The general decline in standards today

[V.C. Brunswick]

Great. They screw up and leave us to clean it up........ I will do my best to clean up the mess an no leave i to my children but I am just one person and out here I am largely outnumbered by the children of the WWII generation pulling the other way with their entitlement mentalites.

A mess that will take at least another century to clean up.

 

[jamespowers]

A mess that will take at least another century to clean up.

So no matter what I do, my children will still have to fix the mess. :doh:

 

[nick123]

If the returning WWII vets, some who went through absolute peril, started the "decline" with their parenting mentality that was certainly based with good intentions, I just can't bring myself to fault them. Their parenting model might have been the catalyst, but it just doesn't sit right with me to criticize them, when they surely didn't intend to throw society into a downward spiral, and instead wanted to give their children everything they could, out of love.

That's just my two cents, not trying to stir anything up.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

So no matter what I do, my children will still have to fix the mess. :doh:

The Baby Boomer generation is the social equivalent of the nasty, persistent rootkit virus that hides in the system resisting all attempts to uninstall.

 

[jamespowers]

If the returning WWII vets, some who went through absolute peril, started the "decline" with their parenting mentality that was certainly based with good intentions, I just can't bring myself to fault them. Their parenting model might have been the catalyst, but it just doesn't sit right with me to criticize them, when they surely didn't intend to throw society into a downward spiral, and instead wanted to give their children everything they could, out of love.

That's just my two cents, not trying to stir anything up.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Like they were the only generation to survive that. The WWI generation survived worse with being stuck in trenches with awful sanitation and death. The same with Civil War veterans etc, etc. All generations give something for their country. Some just more than others. It is just lately that some generations give a lot less.

 

[jamespowers]

The Baby Boomer generation is the social equivalent of the nasty, persistent rootkit virus that hides in the system resisting all attempts to uninstall.

Oh boy are they! They blew through their youths not saving a dime. They had children from three different wives/girlfriends. Now they want respect and free everything as they get older. :rofl: Yeah Right!

 

[nick123]

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Like they were the only generation to survive that. The WWI generation survived worse with being stuck in trenches with awful sanitation and death. The same with Civil War veterans etc, etc. All generations give something for their country. Some just more than others. It is just lately that some generations give a lot less.

I knew this was going to go there! Fair point. I'll end by saying the criticism doesn't sit well with me, but that's me and myself only.

 

[LizzieMaine]

As far as suffering generations go, I think something ought to be said for the generation *between* WW1 and WW2. These were the people who were born in the oughts and early teens, grew up in the twenties, and reach adulthood at the very moment the Depression was nearing its absolute nadir. Everything they had hoped for as children, everything they were promised by their parents, was snatched away in an instant leaving them wondering, exactly, what the point of it all was supposed to be. Sounds familiar?

But they didn't sit in coffee houses composing bad music like their great-grandchildren, they actually stood together and did something about it -- they were the generation at the forefront of the labor revolution of the thirties, which for the first time gave working people a real sense of hope for their future, and they achieved astonishing things in the arts, the sciences, politics, whatever you want to name, and it was their children, born from the mid-thirties into the early forties, who were in reality responsible for many of the accomplisments later apprpriated by the boomers. Let's give credit where credit is due.

 

[jamespowers]

As far as suffering generations go, I think something ought to be said for the generation *between* WW1 and WW2. These were the people who were born in the oughts and early teens, grew up in the twenties, and reach adulthood at the very moment the Depression was nearing its absolute nadir. Everything they had hoped for as children, everything they were promised by their parents, was snatched away in an instant leaving them wondering, exactly, what the point of it all was supposed to be. Sounds familiar?

But they didn't sit in coffee houses composing bad music like their great-grandchildren, they actually stood together and did something about it -- they were the generation at the forefront of the labor revolution of the thirties, which for the first time gave working people a real sense of hope for their future, and they achieved astonishing things in the arts, the sciences, politics, whatever you want to name, and it was their children, born from the mid-thirties into the early forties, who were in reality responsible for many of the accomplisments later apprpriated by the boomers. Let's give credit where credit is due.

That describes my parents and grandparents and where they came from. Those were the people who saved us from being even WORSE off today.

 

[Stearmen]

They were not all that way or how would you explain the hippies----the children of that era??

To much discipline and conformity = rebellion. It's been written about for almost 50 years now!

