“Generational politics is bull…”
90% of my bad experiences with customers come from Boomers. Something about being born in that era makes you an entitled, impatient dickhead.
I had a very bad day at work if you couldn’t tell.
My dad had an aneurysm semi-recently and face planted in cement, broke some ribs, his arm and lost most use of said arm. This is from years of eating like a pig, not working out and not taking his health seriously.
In the hospital, well-aware of his bullshit, a forever MAGA into the second term, I offer him some “tough love” because he is stubborn and never listens to anyone. “You will kill yourself if you continue to eat poorly.” The entire time he’s whining about how the hospital food is bad.
His only response was timidly but broodingly “I will never change.”
I genuinely cringed, and a light flashed before my eyes where I saw images of Anakin Skywalker turn on his red lightsaber, Shadow the Hedgehog pointing a gun at the camera, American eagles with tears in their eyes in Evil Knievel attire riding dirt bikes and blinding patriotism to something they half remember in a movie.
My idiot edgelord father. It’s weird that my dad was someone who I thought was really intelligent growing up, was actually a stubborn bigot with a small world. Painfully, the minute I recognized his limitations, I saw myself as he was the one who raised me.
I’ve had a similar awakening about my father. You either grow up and become your parents or grow up in opposition to them.
That one meme where the dad is shielding his kid from whatever the previous generations are saying is kind of true. Like my dad had a lot of horrible things happen to him in his formation that definitely shaped him, and while he’s an idiot he did shield me from a lot of those same things. He did the best he could is what I’m saying. He fell into chuddom but he didn’t do a lot of other horrible shit bad parents do.
I think the best I can do to honor the guy is actually look at what my dad experienced, learn from that it and leave what didn’t work behind.
Generational politics are bull because there were Boomers who took bullets for Civil Rights, told troops to go fuck themselves, and built unions under Tricky Dicky. Some of those who threw bricks at cops at Stonewall are still around. It’s always an issue of class and class interests.
The Black Panther who shot FBI agents isn’t the same person yelling at you for not comping their meal because you only refilled their drink 5 times instead of 6.
It’s ultimately a class thing, because the majority of boomers who have managed to live this long had the means to do so. Cooler boomers perished because they didn’t have the money to survive.
Generational politics are bull because there were Boomers who took bullets for Civil Rights
So a while ago someone here interrogated that line, didn’t save the comment. A lot of civil rights leaders were actually silent generation. The ones who were boomers were generally elder boomers. When millennials complain about boomers they’re complaining about people their parents age, who were kids during the civil rights movement and were adults in the 80. That demo is reactionary as fuck, Reagan won the youth vote, pretty much the only time a Republican did.
Leadership was largely Silent and Great Generation, but a lot of people doing work on the ground were Boomers. Most of the Freedom Riders were Boomers. Most of the Panthers were Boomers. The core contributors of 2nd. Wave Feminism were Boomers.
Reagan is an outlier. He didn’t win just the Boomer vote, he won the vote across the board. Minnesota is the only state that didn’t vote to reelect him. He took all 49 other states in a complete landslide. 42% of women, 91% of black people, and 54% of union members still voted against him. So the point still stands. The old white guy yelling at you is not the same person as the black woman who was in the BPP.
Why did everyone love this demon?
The problem with generational politics is that it is generally a distraction from class struggle and a materialist understanding of politics. Not that some generations don’t suck more than others.
Also Gen X seems similarly bad. Note that we’re basically describing the generations that had basic economic security and a larger amount of reactionary trappings. Also they’re getting older and less patient as a result. And as others mention, lead exposure.
Give every customer service worker a chelation gun.
It’s the lead, it accumulates in the bones during childhood, as boomers grow older their bones become more porous, releasing the accumulated lead into their bloodstream for the second time in their lifetimes
Millions of boomers are literally walking around oblivious to the fact they have acute Plumbism, this state of affairs should’ve been labeled a global public health emergency years ago
Instead we’re living in the lamest version of the Night of the Walking Dead
Well at this point boomers are really old, which means the class character of their generational cohort is skewed heavily towards wealth. The boomers that weren’t horrible cretins are mostly dead by now, the survivors are mostly people with money and property.
