I wish I could feel sympathy, but I don’t. The Reagan generation did this to themselves, and the rest of us have to suffer with them.
I wish I could feel sympathy, but I don’t.
My grandparents would already be homeless if they weren’t borrowing money from me on occasion. Why? Because their social security doesn’t cover their rent, their food, and their medical issues, despite them working hard their whole lives. Who cares what year they were born in? They weren’t Reagan voters. Not that this should be the metric. They’re proletarian. They’re lesbians They’re women. Therefore they’re oppressed in a threefold manner, along class, gender, and sexuality lines. They’re liberals, but I view that as a result of indoctrination by the bourgeois society. They’re products of their environment. Indoctrination, as much as we hate to admit it, is another form in which the proletariat is oppressed, because they are mesmerized into fighting themselves by an anti-materialist and undialectical mode of analysis pushed by the bourgeoisie.
The Reagan generation did this to themselves, and the rest of us have to suffer with them.
Yeah. I’m paying money out of my pocket to stop my grandparents from becoming homeless while also paying to raise my child. I would be in much more dire straits if I weren’t lucky enough to have stable employment in what is in fact a terribly unstable economic situation, further complicated by hyperinflation.
In any case I don’t think the question of whether you feel sympathy or not for the “reagan generation” really matters and that this is a misfocused way of looking at it in the first place. It’s actually very similar to how liberals draw lines between “red state” proletarians (who they insist deserve their suffering) and “blue state” proletarians (who they insist do not). Assuming you do not own means of production, assuming you do not employ others, assuming you do not accumulate the significant part of your income through financial assets like stock investments or mutual funds, you are a proletarian. Your class position is proletarian. Your parents and grandparents, assuming they weren’t small business owners driven from the market, were probably proletarian. When we become old, I hope the revolutionary consciousness is more developed among the younger generations than it was among us, but if that is the case, expect some of them to say that we deserve death for not fixing the problems sooner, and be prepared to accept that as a consequence of being born when you were.
But there weren’t any baby boomers during the great depression.
100% homelessness rate.
tfw you get an interdeterminant form and there’s no hopeatall.
Sad but not surprising. Nobody has any money, and when you get so old you can’t work they fire you. Not hard to figure out what happens next.
It’s gonna be even worse for our generation. They had a higher home ownership rate. If you rent and get too old to work you’re really fucked.
Hey Boomers
evergreen meme
Death to America
Dios mio
The premise of the article is preposterous. Essentially, older people were rarely homeless in the recent past. Now, boomers are experiencing it. So, we need “to end homelessness in older adults” and “targeted prevention efforts.”
We can’t fix the actual problem for all of society. We need to come up with yet another way for the boomers to have their lives subsidized by all other generations that have come before or since.
no one should be homeless
fascists should die. libs should be re-educated.
but absolutely no one, under any circumstances, should ever be homeless
no one should be homeless
Exactly
Unconscionable
What is a Conscionable rate of houselessness?
I agree. I guess I’m feeling schadenfreude because boomers are finally getting the short end of policies they supported their whole working lives. But nobody should be homeless.
I mean, people are easily manipulated and the flow of information was funneled through even fewer sources back then. I do feel bad for them, and all of us subsequent generations, and the anger could be focused toward current politicians who can improve things instead of dividing us from our elders. Its all easy to see in hindsight of course.
Capitalism. It’s capitalism.
generation is not real, class is
Generation is absolutely real and informs people’s decisions and attitudes
Generation is absolutely real and informs people’s decisions and attitudes
to an extent but the bourgeoisie capitalizes on these differences to divide the proletariat. This episode of
is pretty good:https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-38-the-medias-bogus-generation-obsession
“Baby Boomers are bloating the social safety net!” “GenXers are changing the nature of work!” “Millennials are killing the housing market!". The media endlessly feeds us stories about how one generation or another is engaging in some collective act of moral failing that, either explicitly or by implication, harms another generation. It’s a widely-mocked cliché at this point, namely the near-constant analyses detailing what Millennials have “killed” or “ruined” lately - everything from Applebee’s to diamonds to top sheets to beer to napkins.
