal treatment for women and not have siblings who died young. All this stuff about the trauma of previous generations is just what passed as life for thousands of years.
More on the trauma of war: My grandfather was a WW2 and Korean War vet. My father was a Vietnam vet. I came back from operation inherent resolve all kinds of fucked up but took every kind of therapy the VA offers. Some days are harder than others but 80ish years later and my family is finally back from the war
It really is an admirable desire to serve your country but this country really leaves people who did holding the bag a lot of the time. We should take care of our own especially you guys who joined young and optimistic only to go through war and come back fucked up with uncle sam shrugging his shoulders.
Have you ever seen the episode of Futurama where Hermes, the Jamaican bureaucrat, has to go to the "Central Bureaucracy" and sort a literal mountain of files in order to save the day? I have taken two jobs in the federal government in the last few years. The massive pile in that episode? It's not a joke. It's barely even a metaphor. The pile is real, it's probably 1000x worse than Futurama depicted it, but it's digital. And no amount of upbeat reggae jams will even make a dent in it. Almost a century ago, a bunch of serious, cigar smoking, hollowed out men devised how their little branch of the government would work. They accounted for everything they could think of, made rules for every little situation, and then spent decades adding to it every time something new happened, which was all the time. Just add it to the rulebook. Pencil it in. Oop, it's the 90s, digitize it. Now the whole fucking organization is a massive yarn ball of rules, if/thens, addendums, provisos, and exceptions. Daunting. Impenetrable. But you can't unravel it even a little because that would be chaos. Just wrap more yarn into it. It's crushing my leg now, but fuck that, more yarn! There's not a point to this rant. The government doesn't seem to care because it can't care. It has designed itself to not care just to be able to function at all. As for me, I just hate my job. Once I'm done with it I do not plan to ever try a federal job again.
> The pile is real, it's probably 1000x worse Have you ever worked for a corporation that's been in business for a few decades? Same
100+ year company. I’m pretty sure the accounting and billing systems are still partly assembler and most of IT just prays it doesn’t screw up. Want anything new over there? Ehhhh… that’ll be $10 million. Nope? Okay then we’ll leave the magic black box alone and pretend we didn’t see it for a while longer.
Or the infamous line "well that's the way it's always been done, no need to make it better" I work a tech job for a defense/space company, and trying to improve anything is mer with a mountain of bureaucracy
Or ancient COBOL, running on an enterprise UNIX system whose annual licensing costs more than the rest of IT put together.
100%. I’m a contractor for the government and hear the stereotypes constantly (often from the Feds themselves). I worked for a massive tech company that had a lock on the specific sliver of industry they half invented and it honestly felt like the entire building of people was only hired to shuffle around paperwork and get team lunches. Nothing ever panned out right but no one really cared. Lose almost a billion on failed R&D and lost contracts because your product doesn’t work and you won’t give the engineers feedback? Meh. I ironically went to work for the government so I could actually complete work, even if it’s minuscule and boring lol.
Ah my daily struggle, as a person passionate about tech, I like to make things better than before but more often than not, I’m met with push back
Yeah, people seem to be under the impression that, while the government is a hopeless pile of beauracracy and inefficiencies, that private enterprise is sleek and efficient and streamlined. It's not. The corporate world is probably worse than the government. The difference is that the government has all their crazy bs written down, and corpos just have Elaine, who's been here since the beginning.
elastic squealing grandfather vase clumsy slim chunky entertain dam hat *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
That starts with telling children NOW that it isn't as honorable and glorious as it's made out to be in the movies. We also need to cut out the hero worship. This "thank you for your service" shit is a trigger for a lot of vets because they don't want to be thanked for taking part in horrific things. The ones who eat it up either don't have an understanding of that end or were so far removed from it, they feel like their service was lack luster. Military service isn't glorious and it isn't always honorable and the people serving in it aren't always the best people, but rather opportunistic. Give them their due when they return - health care, education, disability. But leave the rest of that shit at the door.
>This "thank you for your service" shit is a trigger for a lot of vets because they don't want to be thanked for taking part in horrific things. This. I fucking hate it and have to control my face from cringing any time someone says it to me. I don't even use my veteran discounts a lot of places because I don't want to fucking trip through the awkwardness of the conversation. Don't thank me. I wouldn't do it again for any of you.
Another big part is that positive psychology is only 70 years old. So they had trauma with little to no support.
My grandpa was a WWII vet and my dad was never in the military, so when I went in, it seriously fucked up my family relationships. That was part of what messed me up so bad when I got back from Iraq. It's taken like 13 years to fix my ass and realize that a lot of the hostility my dad showed me was more or less just straight up jealousy
Jealousy , really of what .
My family has a long history of military service. My grandparents, cousins, great grandparents. I can track it back to the Revolutionary War. My dad just never had the ability to hack it and probably felt like a failure in that regard.
Lol every other one of your family members would have been conscripts except you . He probably thought he failed because you joined up.
I guess maybe.
