I mean, excuse me for wanting to dismantle social security because I’ll never see a dime from it.
That's exactly why we can't have nice things... How about improving it instead of dismantling it?
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You Are Old, Father William
21–30 of 54 posts
Re: You Are Old, Father William
#22I mean, excuse me for wanting to dismantle social security because I’ll never see a dime from it.
That's exactly why we can't have nice things... How about improving it instead of dismantling it?
We need financial literacy taught in high school. Imagine a world where people actually understood the basics of how to build wealth instead of a bunch of blathering financial basket cases complaining about tax money being wasted on the poor.
Re: You Are Old, Father William
#23My primary critique of this article is that it sets up a strawman in the first sentence to tear down. > Everyone who writes about aging “Boomers”—how “they” have ruined “our” society, and so on, ad nauseum—should be required to memorize Lewis Carroll’s “You Are Old, Father William” (from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) and recite it aloud before an audience of men and women age seventy or older. There are proper ar…
Yeh, I'm one of those boomers. It was our generation who cooked up the whole "taxation is theft" trope. That has made a terrible mess.
We were born before the invention (1959-1960) of pharma birth control, and were teenagers when it took hold in society. It was the biggest change in human history (I'm not exaggerating). We, generalizing, did an awful job of starting to sort out the moral / ethical / social changes birth control brought.
We lived through the Summer of Love (see the previous paragraph) and some of us didn't get it. To misquote Spiderman, "with great freedom comes great responsibility." Some of us missed that. Hence DJT 45, hence the abuses of celibate clergy, among other notorious members of my generation.
And, fossil carbon release.
We did make the US stop the Vietnam war. That was good.
We made the US get rid of the military draft. That, in hindsight, was bad. Politicians think twice if they have to raise taxes and conscript young women and men before they go to war.
What's going for us? What do we have to offer?
We think in decades, not years.
We made it to the moon.
We invented the internet.
We helped cure the world of sanctimonious horsest like the poem Lewis Carroll parodied: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Old_Man%27s_Comforts_and_...
Maybe it's self-delusion, but I hope we're not finished doing some good.
Re: You Are Old, Father William
#24My primary critique of this article is that it sets up a strawman in the first sentence to tear down. > Everyone who writes about aging “Boomers”—how “they” have ruined “our” society, and so on, ad nauseum—should be required to memorize Lewis Carroll’s “You Are Old, Father William” (from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) and recite it aloud before an audience of men and women age seventy or older. There are proper ar…
What fraction of the policy changes of your lifetime did you have a part in or even support? Irrespective of the answer, you can expect to be blamed for them via memes 40 years from now. ;)
Re: You Are Old, Father William
#25I mean, _fine_, but Boomers did ruin everything.
Re: You Are Old, Father William
#26The interesting part of the article comes in the 3rd paragraph. The first two paragraphs just hijack the idea with a meme.
> In the last several years, two writer friends of mine have told me the same story: Their (very savvy) editors advised them to change the age of the protagonists in their novels-in-progress, making them considerably younger; otherwise, their books wouldn’t be publishable.
The "golden years" is the first time in our lives where we are free to be ourselves. We no longer have to bend to the ideas of others to get funding. If you are a writer then self publish. You no longer has to take ideas from marketing departments who dream up book ideas. You can say what you want to say.
Re: You Are Old, Father William
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's exactly why we can't have nice things... How about improving it instead of dismantling it?
This is exactly the kind of centrist bullshit that caused the mess we’re in.
Could you please post thoughtfully and informatively instead?
Re: You Are Old, Father William
#28I mean, excuse me for wanting to dismantle social security because I’ll never see a dime from it.
This is ironic. College freshmen said the exact same thing when I started college. In 1978.
Social Security has always been eminently fixable by extremely modest changes in taxation. It is folks with attitudes like the one expressed above who have consistently put off making those changes.
Re: You Are Old, Father William
#29My primary critique of this article is that it sets up a strawman in the first sentence to tear down. > Everyone who writes about aging “Boomers”—how “they” have ruined “our” society, and so on, ad nauseum—should be required to memorize Lewis Carroll’s “You Are Old, Father William” (from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) and recite it aloud before an audience of men and women age seventy or older. There are proper ar…
Yeh, I'm one of those boomers. It was our generation who cooked up the whole "taxation is theft" trope. That has made a terrible mess. We were born before the invention (1959-1960) of pharma birth control, and were teenagers when it took hold in society. It was the biggest change in human history (I'm not exaggerating). We, generalizing, did an awful job of starting to sort out the moral / ethical / social changes bi…
> It was our generation who cooked up the whole "taxation is theft" trope.
I'm sorry but considering the US hasn't existed for very long, and income taxes in the US haven't existed for very long, I don't see what your point is other than to knock down something you dislike.
The idea of taxation being "theft" wasn't an invention of Boomers nor is it a particularly unnatural (or original) thought for any individual to have when encountered with collectivism.
I'm not going to blame Boomers for the current situation because there are so many assumptions I have to make about the current situation for such blame to be effective. I think one has already been thrown around in this thread, something about education costs, where such complaints make big assumptions about the value of education in the status quo or what the entire point of an education is (e.g. being a productive part of the workforce vs. having critical thinking skills vs. knowing the value of learning about being able to discipline yourself into doing it when you want).
The worst thing is, blaming Boomers for our problems makes the assumption that there is something uniquely special about that generation that allowed them to set society on the wrong path, as if every generation before and after has also been uniquely special in not having that ability.
So I find your comment particularly underhanded in taking this hatred for Boomers and lobbing some pet-dislike you have for a certain ideology. "Oh yeah, us Boomers suck, we ruined everything especially because we don't like taxes," as if Boomers have a monolithic opinion about taxation or anything for that matter.
PS: You may have stopped the Vietnam war, but what do you think paid for it? (Answer: Taxes.)
Re: You Are Old, Father William
#30I'm trying to avoid the "middle brow dismissal," but I'm not sure the point of this article. OK, you are sick of your generation being painted with an overly broad and negative brush. Well, right back at you. I think, perhaps, we could call a truce on the generational warfare.
Your comment is a hasty generalization combined with a red herring.
You don’t know that the author painted your generation with an overly broad and negative brush. And even if he had done so, it wouldn’t render the article “pointless”.