The first rule of drama––and by implication, the media––is to create tension. But what if tensions that actually exist in our society, like white supremacy and class conflict, are too unpleasant and dicey to touch––upsetting advertisers and media owners who benefit from these systems? To replace these real tensions in society, the media repeatedly relies on dubious and entirely safe points of conflict, like those between two arbitrary generations. It’s not the rich or racism that’s holding me back–it’s old people running up entitlement spending or lazy youth who don’t want to work!
In this episode we talk about why this media trope isn’t just hacky and cliche, but also subtly racist and reactionary.
The only way you can really define generation is by way of political economy though.
Boomers grew up during the post war era when the social services created by the post depression era were being leveraged to build up white wealth after the war.
Gen X grew up during Nixon and Reagan, experienced stagflation and the massive austerity imposed by the new neoliberal ideology. The wealthy ones got wealthier and the poor ones got poorer.
Millennials were in that post neoliberal haze of the 90s where American empire seemed to have come into it’s power. It has subjugated all developing markets in Asia and Europe and cemented itself as the sole superpower after killing the USSR.
Gen Z and the younger millennials grew up with 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the 2008 housing crisis, and COVID recession, something that caused complete and total disenchantment of America.
It can feel like it’s hard to discuss things between these generations, because any one of them trying to find common ground with younger people only has their own experience in the economic climate of their time. Boomers just say “get a job” because for the white ones it really was just that easy. They don’t grasp the idea of economic stagnation as something that happens when you’re young and that it causes you to enter a state of perpetual poverty that benefits their pension funds.
And you don’t think the political economy of a person’s formative years will affect their view of politics?
It does, but you said generations inform decisions. Which is such an ambiguous term as to be useless. I was just more clearly defining generations by major economic factors.
Lots of “generation” talk is about nostalgia and culture. When it’s really economic.
This popping up in the middle of the article is so perfect
Same on the desktop
Most of the cool boomers are either dead, in exile, or in prison. Now the few cooler boomers left are becoming homeless.
You are such a terrible person.
Why, because they’re not terribly torn up over people getting what they’ve voted for all their adult lives?
You’re a terrible person.
This is liberal bullshit yes
I think the Red Sails essay by Roderic Day is especially important to keep in mind in these situations. There are arguments that the generation has been propagandized to hell from birth, but there needs to be a buy in for it to actually be effective. There needs to be at least something they want to fuck over, someone to conveniently scapegoat that won’t force them to look at their own failings.
Pensions?!? We don’t need no stinking pensions!
This is the same type of “everyone in red states voted for trump so isn’t it funny that they’re all dying of covid” sentiment. Homeownership was obviously way more achievable for boomers as a generation than later generations, but not everyone bought houses in decent urban areas and then bought 2 more to rent out, just like not every boomer got a decent pension even though they were more available.
This one hit close to home. I literally just talked about this here, where I was worried about libs ‘letting red states secede’ to own the right.
And I did the same thing for boomers. Seems like I need to introspect more. I’ve been making progress, considering I grew up in a fundamentalist, far right household, but I clearly have a ways to go.
Anyway, thanks for this. Of all the criticism I saw, yours resonated with me the most.
Great attitude comrade, I’m glad you found my comment helpful. I saw your red states post the other day and I thought it was insightful. I was thinking of it when I replied
The impulse of the thought is normal, but yeah, its a wrong thought that we should try to catch and fight against.
I’m going to strive to do better going forward. Venting my frustrations out on an entire generation is childish and unproductive. Glad folks here helped set me straight.
Poboy’s nerfect.
FDR’s project for America has failed
I don’t know about that, he certainly prevented a socialist revolution.
America delenda est
