Go home, prop your feet up on the La-Z-Boy, and watch TV news, it’ll never steer you wrong. Don’t forget — when things go wrong, it’s not your fault, and you can just blame those dang Millennials for everything. You’re the greatest and America is the bestest.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
In the early 1980’s, my Dad confessed to me that although he was registered Republican, he hadn’t voted for any Republican since Eisenhower. (My mother was staunch Republican, member of Repub. Women’s Club.) He died some years back at age 98. I like Matt Bors’ work, but I don’t understand this one. What percentage of that generation actually were staunch Repubs all their lives, and how many still remain living voters? This cartoon seems pointless to me.
@johnhodges #1
Why would you assume the comic says anything about it being a large or small percentage? The whole point is mocking the idea that any generation can be “to blame” for all the bad things in society while another is only “herioc”. Each generation is going to have its flaws and strengths.
The Baby boomers need to just stay out of wars. Any war they participated in has never had a successful outcome. Baby boomers are not good at war plain and simple.
I belong to generation X and have grown tired of being over shadowed by the baby boomers. They seem to get what they want sometimes at the expense of everyone else. Example; the drinking age was 18 years of age when the boomers when young. When the boomers became older and their children got close to drinking age the drinking age was changed to 21.
I know not the best example but it was the one that was on the tip of my brain.
steve1 #3
Where was this?
chigau@4, See Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge:
More details at the link. Nowdays it’s normally 21, as a result of the National Minimum Drinking Age Act (1984), introduced, at least in part, due to the then-spiraling upwards rates of drunken driving & drink-caused injuries and deaths. (As steve1@3 says, this really isn’t a very good example for his perspective.)
Steve’s example actually underscores the uselessness of generalizing about “generations”. Technically I’m a baby boomer, but I was in college when the drinking age was set at 21 across the country. (I actually turned legal three times: at 18 in NY, at 20 in MA, and at 21 in IL.)
Boomers like to talk about how Gen X/Millennials/whatever are so spoiled and entitled but forget two things: one, just how easy their generation had it in a lot of ways (much cheaper education, for one), and two, just who raised their kids to have those expectations.
When I was born in 1955, I was not considered to be part of The Baby Boom.
By the time I was taught about it in school (1965ish) I was still not considered to be a Boomer.
I don’t know when the expansion happened.
Drinking/voting age in Alberta was lowered from 21 to 18 before I turned 18.
I still don’t think the book has been written yet about WW2 and the aftermath. I was born in 1956 and the stories I remember from family about the ‘teens, twenties and thirties seem like a different universe. The social and economic shifts were probably greater than the outfall from beating Nazis.
As someone who dabbles in the service industry, I’ve always hated being called an “Entitled Millennial” by the same generation (ie baby boomers) that will throw a cataclysmic shitfit if you refuse to make a no-receipt refund for cash.
Does it help to remember that the Republican party before the Southern Strategy was pretty much the opposite of what it stands for today? If the vets came back from WWII voting Republican that was not necessarily a bad thing. If they continued to vote Republican after the Southern (or possibly “Suburban” – historians differ) Strategy took effect 1968-72, then there is a problem.
Also, in Michigan, the drinking age was lowered to 18 the year I turned 21 (1972) and was the first state to vote it back to 21 six years later. The ostensible reason was ‘an increase in accidents by younger drivers’ but at the time I thought that was the excuse not the reason. I voted to keep the drinking age at 18. It seemed, and still seems, ridiculous to say an 18 year old can vote, marry, sign contracts, reproduce, work, join the army and die for the country and still not be able to legally have a drink. It’s far easier to condemn the young than to promote a culture that expects responsible driving and responsible drinking.
Gwynnyd,
I always thought that the driving age should be raised, not the drinking age.
Good luck with that, though.
@ 8 chigau
I finally turned 21 about 3 or 4 months before the ON government lowered the drinking age to 18. I felt robbed.
You definitely were a baby boomer by Canadian standards, at least according to Michael Foote. It was just that nobody really knew what one was back then. Well, I cannot remember hearing the term used until perhaps the 1980s?
@ 12 What a Maroon, living up to the ‘nym
I always thought that the driving age should be raised, not the drinking age.
This sounds good to me. I’d go for, maybe, 45 years old and with some serious emphasis on driving skills and rigorous testing.
But then, I’m a cyclist and tend to assume that any driver of a personal 4-wheeled motor vehicle must be considered to be a crazed homocidal psychpath until they get out of the vehicle.
Heh. I was in a state where the age was a constant 21 — and dad, at that time, was the chief engineer at a winery. As such, he visited, and got a fair few visitors from, other wineries. It’s apparently something of a tradition in the industry to exchange gifts of wines, so the gifts he got, plus the annual end-of-year case from the winery, meant we usually had some bottles at home. I don’t think I really noticed the difference pre- and post-21 (when at home)…
A lot of people currently forget that our soldiers came back to a segregated county. And the military tried to spread segregation over in Europe. We weere fighting Nazis, not white supremecists as some memes going around were saying.
chigau
I was called Gen Y as a kid in the early ’90s, then a Millennial, then somewhere along the way I ceased to exist and now people talk as though Millennials are currently teenagers/college student. It’s very odd and shows how useless and arbitrary these generational designations really are.
