General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: This, my friends, is far too typical for my generation. [View all]Skidmore
(37,364 posts)that Boomers are all snowbirds flitting carefree in search of warm weather. Laelth, we living in that "simply much worse" world with you and not on some other planet or plain of existence. It also makes the assumption that Boomers are all college educated, middle class or above people. Boomers are also being characterized as negligent in the areas of social, civil, and economic justice.
I think some of the problem is that generational memory has not been passed. Children suddenly became delicate vessels not expected to understand the relationship of money to work or goods until they actually had to do it. My son used to complain about how much time that I (a single parent) spent at work while he held expectations for the expensive designers crap that got sold as essential during the 1980s. He learned long division by being asked to calculate the number of hours I would have to work to supply his wants over what I needed to work to supply our needs.
Many of us not only raised your parents or you, but have cared for our parents and some are now raising their grandchildren. We no longer retire in large numbers. We continue to work well into our seventies and beyond. Now if you are sitting behind a desk, you may be able to sustain working into your 70s or 80s. However, I know plenty people in those age groups who are still working in jobs that require physical labor and in spite of having the health problems that come with aging. We do not live forever but we do need to sustain ourselves and those we love while we can. Because of this economy and the way corporations have stripped rights from the workers, we have been forced to compete with the next two generations for jobs at a time when normally the next generations could have stepped into the breach left by the retiring one.
As far as how hard people work, unless you are born with a silver spoon in your mouth and wore trust fund documents for diapers, you have worked hard--in every generation. The nature of work has changed with technology, but our grand capitalist system has never stopped trying to wring every last bit of output from workers for the least amount of investment throughout our history. What also happened is that workers stopped fighting for their rights. That was a huge lapse. The Harlan County coal miner strikes took place when I was 18. There were large numbers of steelworker and autoworker strikes back in the day too. Whole industries would shut down while labor and management hammered out new contracts. And the effects of those strikes rippled through the economy as affiliated businesses felt the effects. Then this just ceased as the 1980s roared by and people absorbed the message that they too could live the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Reagan broke the back of the unions and Clinton nailed them into a coffin with NAFTA, something I will ever hold him in contempt for.
I am heartened when I see labor in the fast food restaurants take on companies. People are learning how to do this again. American labor will benefit more if the college educated, white collar worker join the service workers in their strikes. If the whole damned workforce just sat down and said "no", it would make a difference quickly. I have little respect for today's white collar worker because they do not seem to understand that their workplaces are the sweatshops of the electronic age. As willing as they are to ignore the shipping of manufacturing jobs to other lands for their workers to be exploited in jobs that America's best would refuse to do, they are equally unwilling to understand that standing up for themselves in the workplace would benefit all workers.
No, it's easy to blame and point fingers, but this is the world we live in and it is one that is vastly different on all fronts than the one I grew up in. I don't think that it is any harder but that the times are just different. Americans have been trained to sell their souls for material gain. I don't see that as having changed. Instead of engaging in a blame game, we need to be pushing back on the forces that shape the pit we have all come to--some of them are Boomers and some are Millenials/Xers. Creating the dynamics for current economic problems has been a multigenerational work and is still in progress.