 

[Stearmen]

I have to laugh at this conversation. From what I am reading, it is the generations after us Baby Boomers that are a nothing more then a bunch of whiners. It is all the fault of previous generations, not yours. You want a perfect world, because you were brought up getting a trophy for just showing up. Nothing was handed to me, or any of the friends I grew up with, with the exception of, the back of a hand. Try being winner not a whiner!

 

[LuvMyMan]

I have to laugh at this conversation. From what I am reading, it is the generations after us Baby Boomers that are a nothing more then a bunch of whiners. It is all the fault of previous generations, not yours. You want a perfect world, because you were brought up getting a trophy for just showing up. Nothing was handed to me, or any of the friends I grew up with, with the exception of, the back of a hand. Try being winner not a whiner!

I could say I agree with you and yes, I do have a lot of care and respect for all the loungers that post here...but you are right. If a person can slow down enough to look at what they do and what happens it all boils down to what you do and what you are. I think we all agree that nothing is perfect in life. Times stink today in general with some of the daily events that are so horrible, but those events are not under my control and for the most part do not get my endorsement...but I can only do as what my Husband calls, "wearing your own shirt"....if it is yours, wear it. Which means only the person looking back at you when you look in the mirror is responsible for your life and your choices you take. I am sure all adults know how to handle things when they need to be "adjusted" when it comes to the younger family members. I have no input on the younger person in line at the store that elects to allow his pants to be half down to the floor. If I have a run in with his parents, if I could know them, I would naturally ask them why they allow their child to be so flat out disrespectful and dressed so nasty....it is all a person can do. The doing it is all that matters. But no matter what a person does, as I have stated before, to not give respect where it is due and to not show care and consideration to others is something we should NEVER forget. One of the main parts of being able to share of ourselves and our lives here as loungers is that we all see something good and worth while along the way and seem to relish in sharing it with the rest of the crowd that hangs around here. In so many ways that may be not thought about much but you know it is the truth...the good in life is what I honestly think attracts all of us to be "here"....using that element as a group does make a difference.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I have to laugh at this conversation. From what I am reading, it is the generations after us Baby Boomers that are a nothing more then a bunch of whiners. It is all the fault of previous generations, not yours. You want a perfect world, because you were brought up getting a trophy for just showing up. Nothing was handed to me, or any of the friends I grew up with, with the exception of, the back of a hand. Try being winner not a whiner!

Huh? Are we reading the same conversation? The most widely-discussed development in parenting from the late forties into the mid-sixties were the theories of Dr. Benjamin Spock -- who advocated exactly the opposite of the "shut up and do what I tell you" form of parenting that had been popular up until then. Not every postwar parent was a disciple of Spock -- but enough of the young WW2 generation parents followed -- or misinterpreted -- his teachings that the pros and cons of "permissive parenting" was being widely discussed in the women's magazaines by the mid-fifites. Spock's following was especially strong in suburbia, but by the end of the fifties his influence was just about everywhere you looked. His book, in various editions, sold over 16 million copies between 1946 and 1965.

Spock was already defending himself against charges that his theories were "overpermissive" before the fifties were over, going so far as to revise later editions of his book to clarify points he believed were being misinterpreted by "permissive parents," and during the hippie days of the sixties it was being widely argued that out-of-control "Spock babies" were responsible for what was happening on campuses. This is a violent oversimplification, but it's what people in 1967-69 were saying, not that "these kids got treated rough by their parents and that's why they're acting up."

Most "hippies" of the sixties were the entitled children of white middle to upper-middle-class suburban families -- the sort of families who were the most avid followers of Spock's parenting theories during the late forites and fifties. While Spockism is certainly not the only factor, it can't be said that it wasn't *a* factor.

Note also that not all those radicalized kids were the children of Joe Briefcase and Sally Pearlstring from Levittown. Some of them were "red diaper" babies, the children of people who had fought in the labor wars of the thirties, and were raised with an acute awareness of the realities of class and economic oppression in America. These kids were college upperclassmen in the mid-sixties, and they were in the right place at the right time to take a stand, not for sex and drugs and rock-n-roll, but for the end of the war in Vietnam. They weren't hippies themselves, but the hippies certainly attached themselves to their efforts.

