Millennials’ choice of Bernie Sanders for president makes perfect sense, and boomer-age Democrats simply have to stop bashing them for it. Young people are also critical to the future of the Democratic Party. The party would be much better served if its leaders could figure out how to bring young Sanders supporters into the fold rather than ignoring them, silencing them, mocking them, or claiming their priorities will “never, ever” happen.I found that as I was Googling to find my way back to something else I'd seen recently, the idea that Millennials — perhaps younger Millennials — have a newly emerging capacity to love Boomers — as we Boomers become what is to them the grandparent generation. The idea — developed as an explanation for the Bernie Sanders phenomenon — is that the loathing of Boomers happened as we were the parent generation. Each new generation must grow up and become independent of its parents, and some part of that necessary process of maturation is going to be experienced as rebellion and hostility. It's the age-old strife between children and parents. But grandparents are in a different position, at a greater distance. They intrude less into your life, but they are there, loving you, admiring you, wanting the best for you, inspiring you to rise to treasured, traditional ideals, not expecting too much for themselves, but truly hoping the world will live on with a new set of good people. The grandchildren can find their way into good feelings that the children withhold.
One point you make throughout your writing is that your generation of women has faced untold amounts of blatant sexism. I get that.... But: Sexism is not the only issue that matters. It is one of your main issues, and it is important. But other issues are also important. What bothers me so much about your ongoing defense of yourself through Hillary Clinton is that you do not seem to care about anyone or anything else. Please: Stop boomersplaining and start listening....
There's still plenty of hostility toward Boomers, and it's natural and understandable. But as one generation moves into later stages of life and a new generation comes on the scene... well, the aging Boomer in me writes that sentence and the song that distracts my train of thought is: One generation got old/One generation got soul/This generation got no destination to hold/Pick up the cry/Hey, now it's time for you and me/Got a revolution (got to revolution)/Hey, come on now we're marching to the sea...
Oh? See? That was a test... that worked as test. Do you hate the Boomers? I went full Boomer on you. Did you like that "revolution" theme? Everyone's saying "revolution" today, after the numbers Bernie (and Donald) racked up in New Hampshire. You know, Bernie Sanders is not a Boomer. He was born in 1941. He's in the grandfather generation and can attract the love of those who still feel the need to distance themselves from the Boomer-parent generation. We Boomers need maybe 5 more years to feel the kind of love that currently flows to Grandfather Bernie.
Okay, I've done enough boomersplaining. I'll stop now and get a little older.
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59 comments:
"Great word,"
Hardly.
When the son of a very good friend is off organizing for Bernie because if Bernie gets elected he won't have to pay off his student loans (no, I'm not kidding) then there's something seriously wrong with at least one member of the Millennial generation, and apparently with many more of them.
I love how the Left has this constant need to create Newspeak. They never can argue on the merits, can they? It has to be about "privilege" or "appropriation" or some other excuse to disregard your betters.
Meanwhile, the Millenials want to buy a new car at 24% interest. And they won't listen to reason. How bad must our public schools be to raise children that fall in love with Socialism? Their teachers should be tarred and feathered.
I feel like my undersized Gen X is about to be squeezed between the two most disgustingly narcissistic generations in history, one of which wants me to pay for their retirement and the other of which wants me to pay for their college degrees and then buy them a house.
I'll see you all in Galt's Gulch.
Let's just stop boomersplaining politics to millennials.
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They're quite aware of what they're going through
"Meanwhile, the Millenials want to buy a new car at 24% interest. And they won't listen to reason. How bad must our public schools be to raise children that fall in love with Socialism? Their teachers should be tarred and feathered"
What do you expect? Their teachers and professors were/are boomers.
Chickens coming home to roost.
Most people over 65 have trended Republican over last 20 years.
Democratic Socialism. What a great concept. As a relatively young boomer, I'm almost for it. If you are an older boomer and ready for retirement, it won't be bad at all. The millennials are already paying the interest on our $13+ trillion debt. Once we have all this socialism in place, they will be paying for even more. In about 8 years they will no longer think free college is a great idea.
It's too bad all these millennials weren't required to take a reality based economics course.
Oh, as noted, sexism doesn't work all that well as a campaign issue. First, 80% of half the population doesn't see it as a big issue. Another 40% of the other half will figure out that simply voting in a female president doesn't impact sexism, just as voting in a black president doesn't eliminate racial prejudice.
On our musically inclined theme today, good to see Bowie get a credit above. On the David Live album he changed spit to shit.
I related to a lot of the montage, but the one that resonates most for me is the one with the black guy carrying the pig across the field (the one you see on the Althouse post.)
a pig is an M-60 machine gun. a big heavy awkward piece of metal that I love :)
AllenS, I suspect you have a love hate thing with pigs?