In that sense, generational politics kind of exists.
it’s not a generation thing, it’s an age thing, factors that others have mentioned can also be impactful, but im seeing the same shit here and we didn’t have the wealth nor the leaded gasoline.
you’re 65, working all your life taking crap from everyone else, now you paid your dues to society and want to live your golden years. everything hurts, your joints are as stiff as your neurons and you simply cannot give a shit about what everyone else thinks. hot take but millennials will be worse.
No fuck that, its an entitled douchebag thing, before they even cracked 40 they were acting like that. Ask me how i know lol
Millennials would broadly be kinder to service workers but it wont matter because the planet will be ashes by then
I think most of the cool boomers are dead 😔. What were they like in their forties? I remember my parents being smokers who were leftwing enough to complain about corporations, vote third party, and even start a tenants’ union (which they then abandoned), but they’re just CNN liberals now. They were not very present in my childhood. I was raised by star trek: the next generation.
My dad went all conservative and then never obama then forever trump. He was always an asshole and racist, he watched star trek but didn’t actually get it it seems.
yeah not all seniors are entitled douchebag, but the majority of entitled douchebag are seniors.
we didn’t have the wealth nor the leaded gasoline.
actually leaded gasoline emits lead into the atmosphere, which gets dispersed globally. the peak in atmospheric lead levels in the 1970’s affected everyone on earth.Getting old will suck even more without children to alienate.
Other generations still have Covid. Shit fucks brain damages you long-term just like lead does
I try not to judge old people, but having worked in customer service for three years, the overwhelming majority of shitty customers - like over 90% - are over 65. Such a large proportion of them are unbelievably selfish and rude, and they abuse minimum wage workers because they know we just have to take it.
this technology has been widespread for at least 15 years
I hate being the “tech guy” in my family/neighborhood because I’m younger than these Boomers. You had like a 40 year head start on me to figure this shit out? What the fuck have you been doing? You know more about your TV and iPhone than I do! Why are you so incapable of understanding things? I don’t have to ask the zoomer doomer coomers nearby whenever I can’t figure out where to find a setting.
And what the hell is with the technobabble they use to talk to each other? “My son said you have to restart your IP address to free up the RAM so that it doesn’t interfere with your hard drive signal or Wi-Fi.” Mom no, what the fuck? That’s not…that’s not even close to what I said. “Oh okay well the modem is giving me a blue screen error so maybe it’s the process capacitor. Can you have him come look at it later?”
technobabble
On a side note, but I fucking hate how bad it is media. It’s just so awful. I think I was watching a marvelslop show and the technobabble was so bad in situations that just didn’t need it to be. Like, you could have done the tiniest amount of research and you DIDN’T? Not even the slightest, so something could make sense? Is this how science sounds like to “normal” people? Nonsense?? I think a lot of normal shows that aren’t scifi/capeshit are guilty of this terrible practice too.
Actually, I do wonder if the combination of age, bad education, social media brainrot and the god-awful proliferation of technobabble on TV shows has something to do with what you mentioned? It’s just so painful.
Didn’t one of the writers on NCIS confirm that they purposely makeup outrageously stupid technobabble to troll the few members of their audience who are capable of plugging in an ethernet cable?
I have so many conversations with nice boomers who suddely go: yeah man, young people are just lazy, they don’t want to work anymore. Before i retired, i workrd with young people, and when the clock struck 5, they would just leave. Can you believe it? They didn’t even come to work when they were sick.
I’m always taken back, because i hear that cery same thing so often, that it feels like tgey all browse the same facebook shit.
Most of the time i just end the conversation, but sometimes i tell them then people tgese days don’t work a normal ass job, buy a house with 21 and raise a family of 3 with a wife that doesn’t have to work.
A lot of surviving boomers are wealthy, the problem is wealthy people are generally self-centered. Boomers were exposed to the biggest anticommunist campaign in history, and grew up insulated from outside perspective for the most part.
