Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Boomers suck

Warning, there are some swears in here. My optimism is flagging today and I'm pissed.



I know, #notallboomers. My mom's not to bad. My dad either, though he's terribly apathetic.

So here's what I have to say to the rest of you. Now that you boomers have elected the Biggest Asshole you could find you're going straight for screwing over the generations behind you. Seriously? As if you haven't done enough.

You didn't want to pay taxes in the 2000's, so you eviscerated funding for education, research, and functional government. When it turns out those things are *important* and that we younger people can't pay for all of it all on our own you go off, blame us for being too lazy, and then elect another guy who promises a big tax cut for you will miraculously solve all the problems your children and grandchildren face.

Guess what assholes: IT. WON'T.

See, there's this massive intergenerational transfer of wealth that happened for you guys when your parents paid for you to go to school, and paid for a bunch of cool research that made your lives better and cleaned up the environment and crap, and gave you a reasonably well-functioning government for when your children (us) were growing up. Yes, I know this is a vast oversimplification and was really only true for white people, but bear with me.

Then you got old. We grew up and were no longer living with you. It was time to live large! As newly-fledged empty-nesters your first instinct was to ... quit paying taxes. Not find a nice cause to dedicate a few years to (you child of the '60's), not read a few good books and see some good movies. Nope. Stop paying taxes. No reason for you to keep paying into the system, since hey, you weren't going to get anything more out of it. At least, not until you retired, but then your (many fewer, thanks to birth control) children will be paying for you. 'Cause hey, you worked hard. You earned your retirement.

Oh, and then on the way to retirement, you hired a bunch of your boomer CEO friends into university president positions where they could extract as much money from the education system as possible, replicating their massive exploitative success from the private sector on the public sector. Yet another young to old intergenerational transfer of wealth that benefits you boomers.

Somewhere along the line scientists realized global warming was A Thing, but since it made you feel like we might be calling you a bad person for using fossil fuels you stuck your fingers in your ears and started yelling, "La, la la." Just to make sure we know you really mean the "la la la" part now that you've got The Asshole as president and More Assholes in congress you're going to knock down our technology that might let us enjoy the same standard of living as you without fossil fuels/sand castle of hope and piss all over it.

'Cause you're mature like that.

Fuck you boomers.

3 comments:

  1. Yup. I vacillate between angry/tired/nervous/motivated/angry a lot these past several days. I'm really interested to see how my "book club" class discussion goes on Friday. We're talking about Food Politics.

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  2. Yes. I am doing the same. For me it's like I fall back into my routine, glumly, almost get happy, and then remember, Oh Shit! That Asshole is president-elect. Grr.

    Does your group include anyone conservative? Are they likely to show up? I hope it's a good discussion and that you find some comfort in it.

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  3. I don't think there's anyone conservative, at least not that I've been able to tell from previous discussion. It was a decent conversation. The moderators did bring up multiple good measures that passed in various local elections - increases in minimum wage, paid sick leave, etc.

    I get frustrated because we never come up with anything concrete. Granted, we're all very new to this type of discussion and grad school. But when we talk solutions it tends to be "government needs to regulate more!" or "we shouldn't allow lobbying!". Very vague, and not terribly actionable things. Or things that don't take into account just how long it takes to accomplish anything federally (i.e. what it took to get action on trans fats). Which I pointed out, and we all left class rather down. Our professor works in this (and was actually in D.C. during the election) and is interested to see if regions get creative with how they handle SNAP potentially being cut. But otherwise seemed to think that we'll need to focus efforts on local food policy over federal for the foreseeable future. Also noted that in all their courses people of color have been much more reserved since the election.

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