Dear Gen Xers and Millenials...Well, first you're going to have to apologize for misspelling "millennials."
March 11, 2019
I'm reading "I'm so, so, so sorry: A Baby Boomer apologizes on behalf of his generation."
By Steven Papamarcos (at The NY Daily News):
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62 comments:
It’s always ‘68 somewhere.
The new crop is just as arrogant and clueless as the 60s boomers.
Dear Kittens,
I apologize for the mess in the litter box.
It's Trump's fault.
Go pee on his bed.
Love,
Professor Deflection
This boomer doesn't sound like a boomer at all. This sounds like it was 'ghost-written' by some sniveling NY 30-something. Yeah. Not buying it.
That may be the most embarrassing thing published today.
He doesn't speak for me and I've got nothing to apologize for.
Typical Coward.
Nothing about Radical Islam. One person was killed in Charlottesville. A jihadists killed 8 in New York City a few months later.
Let’s tally up those numbers killed by Radical Islamists and White Supremacists.
More virtue signaling than apology.
Misspelling millennials is a power move. Malicious misnaming was invented by the Boommers, I believe.
There's a lot of fairly valid points in the article, but a few eye rollers too. Here's one:
I apologize that the Trumpists’ and, on the world stage, their fellow travelers’ nationalist fervor threatens to morph into xenophobia, race baiting and thinly disguised Jew-hatred. Charlottesville, the Yellow Vests Movement, as well as the Labor Party and its grand cyclops, er, leader, Jeremy Corbyn raise questions as to whether humans are really the highly evolved life-form we like to think we are.
Doesn't seem to be the "Trumpists" who have been "race baiting" and "Jew-hating" lately. But whatever.
There's money to be made in stoking grievance, so the media has turned grievence grouping into a industry. We have gender grievence, racial grievence, sexual identity grievence, and now we have generational grievence, pitting one generation against another. Old versus Young.
Debt is a social construct.
Weirdly, the professor is centrist in his complaint. He calls out Trump and he calls out Hillary Clinton. He's worried about the deficit more than climate change. He calls out affirmative action.
Yet the complaint itself -- it's failure as satire, it's failure on facts, its patronizing insincerity -- is a wince-fest.
Blogger Bob Boyd said...More virtue signaling than apology
Is there any such thing as an honest apology? All of them are tainted in one way or another.
its not it's
How To Apologize
By Me
1. Say “I’m sorry.”
2. STFU
The End
"Millenials" is more than just a river in Egypt.
He didn’t apologize for Obama. He made excuses for him.
There's something about this generational cohort between 25-45 that is disturbing in the extreme and I've noticed it as a higher percentage than any other generation both in the military and personal relationships I've had...
It's this idea of deserving perfection.
Lots of them fundamentally believe that they deserve a perfect world. A Safe world. An economic guarantee. Perfect relationships. Perfect careers. An assurance that all trouble will be minimal and that said minimal trouble can be deflected to attribution not stemming from the person themselves.
These people have got a real surprise coming. The future is NEVER a nice place by default. Every generation is tasked with making their contribution. The future belongs to those that show up for it and so many of these 35 year old 'kids' are stuck in 2nd gear. Someone else will take that spot snowflakes.
"Never apologize. It's a sign of weakness."
Millenials will never miss that "n" being mostly math averse.
So this is one a them vagina boys. Got it.
Sad, sad little man. I really hate that every half-wit thinks he/she can apologize for a race or gender or generation. You can not.
Now if you are REALLY sorry call out the insanity of $15 minimum wage, a living wage for all (including the unwilling), "free" education/healthcare/preschool/cell phones/any-damn-thing-I-want.
Else you lament about debt is a very unfunny joke.
It's the Greatest Generation that voted in the entitlements that will blight their lives. We just haven't fixed them or died early and quickly. If only we'd smoked and drank more.
He forgot to apologize for being a white male.
And why pick on the Yellow Vests?
"Millennial" may be the word I misspell the most. I guess the guy doesn't have spell check or doesn't want to let it be the boss of him. Bad news, too that the newspaper didn't catch it, but it is the Daily News after all. Also, those guys in Britain are the "Labour" Party, don't ask me why, but over there you can't spell "labor" without "u".
If you read the article, he does express some culturally and fiscally conservative ideas, but he really hates Trump and believes that those to the right of himself are dangerously infected by racism and anti-Semitism. Maybe that's typical for business school professors who serve capitalism and dislike a lot about political correctness and affirmative action but make up for it with virtue signaling flourishes.