Sorry, just can't take Bernie millenials seriously in any way, as this post attempts to do. They're morons whose moron parents never accomplished what should be priority 1: teaching them TANSTAAFL.
And, having been born in 1980, I'm with holdfast at 9:30.
Boomers are fantasists that got away with it. It was a fun time. The millennials are seeking reality in a world that is no longer friendly to dreamers. That makes them seek the Traditionalists like Sanders and me who can see straight and stand our ground.
For the record, Bob Dylan is not a Boomer.
heard all the same arguments when the Ron Paul boomlet was going on. Need to welcome these disontented young people and bring them into the fold! but they really weren't even a blip on the radar, numerically, so the GOP didn't bother with them.
Oh, as noted, sexism doesn't work all that well as a campaign issue.
Hillary lost 4 out of 5 female voters to Sanders last night. 4 out of 5. Imagine that. The only group of women she took was middle-aged women who make more than $200k (all per MSNBC).
Shocker, I know...
Mansplaining is used by women as a defense against listening to logic and reason from men.
Boomersplaining is used by male and female youths as a defense against listening to logic and reasoning by male and female boomers.
Manspreading is used by women to describe and mock a natural sitting position of men.
Boomerspreading cant be far behind. Hillary is leading the way.
Barry Sanders, not a robot and no relation to Bernie
Seems people forget that there's a generation between boomers and millenials who happen to hate them both.
Millennials’ choice of Bernie Sanders for president makes perfect sense, and boomer-age Democrats simply have to stop bashing them for it.
It makes perfect sense because they have no grasp of economics or history. They came of age in the Internet era where stuff is supposed to be free, so it's only reasonable for them to believe that someone promising them more free stuff is the one to elect. They don't know the history of socialism and its monsters who killed about 100 million people. Free health care, free college, free everything has an appeal to someone with few marketable skills and a lot of debt earning a useless degree.
We never called them "pigs", Drill. They were known as "the 60". I carried a "16".
"I feel like my undersized Gen X is about to be squeezed between the two most disgustingly narcissistic generations in history, one of which wants me to pay for their retirement and the other of which wants me to pay for their college degrees and then buy them a house."
Well, there's someone who understands what Democratic Socialism means. Keep redistributing that wealth, folks, until you realize that the more you distribute, the less there is. How big a sap do you have to be to go to work to pay for other people's Free Stuff? That whole social contract thing works until enough people figure out how to game the system. Then the others realize it's they who are getting played. People like holdfast are the system's greatest nightmare.
LOL AllenS,
so you had the best of both worlds. M-60 on your side, but didn't have to carry a pig :)
"What bothers me so much about your ongoing defense of yourself through Hillary Clinton is that you do not seem to care about anyone or anything else" As opposed to Millennials, who creatively express their care for others by demanding freebies.
@TG: "The millennials are seeking reality in a world that is no longer friendly to dreamers." Sure, supporting Bernie is a way of "seeking reality." Sure. Of course, the reality they'll get won't be the one they seek. Seekers are suckers.
@DrillSGT, just don't forget your glove and a piece of wire.
@sebastian...sanders has a bad solution in Socialism, but he is facing realty of the country going th hell.
Trump does that too and brings with him a real solution to the reality SNAFU among the millenials.
"your generation of women has faced untold amounts of blatant sexism"
It's interesting how adults will fight against the demons of their youth until the day they die (whether those demons are still there or not).
I have been thinking that the relationship of this generation to their parents is entirely different than the boomer relationship. It's due to economics, really.
Younger people have a terrible time getting ahead in this society without a lot of family support. Rents are high, incomes from work have been low, and the cost of education/training is way, way higher than it was when older generations were young.
So the social fabric has changed. Young people have a dependency on their families that wasn't necessary when most boomers came of age.
Are you sure about those lines? I always heard them as "One generation got old/Next generation got sold/This generation got no demonstration to hold".
holdfast - yup. It's bound to fail.
Unless people want to cut the corporate income tax down to Danish levels (23.5%) and raise individual taxes to Danish levels (29%, 25% VAT), Bernie's promises won't work and will end up drastically cutting jobs.
What Bernie doesn't understand is that the Scandinavian model is for strikingly high personal taxes that pay for the strong welfare system. They are all corporate-friendly to an extreme.
Not surprisingly, Danish personal debt levels are incredibly high. A mechanic in the US has the ability to accumulate far more personal capital in the course of his life than almost all Danes.