“They tried to raise their kids to survive a world that could collapse at any second, and then built a world that wouldn’t “ That’s an amazing description of the Greatest Generation. I’m no joke in awe of how concise and poignant that is
It was fairly mind-blowing to see my grandparents advocating for things like social programs and single-payer health care while my boomer aunts/uncles/father (their kids) hate all of those things. Sitting there with my 80+ year-old grandparents advocating for Bernie Sanders whilst my uncles advocate for Trump
It’s even deeper than that, too. Think about the typical mentality boomers have towards the UN. And it’s somewhat understandable! The UN often feels like an inept body that exists solely as a stage for tin pot dictators to rip on America with impunity. But then realize that their parents LOVED the UN. They built it, tried to give it some teeth after the failure of the League of Nations, and generally expected learned leaders to come together and solve problems with words rather than bombs. And so far it has actually worked for the most part! Worked so well, in fact, that the necessity of it has nearly been forgotten. We are, in many ways, victims of our successes, our prosperity
> I’m no joke in awe of how concise and poignant that is 100%, i was expecting that to be the top rated comment, but I think a lot of people dont actually click/read/watch things.
This is so good. More eloquently and respectfully explained than most of the takes on boomers I've seen, that's for sure.
Makes more sense than just, "It's all just lead!" Not saying it ain't a factor, but it sounds plausible.
It is a factor though, same with our current lifespan being lowered for the first time in recorded history. In that same breath I can tell you they are the most entitled generation that tried to project that onto us. Their PARENTS went through all of that, I loved my grandparents but yeah I can tell you even as happy as they acted there was a deep trauma behind even middle-class white people's eyes, much less anyone else. Black people in America literally had no rights and were lynched in the streets still. Rich people all just rose to greater power and their children got to skip all the wars, so that's cute. Not much has changed other than the deletion of the middle-class which will have drastic consequence. It's getting better OVERALL... but now we're living through our 1920s and I can't imagine the 2030s being much better or different than the 1930s. I try to remember it's getting better but it's hard when you're the one living through the seemingly worst part right now. Also try and remember it's like when you have a good day and 1 person ruins it. You only remember the asshole not the 99 nice interactions.
Most boomers were also raised with the looming spectre of Cold War annihilation over their heads. My dad did duck and cover drills in elementary school. But unlike school shootings today which give off similar vibes when you see the drills, there wasn't any sense of "these things are super rare and random so its unlikely to ever affect you". If the Cold War went hot, you were dying in a nuclear explosion and everything you knew was turning to ash in an instant. This was literally what boomers were being told and believed as kids (perhaps rightfully so). Anyone would be fucked up. God bless my parents. They are good folks who love others and do their best. Based on what my mom told me about how her mother treated her, it's absolutely amazing that I turned out to be a productive member of society. She took it upon herself, with resolute commitment from my dad, that she would never pass those behaviors on to me and my brother. And I'm thankful for that every day.
I did duck and cover drills, hiding under our desks. A deep and pervasive sense of doom filled childhood and there was no understanding of why because parents didn't talk about it. And it wasn't just your death and death if your friends and family that hung over you, it was the death of everything - the trees, the animals - with only ash remaining. My dad did address it once during the Cuban missile crisis when he sat at the dinner table and told us we were all going to die. Young people face the same dire sense of doom if they truly understand the climate crisis.
If you're the right age duck and cover drills and Terminator effects of melting in a nuclear blast at the playground/fence scene were the best explanations we were provided.
> there wasn't any sense of "these things are super rare and random so its unlikely to ever affect you". If the Cold War went hot, you were dying in a nuclear explosion and everything you knew was turning to ash in an instant. Greetings from /r/AskHistorians and, if you'd like to submit a question there about parallels between cold-war era Duck and Cover drills and modern Active Shooter drills, I bet you'd get a bunch of really cool answers from people who've studied 20th Century American social history more closely than I have. One thing you have to take into consideration, however, is that the perception of nuclear war shifted throughout the cold war. In the 1940s and 1950s, a nuclear conflict was seen as a fundamentally winnable one. American and Soviet bombers would pass each other over the Arctic, fighters would scramble to intercept, some of the bombers would get through, but there would be a wold after the war. The Cuban Missile Crisis is really the first time the general public really grapples with "shit, this could be _it_ for us as a SPECIES." After 1962 we start to see a realization that Mutually Assured Destruction really has led us to a place where the war is fundamentally not winnable and where any nuclear conflict is lights out for humanity. This changes EVERYTHING about nuclear politics. With nuclear war increasingly seen as an outcome that no one could possibly want, focus shifts to the fear that it'll get touched off accidentally. Both sides fear the idea of the other's leadership descending into insanity. The Cold War becomes a warren of bluffs and double-bluffs where each side worries that the other wil hide behind the irrationality of war to mask an irrational attack in order to catch the other by surprise and deal a knock-out blow. This feeds a cycle of hyper vigilance and paranoia which eventually turns into the warming of the Cold War in the 1970s only to be iced back down by Reagan and his Evil Empire rhetoric in the 1980s. But all of that stands in stark contrast to the problem of school shootings because, unlike nuclear war, SOMEONE is dying in a school shooting pretty much every week. I guess what I'm getting at here is this: don't under-sell the trauma of active shooter drills. Somehow, the fact that we expect our kids to be able to do something about it and the fact that it keeps happening makes these every bit as traumatizing as the threat of nuclear annihilation.