 

[rjb1]

I have to agree with Stearmen about the humor of this conversation. Having people who were not there, or likely weren't even born, telling what we Baby Boomers thought or did or were taught is somewhat humorous. (Except for the personal insults and sweeping negative generalizations, of course.)
I was living right in the peak of the Baby Boomer era and know what I saw and what we did. This is not proveable (at least not by me) but my perceptions of my and my friend's parents tended more toward Rosanne Barr than Dr. Spock. However, there were so many of us that you could make any descriptive statement at random and there would be some subset that would likely be that way - whatever it is. (Hippies??? Haven't seen one in years...)
As to being "coddled" (Dr. Spock, again), our parents (WWII-Generation) wanted our lives to be better than what they had experienced - and why wouldn't they? For the most part times were good and a lot us lived happily in those days.
However, it wasn't all "fun and games". If you weren't there, you don't know what it's like at eight years old to plot nuclear blast radii on a map and talk it over with your pals as to whether we would die immediately in a flash or be killed slowly by the fallout. Everyone likes to laugh about the "duck and cover" mentality now, but it was deadly serious business to us.
After that was over (mostly) we grew into Vietnam. (a long story)
What am I to do - believe my own eyes and experiences - or what you are telling me about what happened in those days?

 

[LizzieMaine]

I can't speak for anyone else, but what I'm telling you is what people at the height of the hippie era were saying about why the "country was going to hell."

And nobody needs to lecture me about "duck and cover." I grew up in the town which supplied all the jet fuel to Loring Air Force Base -- the Easternmost base toward Europe -- and we were well aware of Cold War paranoia even as little children. My "father," such as he was, served in the Air Force during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nuf' said.

As far as the WW2 generation goes, I had an uncle survived two weeks on a raft after his ship was sunk by a U-Boat, but he never wanted a big deal made about what he'd done. He did it because it was his job, not because he was some kind of noble savior of Freedom. I never even knew about it until I read it in his obituary, he was that dismissive of the experience. And he had no interest in coming home and moving to suburbia and buying a dishwasher and a patio. He lived in the same house after the war he'd lived in before the war, and had no interest in "the good life." The good life was the old neighborhood as far as he was concerned.

I'm not all that interested in what kids, themselves, felt as kids. Childhood memories don't tell us much about what adults were really thinking, or about what was going on in the world outside of childhood. I had a lot of fun as a child myself, but that doesn't mean the late sixties and early seventies weren't the absolute nadir of the postwar era. Because kids in 1953 were enjoying themselves in the backyard and Dad was a swell guy doesn't mean the country itself wasn't awash in cheap, manipulative marketing, shoddy consumerism, and vicious political paranoia -- all the seeds of the world we live in today.

I'm not interested in romanticizing the memory of *any* era, Golden or otherwise, and I'm not particularly sorry if that offends some people. The concept of "the Greatest Generation" was a marketing conceit, created in the '90s and promoted by the likes of Spielberg and Brokaw to make money off sentiment. The real world was a lot more complicated. What makes any generation, to my mind, "great" is its willingness to acknowledge its failings.

In the Era itself, you'd be surprised how many people were willing to do that. Read Stephen Vincent Benet's poem "Nightmare at Noon," and the line that will stick with you is "As a nation, I think we try." No cheap jingoism, no American Exceptionalism, just "As a nation, I think we try." I think the WW2 Generation tried. Sometimes it succeeded, sometimes it failed, and sometimes its successes turned out, in the long run, to be failures. There's no shame in that, unless one refuses to acknowledge those failures. And the Boomers, as a generation, have been notable in their reluctance to acknowledge theirs. The history of the past thirty-five years or so is replete with them.

I say this as someone who is, technically, an under-the-wire Boomer -- but I repudiate any connection to that generation. I'm too old to be an Xer. So I have the advantage of being able to look at these generations dispassionately. It isn't personal. It's simply taking a look at the big historical picture.

 

[sheeplady]

However, it wasn't all "fun and games". If you weren't there, you don't know what it's like at eight years old to plot nuclear blast radii on a map and talk it over with your pals as to whether we would die immediately in a flash or be killed slowly by the fallout. Everyone likes to laugh about the "duck and cover" mentality now, but it was deadly serious business to us.
After that was over (mostly) we grew into Vietnam. (a long story)

Ok, let's play:

Generation X: You have no idea what it's like to hear about this "Gay Disease" on TV; watching people die on television- actors, politicians- and people you know. They say it's caused by gayness. The paramedics in some places won't treat you if they think you're gay because they don't know how it's spread. They say if you eat potato chips out of the same bag as someone with this sickness you get it.
Then they find out it's AIDS and then HIV, which remains a death sentence for nearly two decades. And you have to live through the fear- what happens if your Mother or Father is positive because a blood transfusion before 1984? What happens if your partner is positive?