Lucid-ideas: It's this idea of deserving perfection.
I couldn't agree more. As you say, the idea that everything could be perfect if only somebody else would stop screwing things up.
I blame the parents of these "kids." Not to go all "old man yells at clouds" but somewhere along the way this group was not taught about personal responsibility, or even the fact that life isn't always fair. Like I was taught and how my wife and I taught our college-age kids. Even they are astounded by the lack of accountability they encounter in friends and roommates. And it all seems like so much common sense to them - it's not some outstanding accomplishment to take some responsibility for yourself.
It's circumstances that form a generation. Genetically, there's little to separate the Great Generation from the much maligned Baby Boomers they spawned.
It's takes hard times to bring out the best in people. We saw some of that after 9/11. In one sense the Millennials should be glad that they don't have it as easy as their parents. It gives them a chance to build character.
I think this was a space ship from Star Wars called the Millennial Fuckin’.
And I’m a genX’er and I’m pretty sure we’re just bitterly holding it all together until the Blackhole Sun comes to take it all away.
Progressive prices and availability. Progressive confusion. Progressive exclusion. Cats in hats. Diversity. Environmentalism. Mobs and killzones including aborting one of their own. Social justice adventures. Anti-nativism. Refugee crises. Immigration reform. Jew... Asian... Light Black... White privilege. Warlock trials. Warlock hunts. Planned parenthood. Social justice.
Anytime now, Blackhole Sun...
I think the prevalence of one and two child families since (and by) the Boomers has made a huge difference. That and older parents.
Well, in the spirit of group-identity politics and inter-generational political warfare, I suppose we will have to introduce a national lottery system. In order to defray the cost ballooning social security and medicare costs we will draw on a national lottery composed of the nation's baby boomers. The lottery winners will be humanely euthanized so that they don't contribute to the cost of social security or medicare. Additionally in the spirit of group-identity politics and inter-generational guilt, the lottery will be limited to female baby boomers, until such time as the deaths of female baby boomers subject to the 'draft' is equal to the the number of men who died in the Vietnam war. I'm fairly certain Gender Justice, or sexual equity or something requires this. Also, this will have an extra benefit because women tend to live longer so are more expensive to take care of.
There isn't much point in apologizing on behalf of an entire cohort of people. It doesn't mean anything and it doesn't solve any of the problems you're supposedly apologizing for helping to create.
It's especially ridiculous when apologizing for things like the national debt. Lets be honest here, whoever wrote this would be unwilling to actually do anything real about it anyway. In fact I seriously doubt that very many people who claim to be concerned about it would be willing to actual do what needs to be done in order to "fix" it.
The debt will never be properly dealt with not because it's unsolvable in the practical sense but because it's unsolvable in the political sense.
The Boomers set out to herd the cats and wound up screwing the pooch.
Being called a “Baby Boomer” has always made me resentful. I am on the tail end of that cursed cohort and I despise them. They shouldn’t just apologize, they should then shut up for the remainder of their days.
I predict calls for reparations from Boomers to following generations.
I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize for the entire Papamarcos family. We have stolen your money. We have mistreated your women. We have cheated you in our business dealings. The Papamarcos family has frequently told racist and sexist jokes and have laughed inappropriately at jokes which have offended you. We have subjected you to our bad haircuts and our poor clothing choices. We have insulted your intelligence by writing articles with poor spelling and puffed up self-importance. We hope you will accept this heartfelt apology on behalf of the Papamarcos family. We do owe you reparations, but the details of that transaction have yet to be figured out.
As a career higher-ed honcho, he should apologize on behalf of himself for his participation in bilking students at the 2nd and 3rd rate institutions where these "millenials" and "gen-Xers" have been swindled. He doesn't need to be so presumptuous in his apology on behalf of a generation he does not speak for: he could offer a genuine apology for his own bad deeds.
"I'm sorry I teased those who did badly on my tests that they might only have fast-food job opportunities: the truth is that even if you'd done well on my exams, that probably would not have been substantially beneficial to your job prospects. Our generation has so screwed things up, there may not be a ton of opportunity out there even for those of you who've made the financial and effort investment in higher ed."
Follow up with a public resignation, and that would be a newsworthy apology.