The other thing Bernie doesn't understand is that the Scandinavian utopias are socially unstable when they have high immigration. The Danes have a ghetto problem and it is only getting worse.
@Big Mike
Why do I suspect by looking at your handle, that you have been intimate with the pig? :)
Big Mike said...
When the son of a very good friend is off organizing for Bernie because if Bernie gets elected he won't have to pay off his student loans (no, I'm not kidding) then there's something seriously wrong with at least one member of the Millennial generation, and apparently with many more of them.
2/10/16, 9:23 AM"
With Obama it was the free gas and mortgages for the blacks. With Sanders its free college for whites. Moochers got to mooch. Romney was right about the 47%. The Democrats are called the gimme dat party and not the I earned dat party for a reason.
It's fascinating and sad at the same time to see the millennials go gaga over and support an old geezer whose campaign is based on discredited ideas that are older than dirt.
I know that we Xers were originally known as the "angsty" generation, as expressed though Grunge music and movies like "Short Cuts", but we still got down to the work of building careers and families, even if at first we had to survive on the economic and employment scraps left over by Boomers, until the Boomers started retiring en mass. Now we're moving into our peak earning years, and being asked to fund that Boomer retirement, and save for, or pay, our kids' insanely expensive college education, and now along come the Millennials who want Bernie to steal our earnings to fund the needs and wants of this much larger generation coming up behind us. Not only do we not want to, we literally cannot. But hey, these Millennials, the first generation to be "educated" since the Left completed it's takeover of the education system, are all happy to follow the free money siren song of Bernie Sanders, while in the workplace they prove to be a bunch of over-credentialed children who seem to require constant positive reinforcement and hand-holding.
LT/DR: We're fukt.
The boomer - millennial problem is not the latest incantation of passing generations. Millennials believe the junk their boomer parents told them. They embrace the nonsense. And now, they want more.
"When the son of a very good friend is off organizing for Bernie because if Bernie gets elected he won't have to pay off his student loans (no, I'm not kidding) then there's something seriously wrong with at least one member of the Millennial generation, and apparently with many more of them."
-- Man, if student loans get forgiven, I'll be a sucker for having put off so many things to pay down my loans faster. If, as has also been talked about, bad home loans get forgiven/reduced/whatever, I'll be a double sucker for being responsible and not buying what I couldn't afford.
I'll really be feeling the Bern then, because making your responsible citizens feel like used suckers is probably not good.
Was just strumming through the chords to that song yesterday after seeing the album n an antique store for $15. And then I see your post. Pretty synchronistic that. Go figure. I've stopped voting nationally. It serves no purpose. Both parties are opposite sides of the same coin. Big Business Repubs couldn't exist without Big Government Dems and vice versa. But it's still a cool song. Do you have that album framed over your mantelpiece too? or just the coolest of the coolest - Surrealistic Pillow, Rubber Soul/Revolver, et al?
@Matthew, my sons likewise.
What Sanders fans need explained to them is basic economics, and why Venezuelans are lining up to buy toilet paper. The problem is that they believe far too much of what the Boomer-run schools and media have taught them. The aging hippies and anti-war types went into "the institutions" and substituted Howard Zinn and Edward Said for any sense of what this Country's really all about.
What Michael said. Boomers have taught them everything they know, which is how not to think and how to tune out people who have experience with their "new" ideas. That makes Sanders look great.
Canada's single payer? Financed through what would be called her "taxes on the poor." Try telling that to a millennial.
@DrillSGT, I'm a Vietnam era draftee, so I was exposed to the 60 (it would be at least a decade before it was renamed as the "pig"). Someone I knew told me that ou had to wire the nut on the gas tube or it would work its way loose in the middle of when you need it most. Also about changing barrels.
I think we should stop explaining anything to anybody. Let them invent their own damned wheel, I say.
The foolish belief that explaining something to one who knows less is inherently offensive is itself an offensive idea. These jackasses stand on the shoulders of giants and marvel at the great view of the world they have. And they should be made to understand how utterly incoherent they are.
There's a joke to be made with generationXsplaining, but I can't think of it.
@Fen: "How bad must our public schools be to raise children that fall in love with Socialism? Their teachers should be tarred and feathered."
So parents have no role in educating their children regarding economics and government?
Got it.
When I was hired as a cop in 1969, nearly every old cop was a WWII or Korean vet, and nearly every new cop was a RVN vet. The old guys looked at our generation - the music, hippies, communes, anti-war, SDS, etc - and pretty much despaired. I guess "boomersplaining" means "don't be morons like we were, just because of that's where the babes and drugs are."
I can only imagine the old cops' reaction to Bernie's full-on, raging-it's-all-free speech last night.