However leftist boomers did and do still exist. I’ve met the nice ones, and it’s kind of feels bad thinking that the ones who are trying their best against an evil system get lumped in with the bad ones. There are many boomers that inspired me into leftism. Like it or not, they were some of the first to crusade for the environment (ended DDT, CFCs and are the reason the ozone layer is healing, lgbt rights, women’s rights, protesting apartheid in South Africa, etc). Sure, you could say it wasn’t enough, but considering there was no internet to give them an outside perspective, they could have done worse. It’s a shame that particular part of their legacy is being overshadowed by just the worst, bigoted assholes surviving for the most part (due to capitalism).
I also think the inherent tribalism involved with generation stereotyping is that it lacks nuance and is used to gaslight people into hating each other and being distracted from the actual problem. Look at how people treat millennials, we’re the poorest generation in a long time, nearly ever millennial I’ve met has been absolutely fucked and burntout and have messed up bodies from overwork. Believe it or not, most people before us were not this worn out in their 30s and 40s. Yet still that myth that millennials were treated as special and coddled persists, despite all we did with the fuck all we got. We already have the reputation of being failures (even though we’re still alive and doing shit). So much so that Zoomers are terrified of ending up like us. We didn’t do capitalism right and deconstructed a lot of traditions and are now used as example of what happens if you don’t get in line, like the black sheep of an abusive family.
Then look at Zoomers, people are trying the same gaslighting trick with them and calling them soft too! They get so much shit. Just as much as we did. You will get you really cool leftist zoomers and your really terrible mini boomer zoomers too. None of the generations are a monolith. Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Mark Zukerberg are all from different generations and they all suck, not because of when they were born, but because of their class interests.
Generarion warfare is at it core, reactionary. The right loves it when the generations keep shitting on each other and loves stoking those flames. Each generation has its Rush Limbaughs, it’s Ben Shapiro’s and it’s Charlie Kirks constantly crying about how a certain generation is too soft and we need to do evil shit to toughen them up. It works. It gets the everyone defensive and self conscious and distracts from the class issues. (They are like this because they’re from the shitty generation, capitalism isn’t the fault, it’s their personal failings!) It takes the blame away from the system and places it onto individual shortcomings.
So yeah, I see the pattern of rude boomers too, but I try to remind myself that it’s a class thing, less the cool boomers catch strays.
I used to work retail, I feel your pain. It sucks, you get the worst people.
20 years spent in retail and I agree.
I am back working dangerous hard labor taking down trees with my stepdad for $20 under the table and could not be happier.
I think it’s more like “something about reaching middle age in the 1990s makes you an entitled, impatient dickhead”.
Yeah basically. Being a white adult with even just a high school education in the 80s was the generational equivalent of winning the lottery. Turned most of those people into kulaks.
Dinosaurs will die comrade, and take their bullshit with them. I deal with a lot of boomers at work. Boomer men in particular. Boomer men seem to feel more free to let some nasty shit leave their mouths when in the freedom of their own homes, in particular. Ive had some downright hateful things said to me. I’ve walked out on a few service calls over the years. A few jobs too. Solidarity, Conrad. Some days are shit, some days are even shittier than that.
Boomer men are more likely to threaten your life in person.
Boomer women are more likely to start a personal campaign to try and get your fired. I had one contact pretty much everyone she could up the corporate chain to complain about me personally be I laughed when she was asking a question cuz someone said something funny in my earpiece.
Lead. In the gas. In the pipes. Maybe.
I think the only ‘maybe’ might be to what extent it caused it. It sure isnt to account for all of the problems with the Baby Boomer generation but it sure did account for some of it. How much? I think thats the only unknown.
This generation had two channels and radio to fill them with 100% Capitalist brainworms. It was impossible to know anything factual about the USSR or China back then. Where would you go to learn about that stuff, and why would anyone step out of the monoculture to do so?
And social media for boomers has made sure that they will never fall outside of that information bubble again as long as they live, except now with ten times as much fearmongering and ragebaiting.
As a college student working in retail, I’ve dealt with groups of immature middle school kids who are often loud and annoying yet never ill-intentioned, and somehow far more reasonable and respectful to retail workers than the endless stream of nasty, malicious ass boomers
Something about being born in that era makes you an entitled, impatient dickhead.
They must’ve been taught it somehow. I’ve heard this sentiment so much even from people who otherwise believe generational politics is bs.