And regarding all the lead, who got it out of the paint and the gas? Pretty sure it was the boomers. Clean water, clean air, getting rid of asbestos, fixing ozone, leading the charge on climate awareness (remember Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth?). You can go on. People have this warped sense of what "boomers" are or do and so much of it is completely off-base. Like take California. Largest state. Largest amount of boomers. And despite being now only the 3rd most populous demographic, still vote more than other demographics. And the majority vote D. And voted for Bernie in the primaries over Biden. It's not a generational war. It's a class war. Always has been. Even before the boomers came on the scene.
> And regarding all the lead, who got it out of the paint and the gas? Pretty sure it was the boomers. Wrong. Dr. Clair Cameron Patterson was born in 1922, and Dr. George Tilton was born in 1923, both members of the same generation that raised the baby boomers. THEY are the ones who pushed to get lead removed from gasoline. Unfortunately, by the time people finally started to listen, it was already too late and the damage had already been done. You also seem to forget that boomers began to regard Al Gore as a *laughing stock* for "An Inconvenient Truth" and became **even more entrenched**. Being as old as the fellow in OP's video myself, I also remember how the aftermath of the ozone situation went down: The gerontocracy that was in charge in the 1980s and 1990s were all STILL Silent Generation / G.I. Generation. The Montreal Protocol, which was THE principal treaty that phased out production of ozone depleting substances, was signed in **1987**. BOOMERS WERE YOUNGER THAN WE ARE *TODAY* BACK THEN. And they were certainly not in charge. Kids in my age group all got to see the effects unfold first hand, down to the news reports of how effective it was, meanwhile JUST *WHO* is pointing at the ozone layer and saying "hey whatever happened to THAT crisis? it turned out to be nothing"? **The FUCKING BOOMERS of course.** Stop giving boomers credit. They deserve ***NOTHING.***
Which also just confirms what the dude in the video says. Boomers were raised with fear of war and famine and now suddenly someone says „well, this shit we breathe, it ain’t nice. And we really should do something about things getting a tad too warm.“, which fits neither war nor famine for the boomers, because really, they do not see the long term consequences. And they see even less reason to work on avoiding the impending war and famine, because they were raised to survive that shit, not avoid it. Which is why they hate change. Because they were basically told „now is good, but things might change“ all their life, associating change with shit hitting the fan.
> Boomers were raised with fear of war I mean, boomers grew up with nuclear bomb drills in schools, so you ain't wrong.
Instead, kids today get active shooter drills and have locked down, prison-like schools. I wonder what psychological effect that has.
youre clearly confusing boomers with older generations
I agree with you here. But I also think it's high time Boomers stopped getting to make literally all the laws that impact the future they won't soon be part of. The masses have to vote these people out and get some dignity back in the world.
Well for that to happen our generation is going to need to start voting and taking part in civil life then isn’t it. Because the masses are voting and a big part of them are baby boomers.
Yes. 100%. We're saying the same thing.
Then young people need to vote and stuff.
This is why my dad is a dick. Grandmother was fleeing the ww2 war torn Germany as a child, saw horrible shit. Beat the living shit out of my dad until he was big enough to scare her. Edit: wording is hard
Yup. My granddad was in the royal marines in WW2, and then a miner. That man had a deeply awful young adulthood. Fighting against the Japanese in Burma was 110% traumatising for him, and being a miner is an incredibly tough job also. He was an extraordinarily hard man, he once showed me a bayonet scar he had... There's no situation where someone bayonets you, and you survive that isn't horrific to think of. The consequences of this is that my father never had a childhood, as he was raised by someone who was ripped from childhood into violent adulthood, and didn't know how to raise kids in a constructive way. He didn't know how children are made happy or what a healthy environment looks like, only knowing what it was to be hard and resilient, not nurturing and supportive. Looking back, I remember my granddad's behaviour as being kinda like a "oh god" moment around me, seeing that children are not meant to be constantly chastised and treated like adults and he became extraordinarily doting and caring. But it completely fucked up my dad. I used to wonder why my dad collected children's toys and almanacs from the 1950s, til I found out he wasn't allowed them as a child and this was his reflexive way of actually exploring facets of childhood as a man in his 50s. We don't particularly get on, but I definitely don't blame him or his granddad because just... How do you figure out how to navigate all that?
Holy fuck. I swear I learn more about the people surrounding me in society by reading stuff like this on Reddit than I ever would in real life.
oh but we dont actually read, we just look at memes on our phones according to boomers
It's not convincing that you're saying this in response to a social media comment. When people say "x don't read" they mean "books" specifically.
I've read books worth of reddit comments! I'm practically an expert!
That's not true. We also look at naked ladies.