The "Greatest Generation" was not without its warts. The men who turned fire hoses on peaceful civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham in 1963 were from the "Greatest Generation." The three US Presidents who as CinC presided over the Vietnam War -- Kennedy, LBJ, and Nixon -- had all been junior officers in World War II and were from that generation. So was George Wallace. Under their environmental stewardship pollution was so bad that Lake Erie caught fire (yes, yes, technically the area where pollution was so thick that it burned was at the mouth of one of Erie's tributaries where it drained into the lake -- but I, and other Boomers, saw the fire on TV).
Civil rights demonstrators included us Baby Boomers, and a case can be made that we cleaned up the environment, to the point where 21st century environmentalists have to invent CO2 and cow farts as pollutants. And some of us drafted during the Vietnam War, even those like me who (thankfully!) never served in SEA, are pretty rough ourselves.
And as for Aunty Trump, FOAD mother****er.
Meh, it's not really a misspelling. See here for example.
He's got a lot of things right in there, but also seems to attack the people who are actually trying to fix the mistakes now. He calls out the mistakes and then proceeds to make them over again.
I"ll know the boomers are sincerely sorry when they start leaving planet earth.
“Never trust anybody over thirty. They have seen that our ideas never work."
Plus it’s no coincidence that the pre-frontal cortex, responsible for logic, planning, and perception of consequences isn’t fully developed until one is 27.
Talking about "generations" is ridiculous. 25% of the "Greatest Generation Ever" wasn't in the military in WW2. And not every boomer was at Woodstock or serving in Vietnam.
The past is a foreign country. That means that the future is too.
Absent the reflexive Trump-thump so he can stay tight with his shuffleboard buddies, it's a reasonably good rant. Did he say any of it back when it mattered, back when it could have cost him, back when it might have made a difference?
I am curious, do they ever say “Conservatives were right”?
I"ll know the boomers are sincerely sorry when they start leaving planet earth.
The oldest Baby Boomers were born in 1946, and if you don't have immediate access to your calculator, that makes us in our early 70s. Many of us already have departed this earth. And many of the rest of us see nothing for which to apologize. Not. One. God. Damned. Thing.
If you're going to write stuff like this, can't it at least be interesting from a writing perspective? Meaning vocabulary and prose style. This is just terrible in too many ways. What a pathetic piece.
daskol said...
"I'm sorry I teased those who did badly on my tests that they might only have fast-food job opportunities: the truth is that even if you'd done well on my exams, that probably would not have been substantially beneficial to your job prospects. Our generation has so screwed things up, there may not be a ton of opportunity out there even for those of you who've made the financial and effort investment in higher ed."
Follow up with a public resignation, and that would be a newsworthy apology.
********************
Better yet, he could commit seppuku in Times Square.
He was a management school guy: probably a lot of his students do have jobs, so he can just apologize. If he was a grievance studies dean, yeah, seppuku would be better.
Two things that don't [really] matter: The Times and Boomers speaking for "Boomers".
the baby boomer cohort has essentially cleaned up numerous messes left by the greatest generation. This includes the Vietnam war Watergate the Cold war we took what we were given and created the personal computer revolution and the internet. All at the same time we reduced the pollution from all our cities and power plants and waste dumps and rivers and acid rain. Sure the world is not perfect that we left for the millennials but is a f*** ton better than it was when we were born
Academia is a total shitshow, though, and has degraded terribly since the 60s, which has had sad consequences for our cultural and political landscape. Identity politics is a terrible legacy.
Howard agreed wth my comment at 10:29. Wow.
Right, you took a country relatively free of debt, with a brand new technology that was discovered by your elders in the greatest generation, the transistor and the computer, and you created mountains and mountains of debt, a surveillance state that even Orwell couldn’t have dreamed up, and a kind of politics that bids fair to snuff the Enlightenment.
Although I am completely unsurprised that you guys are unapologetic. Self knowledge was never your strong suit. You are like the heirs of a great fortune bragging about the fun you had spending what your parents earned while leaving your kids with squat.
Destruction of the university system, once the envy of the world was just the cherry on top.
Dear Apologist,
We don't care.
Sincerely,
Generation X
As a member of the unplanned parenthood generation, is he apologizing to or for the numerous millennials?
> The "Greatest Generation" was not without its warts.
Let's give some credit to the managers of the greatest generation, they were the generals, the admirals, the ones who ran the factories and made the strategy. JFK was the first GG president, and he wasn't much.
@Aunty Trump, if you think all Boomers lefties, then you are a fool. If you think the lefties in the Boomer generation did not have help from the "Greatest Generation," the "Silent Generation," and "Gen X" then you are a moron.
Lefties have a lot to apologize for, but my whole generation? Not a damned thing.
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