What is up with the “Haha younger people are suffering” jokes they make? It’s pretty fucked up.
These are your children, their suffering is your failure.
It’s like the “every man for himself” attitude is so pervasive that people are even alienated from their own legacy.
It makes me appreciate our commie boomers, for sure.
Mass brainwashing and capitalist propaganda from the Red Scare left individualism as the dominant idiology amongst Americans of that generation.
This is despite the fact that Boomers grew up in the time when America was the closest to a social democracy that it has ever been after FDR’s massively influential presidency and social democratic policies and after WWII, which injected tons of money into the American economy. One person could work a minimum wage job and buy a house and car, along with being able to support a whole family. Hell, I heard many stories of High Schoolers working a summer job and being able to buy a house from that income.
It’s mostly ignorance of class struggle for most people of that generation, since they didn’t get the short end of the stick, nor have they ever experienced economic struggle. Sure, there are some people who legitimately don’t care about others, but I think that’s a minority.
These same people lived through the 60s counter-culture movement and many saw the hippies as dirty, disorganized, etc. This extends to their idiology too. Couple that with being old enough to have economic stability by the time Reagan took office and started his massive deregulation campaign, and that results in thinking capitalism is a great system and socialism is for the weak and lazy.
Many Boomers just don’t realize that they didn’t have many economic struggles growing up when compared to younger people of today. They don’t know the struggle of working a full-time job and not making enough to survive. They don’t know that jobs aren’t nearly as stable as they used to be. They think that being loyal to your job means that you will go up the corporate ladder. Instead, people are being laid off in record numbers as of late, and the only way to move up economically is to get another job that pays more. Stability is a joke compared to the past.
There is also the Wolffian argument that capitalism inevitably fails after an average of 47 years, and Boomers just happened to be born at the right time.