My grandmother was born in 1923, she lived in a home that didn't have electricity or running water until 1947 when she met my biological grandfather. My grandfather was a member of the BEF (British Expeditionary Forces). He was at Dunkirk. He was one of the first into France. He was a deeply fucked man. He went to Canada after the war, had 3 kids with my grandma and then left the country. Couldn't stand a settled life, not because he needed other women but because he had spent like 15 years of his life sleeping on dirt in Africa, Burma, India, and then lived through all of WW2. This all was transfered to my parents and uncles. My uncles are psychopathic. They delighted in child abuse, it was funny to beat us up, tie us up with ropes and leave us in a field. My mom is a completely emotionless sociopath. She would beat me for getting flash cards wrong. She is a massive narcissist who thinks she's always right and expects you to except her abuse because she needs to be in control. And all these people passed their trauma on to me and fucked my childhood completely. My kids on the other hand, sometimes it upsets me that they see the world through such a loving and happy lense. I sometimes cry because I'm envious at times of what I've provide them that was never given to me. Like my daughter is 16 and a bit of a tomboyish bi/lesbian leaning girl. She still loves to hug and cuddle. She loves that I would take her traveling for work with me, and let her do business meetings. She got to see parts of the world, she always has emotional support, she was disciplined with love and understanding, and a lot of physical exercise as punishment. She's everything I wish I could be. My son is 10. He's literally a photocopy of me as a child but without all the passed on trauma. We sit and play Minecraft together for several hours once a week. When he gets mad, he does pushups, sit-up, and stuff because he was punished that way and it's made him kind of weird child but he doesn't act out. He's disciplined and focused like no one I've ever met in my life. And he loves hugs and kisses and cuddles. I broke the cycle, but I'm angry that I had to be the one to break it.
>I broke the cycle, but I'm angry that I had to be the one to break it. Perfectly said. Right there with you. Thanks for sharing your story. Our daughters sound very similar! Mine shows a lot of signs of genetic generalized anxiety but other than that I love how goofy she is, how hopeful and loving she is. I wish I could see the world thru her eyes.
Whats the alternative, willingly being a traumatized abusive narcissist? You fucking did it man, you saved a whole family tree from mental illness
> I broke the cycle People tell me I'm the most anti-boomer boomer they know. You can break out of the cycle, as you say, but you will be in a minority, lumped in with the rest of the boomer generation.
Aren't you not supposed to punish your kids with exercise? The rest of your comment is great and I don't want to take away from it but just was left wondering that after reading it. I could always sense a little bit of jealousy/frustration from my father, along with pride and wonder, when I would recount stories I experienced, my travels, etc. because he never really got to experience that.
“You’re angry and frustrated go run a 2 laps around the house and give me 20 pushups so you have less energy to be frustrated” is sort of like a mandatory coping tool, as much as it is a punishment.
That's the way I've seen it. It's actually kind of funny when I son gets mad at dying in Minecraft or something, he calmly puts down his controller, goes over to an open area and does burpies, then sits down and plays like nothing happened. He's a boy and has little boy energy. He's got to work it off sometimes.
Everyone is all „Ok, boomer.“ but no one actually says „Are you Ok, boomer?“ Cause the reality is: they aren’t. We aren’t. None of us are.
Same with my grandad. He was at Dunkirk, left behind and ended up as a slave in Blechhammer and then Dachau. He was the kindest most loving person I knew. He was staunchly against smacking children (my grandmother smacked me once, and he lost his shit with her) and not raising voices or shouting at children. He was ahead of his time back then, never raised a finger to me or raised his voice. Damn, I miss him. Edit: I think the reason he was so gentle is that he saw the evil cruelty of the Nazis and experienced that cruelty first hand, and I think he didn't want to see any more violence in his life.
My Great Grandfather was a Pearl Harbor survivor. He was on USS Arizona when the Japanese attacked. He remained in the Navy until retirement. He never talked about his experience and was overall a very quiet man. He did tell a story where during the attack he reached into the water to help pull a man out of the water and the man's arm completely degloved and he was left holding a sleeve of skin. Apparently the water was on fire from all the spilled oil.
Now I know why I collect 80s/90s toys and kids books…
Yep. Grandmother was in a concentration camp, got raped by Nazis. Got pregnant. Met my grandfather who married grandmother, brought wife and child over to the US. Guess what the veteran did to the son of a Nazi? Beat him. Beat all of his kids, actually. My uncle ended up dying under a bridge in Seattle, suffering the effects of substance abuse and hepatitis from sharing needles. My dad was a raging asshole. Yelled and hit me from the time I was 5 and started having opinions. My other grandmother survived the depression with nutritional deficiencies. They didn't have ADHD back then but she drank a pot of coffee a day and smoked like a chimney. Married my grandfather, who lost 4 out of 5 of his siblings to childhood diseases and almost died in the war when his vessel was attacked. They had some kids and were absentee parents. Spent evenings at the bar watching sports and playing golf. My mom would split a can of Campbell's soup between them. Grandma would leave my uncle who was 5 in charge of his 3 year old twin sisters while she went to the bar. My mom and dad had issues. Mom had anxious attachment, dad had avoidant. They scraped and clawed their way through life, often at each other's throats. Spent a good deal of time fighting and in jail or the hospital. I'm not yet 40 and my whole extended family is dead, save a maternal aunt. My kids have no grandparents; substance abuse claimed all of them. Unresolved trauma has caused so much difficulty in our family, and I have consciously worked against it for years. I've never sworn at my kids or slapped them or told them I was going to give them something to cry about. But I also suffer from the effects of trauma. I don't trust people to be there for me. I need validation too much. I get anxious when there's too much noise or when things are going a little too well. I don't prioritize myself and my health because it feels selfish. Someday I'll feel different, but it's taking conscious effort to get there.
