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Every generation does the same. The young ones feel the old generation screwed things up and are conservative and the older generation what you wrote.
I remember reading something similar to what you wrote from I believe the greeks or some other civilzation from those times.
There is not to say that both generation may have some validity to what they say of each other, take care.
So true. and I think you're referring to the Romans and the quote about the times, the morals.
We (older) boomers definitely looked down and were disrespectful to our greatest generation parents. There was even a name for it--The Generation Gap.
We had been slightly spoiled by them and their wish to have happy families after the War so we grew up not exactly having it easy but probably most of us had it easier than they did. I think we were the first generation to head off to college in droves as opposed to getting right out to work for our existence.
The greatest generation were mostly about success and houses and cars and we were rebellious. We didn't care about money, we cared about poor people and we joing the Peace Corp to help others. It sems like everyone wanted to join a commune and live the simple, back to the land life.
We called our parents materialistic. We were a bit arrogant and procaimed ourselves as the generation that would save the world! We were all for things like Medicare (thinking of our grandparents), welfare (for poor people), the Great Society where everyone would be equal and there would be a War on Poverty.
We fought bitterly with our parents generation. Some of them were very mean to us for our disrespect and that only made us more disrespectful. "Don't trust anyone over 30" was our mantra.
At some point in time as we grew older, we started to tone it down, & realized that even though we didn't agree with our parents, we should respect them and stop complaining about them. Later on we became a generation of caregivers and both generations got along.
Some boomers became what we said we would never become--followers of the almightly dollar--but a lot of people just worked at their jobs and tried to make the best of it.
Some generations are more estranged from their parents than others--think of the rebellious kids of the 1920s who "bobbed their hair" and danced the Charleston and partied. Must have been a big generation gap there. Then came the kids of the 30s and 40s who had to scramble to survive a Depression. I wonder if they felt the same as Generation Y feels today.
I'm sure there are many many more examples throughout history but I do think that it's perfectly normal for a new generation to rebel a little bit in their search to define who they are. Some will rebel A LOT if their lot in life is markedly different from that of their parents. I wish our boomer generation hadn't been so mean and disrespectful to our parents in our rebellion (but our parents played their part in that too by being mean and resentful and smug to us) and I hope that Generation Y, once they get their complaining and rebellion out of their systems, will learn to understand where the boomers are coming from and all can get along. Instead of fighting it would be great if both generations would stop putting each other down and learn to understand.
I don't know why Boomers would have anything bad to say about gen-y. Gen-y has leveraged up for college debt providing a nice source of liquidity to allow Boomers to deleverage their mortgage debt while still propping up prices.
Both generations have negatives. Both generations are NOTHING compared to the generation that stormed the beaches of Normandy. At this point, everything that they have done to make this a great nation has been absolutely destroyed by the following generations. Boomers packed up and shipped out the jobs that provided for a stable employment for the masses. Gen Y would have been too wussy and self entitled for these jobs regardless. Every great nation finds a way to squander it's wealth...
Quote:
Originally Posted by in_newengland
Some boomers became what we said we would never become--followers of the almightly dollar--but a lot of people just worked at their jobs and tried to make the best of it.
And many put it above all else. Hence, our country is starting to resemble a hollow shell of our former greatness.
Both generations have negatives. Both generations are NOTHING compared to the generation that stormed the beaches of Normandy. At this point, everything that they have done to make this a great nation has been absolutely destroyed by the following generations. Boomers packed up and shipped out the jobs that provided for a stable employment for the masses. Gen Y would have been too wussy and self entitled for these jobs regardless. Every great nation finds a way to squander it's wealth...
And many put it above all else. Hence, our country is starting to resemble a hollow shell of our former greatness.
The oldest Gen Y is barely into his 30s, dood. We have yet to gain political clout as a voting block. We are the re-hash of the great depression generation. This is a problem for the boomers because we have largely opted out of the investment vehicles the boomers so rely upon in order to monetize their paper dreams: real estate and the stock market.
One of the nice little unintended consequences of being a wage poor generation is that we can't afford the boomers paper. They will have to fire sell. This is good for us, bad for them. In the end the Country will see a reset, that was not something perpetrated by my generation. We inherited the downgrade, like our forefathers in the 1920s did. We aren't even 40 years old yet. Give us one decade, I'm confident we'll display a whole lot more resiliency than the boomers were ever capable of.
Pretty much every generation from great grandma on down are whining about the standards of living reset in this country, so I do not believe it is really all that relevant to be picking on the 20-some year old who got sold his parents dream and came out with an empty bag and a promissory note out of college, with no sight of a pension for a thousand miles.
We'll make due. This Country is effed though, from a social mobility construct. That dream is going to the grave with the boomers.
The oldest Gen Y is barely into his 30s, dood. We have yet to gain political clout as a voting block. We are the re-hash of the great depression generation. This is a problem for the boomers because we have largely opted out of the investment vehicles the boomers so rely upon in order to monetize their paper dreams: real estate and the stock market.
One of the nice little unintended consequences of being a wage poor generation is that we can't afford the boomers paper. They will have to fire sell. This is good for us, bad for them. In the end the Country will see a reset, that was not something perpetrated by my generation. We inherited the downgrade, like our forefathers in the 1920s did. We aren't even 40 years old yet. Give us one decade, I'm confident we'll display a whole lot more resiliency than the boomers were ever capable of.
Pretty much every generation from great grandma on down are whining about the standards of living reset in this country, so I do not believe it is really all that relevant to be picking on the 20-some year old who got sold his parents dream and came out with an empty bag and a promissory note out of college, with no sight of a pension for a thousand miles.