The Millennials: You are going off the college or just on the job market. The housing crisis happens. Your father loses his job the same time your parents find out that their house has balloon payments; and you need to live off your mother's wage in the pink collared industry. You can't find work; you can't pay for school. You eventually find work part-time at minimum wage. Your grandparents find their retirement 401K is shot and need to go back to work. You wonder will you ever be able to afford to move out of your parents home, get married, or have children? You are the first person in two generations to doubt if you will ever be able to buy their own home.


All generations have tough things happen to them. In most cases, like the example of "duck and cover" it's the results of the mistakes of the generation before. The issue is that each of our generations tends to leave a bucketload of **** for the following generations to clean up. And every generation once it's spilled runs back and starts screaming, "I'm not cleaning up that ****! Look at the mess I inherited! Don't expect me to clean up my mess! It's not my fault I dropped that bucket on the next generation! Look at what happened to me! This place was already a mess! You clean it up!"

So the next generation learns, "We don't clean up after ourselves. We don't take responsibility."

I'm a member of Generation X. I can tell you exactly the flaws of my generation, I don't pretend that we don't have a bucketload that we haven't dumped on everybody.

 

[jamespowers]

To much discipline and conformity = rebellion. It's been written about for almost 50 years now!

Riiiiggghhhttt. And it has been wrong for fifty years as we know that discipline was far more strict during the Civil War Era. I didn’t see the rebellion after that or before.
It was due to not ENOUGH discipline not too much. Lol lol

 

[jamespowers]

I can't speak for anyone else, but what I'm telling you is what people at the height of the hippie era were saying about why the "country was going to hell."

And nobody needs to lecture me about "duck and cover." I grew up in the town which supplied all the jet fuel to Loring Air Force Base -- the Easternmost base toward Europe -- and we were well aware of Cold War paranoia even as little children. My "father," such as he was, served in the Air Force during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nuf' said.

As far as the WW2 generation goes, I had an uncle survived two weeks on a raft after his ship was sunk by a U-Boat, but he never wanted a big deal made about what he'd done. He did it because it was his job, not because he was some kind of noble savior of Freedom. I never even knew about it until I read it in his obituary, he was that dismissive of the experience. And he had no interest in coming home and moving to suburbia and buying a dishwasher and a patio. He lived in the same house after the war he'd lived in before the war, and had no interest in "the good life." The good life was the old neighborhood as far as he was concerned.

I'm not all that interested in what kids, themselves, felt as kids. Childhood memories don't tell us much about what adults were really thinking, or about what was going on in the world outside of childhood. I had a lot of fun as a child myself, but that doesn't mean the late sixties and early seventies weren't the absolute nadir of the postwar era. Because kids in 1953 were enjoying themselves in the backyard and Dad was a swell guy doesn't mean the country itself wasn't awash in cheap, manipulative marketing, shoddy consumerism, and vicious political paranoia -- all the seeds of the world we live in today.

I'm not interested in romanticizing the memory of *any* era, Golden or otherwise, and I'm not particularly sorry if that offends some people. The concept of "the Greatest Generation" was a marketing conceit, created in the '90s and promoted by the likes of Spielberg and Brokaw to make money off sentiment. The real world was a lot more complicated. What makes any generation, to my mind, "great" is its willingness to acknowledge its failings.

In the Era itself, you'd be surprised how many people were willing to do that. Read Stephen Vincent Benet's poem "Nightmare at Noon," and the line that will stick with you is "As a nation, I think we try." No cheap jingoism, no American Exceptionalism, just "As a nation, I think we try." I think the WW2 Generation tried. Sometimes it succeeded, sometimes it failed, and sometimes its successes turned out, in the long run, to be failures. There's no shame in that, unless one refuses to acknowledge those failures. And the Boomers, as a generation, have been notable in their reluctance to acknowledge theirs.