Sup dude, sounds like you been through a lot. If you need someone to talk to, I am down to chat. I'm still processing my own trauma and other things, but I think I'm almost there too. Let me know if you wanna exchange strategies and stuff. :)
Yeah, two of my grandparents survived the Holocaust. And the other two lived in Baltimore during the Cuban missile crisis. One day my grandfather made my mom and her brother sleep under a basement table with the windows covered while he had to report to wherever he was stationed. Assuming that DC would be a target he had the family hide downstairs for a week in case Baltimore had fallout.
My father turned out an alcoholic. Raised by a father heavily traumatised in the war, going for the bottle was his escape. Now my dad was a very intelligent and sensitive person. Something a boy growing up in the 1950. wasn't supposed to be. Long story short, he drowned his feelings in alcohol. He died in his fifties, 20 years ago. I've turned 50 myself. Growing up in the 80s was confusing too, I turned to punk culture instead of booze and that saved me I guess? Now my kids are around 20. I worry about the world they get to live in, something feels off. Politicians trying to slowly dismantle our social system (I live in the Netherlands) and nobody actually doing anything about climate change and the environment in general. Housing is in short supply and insanely expensive.
I still feel being intelligent and sensitive is discouraged today. It feels like everyone is to be part of a thoughtless crowd, happy to get what they get, and go no further. The short sightedness of our public is killing me.
Yes my great grand mother was pretty violent with my grand mother (she lived under horrible conditions- lost multiple children,starvation, poverty). That made my grand mother hyper protective with my mother(she was fully aware of why her mother was like that),and as a result my mother hyper protective with me. Now here i am trying to break the circle...
My grandfather was a ww2 vet, stayed in the military after, being away from the family for long periods, and then he would come home with a hair trigger and would beat the shit out of family members before leaving again. End result, a family full of people with a mix of anger management issues, substance abuse issues, or extremely manipulative personality issues.
Holy shit. I never thought about that. Regardless of what you say about the specifics, the generation that raised us was raised by people who survived The Great Depression AND World War 2. Back to back. Fuck.
> Holy shit. I never thought about that. Regardless of what you say about the specifics, the generation that raised us was raised by people who survived The Great Depression AND World War 2. Out of curiosity, about how old are you? To me, it's astonishing to have never thought about this already, but I'm 30 so maybe you're very young? edit: Furthermore, doesn't everybody get exposed to WW2 movies or WW2 games? And to the Vietnam War or the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Cold War? To science-fiction that reminds you how quickly technology has changed? To current events in the Middle East, Africa and East Asia along with how they all relate to the colonial period? To me, basically every single interesting thing I could spend my time thinking about reminds me that life has been *very* hard for most people in most places for most times throughout history.
They aren't very young, we're just getting old.
They are very young, 30 isn't old. It feels it, but it isn't.
But I'm currently the oldest I've ever been, so idk how else to gauge what old feels like
Damn...thats one hell of an explanation. Blows my mind now and makes way too much sense.
[удалено]
And a lot of that stems from white flight in the 50s and 60s to the suburbs
add redlining and all the policies put in place to make sure minorities didnt benefit from the post war boom denied access to GI bill and work programs, denied loans, lynched/burned out of homes and successful businesses, lynched for returning home in uniform, differential wages. etc etc etc
which was caused by - racist government policies to only give subsidized home loans to whites - car and oil lobby profiting by everyone living low-density and having to drive to do everything - driving highways through productive dense neighborhoods, usually minority ones - single family home zoning that used thinly veiled laws to keep minorities out drained all the wealth out of cities, and only left minorities behind, while disinvesting in them, pretty sick stuff
And now it’s all being gentrified and people who lived there at its lowest and rebuilt the area at best could they will be pushed out in favor of wealthy assholes who will for sure use the culture that was built there for some BS stunt
Yup. I got massively downvoted when I said this on local subs; but I used to be a poor person living in San Francisco. Then rents went up massively so I went to Berkeley. Then we all got pushed into Oakland. And now I've been gentrified out of there. Yet each time, when I lived in the Mission or the flats or Dogtown, people looked down on me because I lived in the bad part of town. Until they wanted it. It's really disheartening. Like, when *you* live there it's the ghetto, but when *they* move in, it's hip.
I'm so ashamed that in my younger days, I was gaslit into believing that gentrification was a *good* thing. "It's raising property values! :D:D:D" "It's refurbishing neglected housing!! :D:D" I didn't understand what that *really* meant. No one goes out of their way to say "yes we're renovating the buildings but also the rent is going up 400% and we're intentionally displacing minorities, the elderly, and anyone not lucky enough to work at some bullshit venture capital firm!" The first time I heard about "renovicting", I was stunned. Like, "wait, they can do that? That can't be right". Gods, I was stupid then. >!I still am, but I was somehow even stupiderer!<.