Millennials’ choice of Bernie Sanders for president makes perfect sense, and boomer-age Democrats simply have to stop bashing them for it.
I'm with Birkel.
Even if their choice makes perfect sense, why must anyone else stop explaining to them why it's a bad idea. That just seems like more of the kind of leftism that's gotten these kids where they are. They think their own ideas are genius, other peoples' ideas are hateful, and that nobody has really thought through why the rich can't just pay for everyone. They are the zero-tolerance generation.
But we don't have to give into that. We can disagree with them, and tell them why.
I'll really be feeling the Bern then, because making your responsible citizens feel like used suckers is probably not good.
That's what gets ignored.
What happens when the "good people" decide that being good is a fool's errand?
What's coming is a means testing for SS. Which is another way of saying they are going to take much of the life savings of responsible people and give it to the spendthrifts. They will also take away the max earning limits on the tax, to really rub salt in the wound.
Once they do that, people are suckers to save for retirement, unless they can save really huge amounts, which will be harder and harder to do. None of this is a problem for them. They want people dependent on the govt for every scrap of clothes, morsel of food, and bit of shelter.
These kids really do hate their parents and are signing up Bernie to take their parents money away and give it to them.
If they really think socialism will bring them utopia, then the label "Dumbest Generation" in richly deserved.
Every generation gets exasperated with previous ones. They think it will be different for them, that people before just didn't know, or didn't try hard enough, or didn't BELIEVE enough. Like every generation before them, Bernie's Babies will find out the hard way. Then they'll cry like us older folks, because the next generations won't listen to THEM and will insist on learning the hard way. The next generation, if we all survive that long, will probably be rabid constitutionalists who hunt and trade only in gold. I doubt Bernie can get the votes, even if he gets the nomination, because the terminally insane denizens of colleges and the Bernie Baby generation are the only fools who will vote to do to ourselves, what Venezuela is doing to themselves. But Bernie could be elected. If so, move to a small town far from freeways, cities, and military installations; and start stockpiling and forming neighborhood militias. It will all work out somehow, and live or die, God has our backs. Oh, and you leftists, who taught Bernie's Babies all this kumbayah crap - rot in hell. It is surely coming for you.
Bernie Sanders was born 9 years before me? Don't trust anyone over 70!
Matthew Sablan said...
-- Man, if student loans get forgiven, I'll be a sucker for having put off so many things to pay down my loans faster. If, as has also been talked about, bad home loans get forgiven/reduced/whatever, I'll be a double sucker for being responsible and not buying what I couldn't afford.
I'll really be feeling the Bern then, because making your responsible citizens feel like used suckers is probably not good.
That's how my wife feels about illegal immigration. She came here legally and did everything necessary to become a US citizen. This crap with giving everything to illegals just makes honest legal immigrants a bunch of chumps.
Also, as the InstaPundit has pointed out, if the government employees aren't held accountable when they break the law, why should any of the rest of us obey it? "We are a nation of laws, not of men" and "equal justice under the law" have always been pretty lies that we like to tell ourselves. They're pretty lies but lies just the same.
I cannot ridicule Sanders and his youthful supporters without simultaneously criticizing Trump and his know-nothing supporters.
To me, both campaigns are examples of how desperation and withful thinking cloud rational judgment.
I've always believed that it's better to know the truth--however unpleasant--than to wallow in fantasy, however pleasant.
That's why I support neither Sanders nor Trump.
"I cannot ridicule Sanders and his youthful supporters without simultaneously criticizing Trump and his know-nothing supporters."
Nor should you have to! It's rare when duty and pleasure align: enjoy!
Hating on boomers is fun too!
When I was in, if anyone would have shouted: "Get that pig up here!" The whole 3rd platoon would have come forward.
I was in the 2nd.
We boomers lead the way in hating ourselves.
AllenS,Drill Sgt- when I was in we always safety wired the gas tube nut.Surprisingly easy to fire my "baby" from the hip.Good for suppressing fire out to about 250-300 m.The poor kids nowadays have to use the upgraded multi shot poodle shooter called the SAW.As to this generational thing I am technically a boomer but don't feel it.The boomers had already screwed up most things by the time I got to enjoy them.Millenials are easily some of the most ignorant people I have ever known.I work with a few on a daily basis and my chief observation is none can do any math..
AllenS said...
We never called them "pigs", Drill. They were known as "the 60". I carried a "16".
My wifes cousin carried one in VN. He was the biggest guy in his platoon. He got his bronze star and purple heart for being the last man standing when the shooting stopped.
Isn't it interesting that both sides essentially say the same thing: 'shut up, and submit to what I want.'
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