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Memories of the 28th Century

Did Boomers Cause Present Situation

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It doesn’t do much good to blame persons or groups for social changes, and that is certainly true in the present political climate. There are plenty of reasons why the political and economic landscapes became what they are now, and it partly happened during a period when boomers dominated to political and economic worlds, but it started and most of the damage was done earlier, and some of the present situation is just negative aspects of good things. Even the neo-NAZI aspects of Trump’s political backing is a leftover from earlier times. We can blame him for bringing back a thoroughly discredited political position, but he was only bringing back ideas that fit from his childhood; the rest of us knew that fascism was evil no matter what you call it.

To blame any group is to ignore the fact that humans all think pretty much the same about most things. Even though we aren’t hunters and gatherers any more, the immediate availability of food and other necessities are foremost in the minds of most people. The lack of adequate food will make people do unpleasant things to obtain food. That desire to gain things extends well beyond food to all things, because anything might be useful in survival. But we can’t use that excuse, except in some special cases. What we are looking at now is an attempt to reverse the results of the Enlightenment and the wars that led to it.

There are people who think that they should be believed because they are the authorities, or so they think. A lot of people fought and died for the right to think as they wished, and we have honored them in practice since then, but now Trump and others want to condemn those brave people to oblivion. The free thinkers defeated the powers of religion and were so magnanimous that they did not destroy religion.

How do we tell people that throwing their opinions around as if they were actual facts is not acceptable? People seem to like to believe things, and I have no desire to destroy the illusions of people, but we have to make people stop trying to enforce their opinions, which puts me in a quandary, because this is my opinion that I would like others to accept, but you can be sure that I will not force anyone to believe as I do.

Trying to blame the boomers of the conditions of today would be a morass, but I would contend that we continued to extend the advances made by the Greatest Generation. Thirty years ago we were still in the Cold War, but things were improving, and the domestic conditions were considerably better here in the U.S.A. than they'd been a few decades earlier, except for the foolish closing of the mental hospitals, which had started in the early 70's and was mostly done in the 90's. But one of the reasons for that was that the patients' rights were being ignored.

On the other hand, there are people of the Baby Boom generation who have spent their careers working to reverse the advances of the Enlightenment. Trump, Devos, and others would allow religious principles to be taught as facts. We threw that out hundreds of years ago, and we don't want it back. Most people don't like to even think about the rights of people, but that was settled here in the U.S.A.

It is painful to watch as the U.S. Constitution is pointedly ignored by the president and his advisors. It would be better to go toward more equal rights for everyone, including elimination of tax exemptions for religious, educational, and etc. non-profit organizations. They are just service business organized so as to avoid taxes.

I suppose you could argue that Boomers were more willing to tolerate extremists, so NAZI's were ignored, so they grew in power and numbers of the points that they managed to get one of their kind elected president. But we Americans have always been fairly willing to tolerate extremists.

Then there is the logical argument: Everything is caused by what came before, so the Boomers by having been earlier than the present time had some connection to the causes of the present situation, but similarly, everything that the Boomers did was caused by earlier events over which the Boomers had no control, so we can’t blame them, can we.

This was written as a response to this article:

http://theconversation.com/blaming-t...-favours-46281

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