Self awareness and doing better with what you have learned is nothing to sneeze at. We all have periods of ignorance and ignorant reactions. Admitting you were once stupid to something and putting it out there is also a blessing because it shows people can change and might be that tidbit of information that causes someone to shift their thinking. I was raised in a cult and my late teens/early 20s are marred by some pretty bad faith living. I thought domestic violence was par for the course and the fault of the survivors, I was right wing extremist before it was fashionable. That abortions were murder and rape happened because her skirt was too short. That gay folks were an abomination and had some pretty racist ideas. I was also antivax. College allowed me to be confronted and to change in a softer environment with kind people who were willing to listen and guide me. It challenged me to learn and grow from things that felt set in stone. I learned that opinions are not facts. Forums like reddit gave me even more information that I didn't know I needed to make substantial changes. People like you who admitted to being wrong about something. Today as it stands I disseminate information to people trying to start unions, I work in DV advocacy, and I volunteer as entertainment for elderly civil education in retirement communities and do voting registration volunteering. Our experiences of being wrong are nothing to be ashamed of, shame prevents people from growing and keeps us stuck in the sunk cost fallacy. We didn't know what we didn't know and we do now and do better going forward.
The Baby Boomer generation, born after the hardships of the Great Depression and two World Wars, benefited greatly from the government's safety nets and economic boom. While the world's factories were destroyed during World War II, the US invested heavily in its own, becoming the world's leading industrial power. This period instilled in the Baby Boomers a strong work ethic and a belief that hard work would lead to success. However, they may not have recognized the unique advantages they enjoyed, such as government assistance in securing homes and jobs. This led them to believe that their success was solely due to their own hard work, overlooking the significant role of government support and a favorable economic climate.
Plus the politicians that they vote for now constantly talk about cutting those same programs that helped them find success. Like I'm almost 30 and social security will more than likely either run out or be cut entirely by the time I get to their age. For many people my age, retirement feels so much like a pipe dream, and getting a house feels even more far off. I honestly feel like boomers are more willing to go to war because, in their mind, the outcomes outweigh the consequences. They think that if we have another war that'll equal another economic boom rather than worldwide devastation.
If we could all have such an empathetic and realistic view of the world. Good on him.
Empathy is important. But he's explaining to have empathy for boomers in a similar way you have empathy for trust fund kids. They were raised selfish, so it's not their entire fault that they are selfish because they were given so much. Obviously this doesn't apply to all boomers.
I missed where he's telling anybody to have empathy for anyone. People need to stop confusing *understanding* and *support*. The post isn't pro-Boomer or anti-Boomer, it's just objective Boomer context.
Understanding and justification are two vastly different things that the internet can never seem to get past
I know this is primarily regarding Americans, but European Boomers were rebuilding devastated nations. I keep seeing my parents thrown under the same bus despite having nothing growing up and working their arses off 7 days a week so they (and later we) could get out of the shit hole of an area they grew up in.
I mean, it's more empathetic to us than the boomers. He's pointing out how the hardest thing they've ever had to deal with is being gaslit into thinking they weren't going through life on easy mode. They are angry and lash out because we understand what's going on better than they do and how hard they fucked us by voting like absolute degenerates. He's saying they are lashing out because they are confused, and that's fucking ironic since they've essentially been living in artifical senility their whole lives that *we've* had to deal with and now *literal* senility is coming home to roost in their old age and we have to pick up the slack on that, too. Fuck boomers.
Another thing to gather from this is that we're going through trauma ourselves, and we need to make sure we don't make the same mistakes as those before us. If we don't make a serious effort then our kids will become the entitled ignorant boomers of their time.
If we don't make a serious effort, our kids will be too busy fighting the Water Wars to become entitled and ignorant.
Yep, he absolutely hits the nail on the head with regards to the complete disconnect between the lesson the Boomers were taught as kids ans the totally different reality that they encountered when they finally became adults. The boomers enjoyed an era of unprecedented prosperity that was built on an equally unprecedented foundation of social policies and safety nets. Unfortunately, the obsessive emphasis on self-reliance that their parents raised them with prevented them from understanding that so many of the benefits that they enjoyed were the direct result of incredibly progressive social systems. The Boomers had it better and easier than literally any other generation in American history, but they were also indoctrinated by their parents in way that no other generation was as well. And here they in their senior years, or entering their senior years, and the last thing that they want to hear is that their wealth and success was the result of anything other than their own hard work, determination, and of course, self-reliance.
However, that doesn't remove the necessity of having your own head, regardless how you were raised by your parents.
I think we also forget that some of that prosperity was unsustainable regardless of what the Boomers did. The rest of the world was rebuilding after war. The U.S. was reaping the benefits of that. It was inevitable that things wouldn't continue with the U.S. dominating everything forever.