We'll make due. This Country is effed though, from a social mobility construct. That dream is going to the grave with the boomers.
This country was founded against all odds. We fought the most powerful force on the planet to declare our independence. We did what no other nation could in that regard. And building this nation to what it is today was no small undertaking. Fast forward to today... Could any of these generations survived such tests? It is up to gen Y to define ourselves and our destiny. Personally, I don't think we will fare well, but I do root for the underdog. It's quite an uphill battle from here.
We (older) boomers definitely looked down and were disrespectful to our greatest generation parents. There was even a name for it--The Generation Gap.
We had been slightly spoiled by them and their wish to have happy families after the War so we grew up not exactly having it easy but probably most of us had it easier than they did. I think we were the first generation to head off to college in droves as opposed to getting right out to work for our existence.
The greatest generation were mostly about success and houses and cars and we were rebellious. We didn't care about money, we cared about poor people and we joing the Peace Corp to help others. It sems like everyone wanted to join a commune and live the simple, back to the land life.
We called our parents materialistic. We were a bit arrogant and procaimed ourselves as the generation that would save the world! We were all for things like Medicare (thinking of our grandparents), welfare (for poor people), the Great Society where everyone would be equal and there would be a War on Poverty.
We fought bitterly with our parents generation. Some of them were very mean to us for our disrespect and that only made us more disrespectful. "Don't trust anyone over 30" was our mantra.
At some point in time as we grew older, we started to tone it down, & realized that even though we didn't agree with our parents, we should respect them and stop complaining about them. Later on we became a generation of caregivers and both generations got along.
Some boomers became what we said we would never become--followers of the almightly dollar--but a lot of people just worked at their jobs and tried to make the best of it.
Some generations are more estranged from their parents than others--think of the rebellious kids of the 1920s who "bobbed their hair" and danced the Charleston and partied. Must have been a big generation gap there. Then came the kids of the 30s and 40s who had to scramble to survive a Depression. I wonder if they felt the same as Generation Y feels today.
I'm sure there are many many more examples throughout history but I do think that it's perfectly normal for a new generation to rebel a little bit in their search to define who they are. Some will rebel A LOT if their lot in life is markedly different from that of their parents. I wish our boomer generation hadn't been so mean and disrespectful to our parents in our rebellion (but our parents played their part in that too by being mean and resentful and smug to us) and I hope that Generation Y, once they get their complaining and rebellion out of their systems, will learn to understand where the boomers are coming from and all can get along. Instead of fighting it would be great if both generations would stop putting each other down and learn to understand.
What a thoughtful post above - a good summary, even though I think it's skewed. I say that because it accurately describes a certain subset of older boomers, not all of them. The group to which poster in_newengland belonged was the rebel group - the hippies, the resenters of their parents' generation, the "drop-outs" in terms of rejection of traditional career goals, the naive idealists, etc. She has described that group well.
But we were not all part of that. Some of us continued to pursue traditional educational and career goals - whether that means we were excessively materialistic is highly arguable. We were not attracted to rejecting authority just to be rejecting authority. And, in my view most importantly, we did not embrace drugs.
I do not pretend to know what percentage of older Boomers belonged to the two camps, and I realize the division into two camps is somewhat arbitrary anyway. Since most of us tend to choose as friends people who are more or less like-minded, it is all too easy to slip into the mindset that "everybody" was like we were. That is what I think poster in_newengland is doing when she describes the entire older Boomer group as "we". Well, I was not part of that "we" and I sure as hell was not alone.
I think it's amazing that this country seemed to recover from the large numbers of people who rejected productive work, and more importantly, from the large numbers of people who embraced drugs. But maybe we never really recovered after all - I'm not sure.
Disclaimer: Technically I am not a Boomer, being slightly too old (born in 1944). But I think of myself as one anyway because the two years do not seem that significant to me. Socio-economically I feel like part of the older Boomers.
What a thoughtful post above - a good summary, even though I think it's skewed. I say that because it accurately describes a certain subset of older boomers, not all of them. The group to which poster in_newengland belonged was the rebel group - the hippies, the resenters of their parents' generation, the "drop-outs" in terms of rejection of traditional career goals, the naive idealists, etc. She has described that group well.
Disclaimer: Technically I am not a Boomer, being slightly too old (born in 1944). But I think of myself as one anyway because the two years do not seem that significant to me. Socio-economically I feel like part of the older Boomers.
Escort Rider is right. I'm an older boomer and I was describing the group I hung out with. But even in my "hippie" type group we all went into careers--I was a teacher married to a teacher--and I never took drugs and was/am 100% against drugs. Not all older boomers disrespected our parents, the greatest generation, but everyone I knew was against our parents for at least one main reason and that was the Viet Nam War.
So, again, we boomers are not all alike and it seems that we older boomers are different from the younger boomers. I don't know that much about the younger boomers but if they are the ones who spoiled the kids they're already different from the older boomers.
We're not all rich either. Our generation was the first to get divorced in huge numbers and so a lot of us experienced financial setbacks. We somehow lived through a serious recession in the mid 1970s and if we weren't frugal enough already, we learned then. I, for one, don't have any valuable real estate to leverage (?) and I know a lot of people my age who are struggling. I also know people my age who inherited money from their parents and have plenty of it when combined with their own pensions and investments.
Goes to show we don't fit into any sterotype. I can sympathize with generation Y to a certain extent and maybe many of their younger boomer parents fed them a mess of illusions about being special and getting things handed on a silver platter but they also have to live and learn and see that it was just an illusion. Their attitude may make things even worse--and I do agree that things are bad out there.
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Older Boomers or just a subset of older Boomers?