I say this as someone who is, technically, an under-the-wire Boomer -- but I repudiate any connection to that generation. I'm too old to be an Xer. So I have the advantage of being able to look at these generations dispassionately. It isn't personal. It's simply taking a look at the big historical picture.

Exactly! This is exactly what I was writing about and how it TRULY happened. I am about the same age as you and I don’t want to belong to any of those “groups” they put people in.
Denial is truly the problem that many people have. They accuse us of excuse making but they were the ones making the excuses for generations now. Hippies were the children of the WWII generation that is a fact of chronology. Period. Dr. Spock or permissive parent or whatever you call it, the results are the same.
Individual anecdotes are fine but they do not represent the trend. I never got anything I didn’t earn either from my parents. Discipline was tight and tough from a former Marine. However, that was not what was going on around me with my friends at school. Permissive parents were letting my classmates run roughshod over them. That is my anecdotes of the same time. Then again, I am located in the nexus of the Hippie movement so I probably understand it better than someone who never saw or currently does see hippies. I still see them all the time……:doh:

 

[jamespowers]

Ok, let's play:

Generation X: You have no idea what it's like to hear about this "Gay Disease" on TV; watching people die on television- actors, politicians- and people you know. They say it's caused by gayness. The paramedics in some places won't treat you if they think you're gay because they don't know how it's spread. They say if you eat potato chips out of the same bag as someone with this sickness you get it.
Then they find out it's AIDS and then HIV, which remains a death sentence for nearly two decades. And you have to live through the fear- what happens if your Mother or Father is positive because a blood transfusion before 1984? What happens if your partner is positive?

The Millennials: You are going off the college or just on the job market. The housing crisis happens. Your father loses his job the same time your parents find out that their house has balloon payments; and you need to live off your mother's wage in the pink collared industry. You can't find work; you can't pay for school. You eventually find work part-time at minimum wage. Your grandparents find their retirement 401K is shot and need to go back to work. You wonder will you ever be able to afford to move out of your parents home, get married, or have children? You are the first person in two generations to doubt if you will ever be able to buy their own home.


All generations have tough things happen to them. In most cases, like the example of "duck and cover" it's the results of the mistakes of the generation before. The issue is that each of our generations tends to leave a bucketload of **** for the following generations to clean up. And every generation once it's spilled runs back and starts screaming, "I'm not cleaning up that ****! Look at the mess I inherited! Don't expect me to clean up my mess! It's not my fault I dropped that bucket on the next generation! Look at what happened to me! This place was already a mess! You clean it up!"

So the next generation learns, "We don't clean up after ourselves. We don't take responsibility."

I'm a member of Generation X. I can tell you exactly the flaws of my generation, I don't pretend that we don't have a bucketload that we haven't dumped on everybody.

In other words, every generation has had and is going to have some sort of drama dumped on them. It is what they do with it that counts.

 

[LizzieMaine]

In any generation there are always exceptions to the general mood of the times. There were many thousands of able-bodied men between 1940 and 1945 who went to prison for draft evasion. There were Irish-American neighborhoods during the prewar years where the swastika flag was openly flown as a sign of contempt toward England. Counterfeiting of ration stamps was an epidemic thruout the war. Hoarders of rationed commodities were found in every town. There were plenty of members of the "Greatest Generation" who were good-for-nothing, no-account bums, whether or not they served in uniform.

In the U Auto Buy Now Fifties, when everyone Loved Lucy and Liked Ike, there were plenty of people who agreed with Jean Shepherd in his attacks on the "creeping meatballism" of postwar culture. Those kids who were snickering at "Mad" magazine knew they were being lied to and manipulated by the Boys From Marketing, and many of their parents, looking up from their Vance Packard books, realized the same thing.

In the sixties, most people were neither hippies nor warhawks. By 1967 nearly half of all Americans opposed the war in Vietnam, but the majority of these didn't grow their hair and smoke dope. Tough old two-time war hero Ted Williams himself spoke out against the draft and then spit on the floor and dared anyone to challenge him on it. But most people didn't even go that far. They simply stood by waiting to see what would happen.

In the Seventies, most people didn't think Nixon was a crook, until he turned out to be one.

And on and on. There are *always* exceptions in every generation. But that doesn't mean you can't look at an era and sense the general mood of the period, even if that mood was generated by a minority of the overall population. It's the people who make the most noise who get the most noticed.