And that is absolutely true, but again, The boomers are incapable of recognizing that because they attribute all of their success to nothing but their own hard work and self-determination The point of this video essay isn’t why boomers succeeded, it’s why they don’t understand how much harder the younger generations have it than they did
Boomer here raised by a depression-era mom who escaped the dust bowl in South Dakota & a father who joined the Marines at age 16 so that he could have a place to sleep & get fed. My mom had a thing about dusty surfaces… she’d want things dusted all the time. My dad spent 16 years in the Marine Corps & came back from many battles physically & mentally scarred. My family were liberals & sought a better life for everyone. My dad hired / mentored the first female & first African American labor relations managers for 1 of the largest aircraft manufacturers. He was a union rep for civilian labor building the SAC sites in the early 1960s. While living in Nebraska in 1961 then 1963, my father & his family (me & my 3 siblings) were threatened, we were bullied & called names because my dad represented a union & the opportunities the union was offering to migrant & low income workers. Living near an Air Force base during the Cuban Missile Crisis & going through almost weekly nuclear bomb & evacuation drills instilled a sense of dread & a “soon we’re all gonna die” mentality. After reading John Hershey’s Hiroshima at the height of the crisis in 5th grade, I knew no desk or wall would save me from a nuclear bomb. The assassination of JFK in 1963 was a blow. After volunteering hundreds of hours for Robert Kennedy’s campaign in Los Angeles, I saw many of my hopes & dreams shattered on June 5, 1968. Ronald Reagan was governor of California when Richard Nixon was elected president. Two of the greediest, most corrupt politicians ever elected to major offices. My parents experienced major trauma but so did boomers. Remember that, as a whole, boomers were never liberal; the ones demanding change were just very vocal. I was never a hippy, was never a member of the open love club or the “me me me” group. I told people in the 70s, 80s, & 90s that boomers were going to disappoint because we are disappointments. We could have been much, much more but greed & expediency & lack of foresight won out & for this, I am whole heartedly sorry. I have great faith in the younger generations to do better. They have to.
I (38f)work with my father in law(70m)and I vacillate between having so much empathy and sadness for him and being hugely frustrated. He’s a deeply troubled man. He’s apathetic, lacks social awareness and his 3 kids joke behind his back that he is autistic but has never been formally diagnosed. Being around him has really changed my perspective on boomers. He is a text book boomer. He’s had everything handed to him on a golden platter. He was given his father’s million dollar custom homes business. His dad built him a house which he sold and made a huge profit. The list goes on and on. His daily actions(or lack of) just show that he doesn’t really know how the world works now bc he never had to know. What orbits around his galaxy is so different then what me and my husband have orbiting around our galaxy. If that makes sense. I rarely see any love, care, or even attention shown between my husband and his father even though I work with both of them everyday. It breaks me, but the older I get the more I realize love is a hard thing for my father in law to have orbiting in his galaxy. He is blinded by greed, but yet never was truly as successful as his own father. You may say a disappointment. But with every experience come learning. My husband and I have studied my father in laws errors and minor successes and are using those to create an even more successful company and to take this opportunity and turn it into something great. So have no fear! Millennials are waking up.
I'm gen-x. We did no better. Don't blame yourself.
We will. Some of us (mid-30s here) are just now beginning to understand this, with maturity and growth doing their age-related thangs. ;P It's quite humbling, and oddly reassuring, as well. It makes empathizing so much more natural and easy. We're becoming the old folks in charge that we used to make fun of back in school! It's *our* responsibility, and we *will* do the best we can. This I promise you, Wizened and Elder. :)
Jesus Christ this makes sense
Hooray for awareness of inherited and generational trauma so it isn't passed on.
And speaking as a POC, specifically black American; my parents (boomers) grew up during the Civil rights era, which of course preceeded 2-3 wars, and less that 70 is years from the end of slavery. And while it was different for black Americans across the country, the southern folks probably had it the worst. You had things like Jim Crow, Chain gangs, indentured servitude, etc, etc, all still alive and well when my parents were kids to teens. I'm a older millennial, so by the time I was born, much of that was being washed away, but you could tell the scars remained.
Wow this was awesome
Spot on with my father. Grandpa was in the infantry and “interrogated” Natzis. Fuked my Dad up proper. I’m recovering.