@#3, steve1
Agreed, but how about “the United States needs to just stay out of wars”. There is no reason to believe that Gen X, Gen Y, or the Millennials are any “better” at war than the Boomers — in fact, the history of the disaster of Libya can be boiled down to “Hillary Clinton thought that Iraq would have gone well if a Democrat had been in charge, and convinced the Obama administration to try and prove it, and — predictably — it was an utter failure”.
Hey, it could be worse. You could be a Millennial.
If you graph average worker productivity in the US, the line goes upward over time. If you graph wages for any particular type of job, adjusted for inflation, in the U.S., the line goes downward over time. In other words: the Boomers were paid the best for the least amount of work, every generation since then has been paid worse and had to work harder, and the Millennials are at the bottom of the heap.
Gen X got a raw deal because of the Boomers, no question, but you haven’t done much to stop later generations from getting the same (or worse) raw deals. (Admittedly, the Boomers and the self-named “Greatest Generation” have been blocking anyone from trying to improve things for decades.)
Gwynnyd, #11:
The effects of alcohol have been studied for a long time. Even when it isn’t being abused, it is a major public health issue. We also know a thing or two about human development, biologically and socially. Put the two together, and you have your non-ridiculous reasons. All of the things you cite are entirely irrelevant, which really does make it some ridiculous bullshit.
Don’t be absurd. Young people are not being “condemned” when they can’t legally buy/use alcohol in public. They’re being protected, because it’s in their own interests (whether they understand that or not) to restrict their access to alcohol, to reduce their risk of causing harm to themselves or others in any number of ways. We ought to have a culture where we are responsible for each other and take care of each other. It’s a group effort. It’s not a matter of individuals (teenagers or otherwise) making their own decisions, while the rest of us take a laissez faire approach and assert that “they should be responsible.” Or after the damage is done, we tell ourselves “they should’ve been responsible,” as if we didn’t know better, as we couldn’t have done anything, as if we are not responsible for the environment they find themselves in.
@8, chigau & @17, The Mellow Monkey
I was originally grouped with the Gen Xers, then I was Gen Y, at some point I think they toyed with “The Lost Generation” (even though that was already used for the generation who came of age during the First World War) now I understand I’m technically a Millennial. Personally, I think the Lost Generation is more apt for people born between 1980 and 1990, because we’re not Gen X and we’re not really who they’re talking about when they talk about Millennials (at least most of the time). Although, most people who talk about “Millennials” often seem to be actually talking about the older members of the (currently named) Generation Z, who are the generation following the Millennials, so who knows?
I tend to think that it is rather unfair and arbitrary to blame or praise entire generations as if everyone born in the same years acts in the same way, or has the same kind of life experiences.
Having said that, I also think there is often a lack of understanding and empathy between people of different ages, with all too many people ready to dismiss those of other generations as “spoiled, whiny kids” or “clueless old farts”. The divides between different ages have only gotten higher over the last few generations, as the pace of change in technology and society has accelerated.
Fortunately, some people stop to think beyond stereotypes. My own father, a baby boomer, once told me that he felt bad for people my age (gen X) because in his generation people could be confident that if they got a high school education and worked reasonably hard they would do at least as well financially as their parents, and if they got a college education and worked reasonably hard they would almost certainly do better. My generation, he said, couldn’t be nearly as confident of getting ahead. That comment was made almost 20 years ago, and it strikes me as prophetic now. The baby boom might have been the high-water mark for expanding prosperity and confidence in the “American Dream”.
The effects of war, debt, and unhealthy relationships are also well studied. Getting my phone to highlight is like pulling teeth but the same developmental factors apply. Why single alcohol out?
@22, Azkyroth
I’m guessing because alcohol is a relatively easy one to tackle, and there’s not a whole lot of pushback on the issue (while there are big pushbacks on things like debt and war, and those things also tend to be more complicated issues in general).
In what sense was it singled out?
Gwynnyd
I agree. If you’re old enough to die for your country, you damn well ought to be able to have a drink.
By an odd confluence of circumstances worthy of a Douglas Adams story, I was, for 9 days, both too old to register for the draft and too young to drink.
@Consciousness razor #19
me – It’s far easier to condemn the young than to promote a culture that expects responsible driving and responsible drinking.
cr – Don’t be absurd. Young people are not being “condemned” when they can’t legally buy/use alcohol in public. They’re being protected, because it’s in their own interests (whether they understand that or not) to restrict their access to alcohol,
me – What the heck kind of nonsense argument is that? You are stating that it’s perfectly fine for some classes of legally adult people to be “protected” from making their own decisions *for their own good*. Just who *else* falls under that category of ‘research shows this class of otherwise legally adult people can’t really handle adulthood and they need to be protected for their own good’? Women? Minorities? LGBTQ? Hey, we know better than they do themselves – we can cite *research* – what is best for them. If research shows that people at age 18 can’t make good decisions, perhaps that ought to be acknowledged by not letting them vote, sign contracts, drive at all, be allowed in the armed services, marry, raise children, have credit, or do anything else allowed to other legal adults that they can now do. What about those silly lady brains? There are a lot of people who think women should *never* be acknowledged as fully adult and be protected all their lives “for their own good”. I’m sure there’s a lot of research that can be cited to show that if someone looks hard enough.
If you agree that some class of people can be a legal adult in all ways … except this one way, there is no decent argument for not letting them have that one way, too.