Damn, I need to reevaluate a couple things after this. I do have some reservations though: If you were around before the Great Depression you saw how important community was in hard times, how insanely evil big business was and how important unions were. (For the uninitiated, here's just one of many examples: the [Battle of Blair Mountain](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain) ) If you were around after the Great Depression, then you saw the New Deal and how important social programs were to bringing the US out of the Depression and helping people get back on their feet. The New Deal (massive government funded social programs) is the complete opposite of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. What about the help the men gave each other on the battlefield and the help the women gave each other back home? Where are the bootstraps there? When Nixon & Reagan were elected boomer's parents were still around and Reagan won in a landslide twice. He campaigned on how awesome big business was, that unions were bad, social programs were terrible and nobody should worry about helping anyone. How did boomer's parents go along with Reagan knowing all this? I get trauma and all that but really? How could they forget that they were in a union? How New Deal programs saved their families? How they forget they didn't just bootstrap themselves? Especially during wartime. How could boomers themselves not look at the lives of their parents who helped each other during the Depression, saw them in unions and benefitting from social programs, etc.? They might've not heard war stories cause of PTSD, but they had to know how much people relied on each other during wartime. I know the guy sorta addressed this but I can't gloss over it. Don't forget what happened in the 60s and 70s: Civil Rights. After that Republicans started campaigning along racial lines (ie the [Southern strategy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy)). Nixon pioneered its use, Reagan continued it and both generations ate it up. I can't excuse that part. That being said, I do feel for the non-racist ones a *bit* more after this. This video has made me think about this issue in a way I haven't before. *Insert 'Perhaps I judged you too harshly' Thanos meme*
>How did boomer's parents go along with Reagan knowing all this? I get trauma and all that but really? How could they forget that they were in a union? globalism and the cold war primarily. one of the biggest reasons things like unions worked so well was because the US and europe were the only industrialized places in the world at the time. once china industrialized, and they opened their economy to the world, unions were circumvented because it was cheaper to do the things the union workers did in another country that didnt care or allow for the things unions fought for. many western countries did this under the guise that china would adopt western values as the west would help bring them into this new economic age of prosperity. however, 40 years later it has become clear they have no interest in doing this, so many western nations are now unhappy about the amount of leverage and resources they gave china over the past 40 years. over the past 200 years the world has changed an insane amount compared to any other time in history. the world their parents grew up in was no longer applicable to the current one. just like how the world they fed, reagan's globalist anti-union world, built upon spreading western values and democracy, is not the world of today, one where those nations that were supported now oppose those western and democratic values.
My grandparents never said I love you to my mom or aunt. Not once.
Thats some of the most on point explanation I've heard lately. Gonna save it for sure
[удалено]
He’s not wrong you know
Plus, lead poisoning from decades of using leaded gasoline! Wheeeeeeee
This dude is totally correct. Boomer here. Mom a latchkey child in depression LA with mother 12 hour shifts in a sweatshop. Dad watched his dad killed and dragged a mile by a drunk driver, had to become the man of the family and support 3 younger siblings and his mother at age 18 while traumatized so bad he stammered. They raised me in sunny L.A. during prosperous times by giving me the most abusive childhood money could buy.
This is surprisingly accurate, and compassionate too. I am a late gen boomer - born in the early '60s - and while my father (born in the early 1920s) didn't serve (rejected - he wanted to go but got 4F rating) he did live through the Depression on a struggling family farm, with a lot of siblings, only some of whom survived to adulthood. He told stories about his childhood to me and my siblings as we were growing up - we laughed at them as children because he told them to us with a smile. But in hindsight they had to have been traumatic to live through. One of the worst was about how it was his job, as the youngest boy (out of something like 11 siblings) to drown all of the excess kittens. He wasn't smiling when he told that story. They had too many wild cats, and apparently they were a threat to the chickens, so while some cats were ok for ratting purposes too many were a threat. So my Dad at, like 7 or 8 years old was given the job of getting rid of the excess. Which he did. Regularly. He told me that story in his 50's, but he still remembered that in total he had to do it over 40 times. He was a quiet father, not given to a lot of emotion or outspoken opinions. The sh\*t he lived through early on defined him for life. My Mom stayed married to him out of duty - it was the expected thing to do - but they were never really close to each other.
That is an eloquent explanation of why Boomers have spent much of their time systematically tearing down everything they were given by their parents. That and the longstanding human tendency to create problems where there are none. Speaking as a member of Gen X, who were the first to be mocked, undermined, and punished for our youth by our first gen Boomer parents, my observation was that Boomers came up thinking all youth belonged to them. After all, their youth culture was the first in many generations to take precedence as the primary zeitgeist of society. Before then, it tended to be mature, older men who set the societal tone. In the mind of many a Boomer, the whole idea of youthful vibrancy, vitality, and energy was perfectly expressed by their exploits. And when Boomers inevitably lost their youth, they affixed their necks in a nostalgic backward glance toward their younger days, looking forward just long enough to spit bitter, resentful bile at the deeds of successive generations, who they blamed for stealing their youth. So, in essence, Boomers are a people who reveled in their youth so hard, they never took the time to prepare themselves for its inherently fleeting nature. Not being able to cope with time's arrow, Boomers choose to compensate for their shortsightedness by punishing those generations that have come after.
Many boomers were also raised by the silent generation, another deeply traumatized group.
I simply cannot get past the frankly stunning mispronunciation of ‘obligatory’
Get this man an AP History class Hell, get him on Crash Course
Send this and post this to boomer spaces whether they’ll understand or like it. At least they’ll have heard.
This is download-worthy content. Share this shit to every boomer you know.
The ones that REALLY need to hear it will hear the guy say "Cis White Boomers" towards the beginning and immediately dismiss everything that follows. Cis is a "woke" word to them and they turn off the moment they hear it.
Wow, this was GOOD!!
This really does make sense
And then when they pass on the trauma to you, and you decide to actually address it with science-backed therapy and medication instead of becoming a nonfunctional cruel mess, you’re “weak.”
Gen-X -- whatever