On Boomers, and What Came Next
But BBs became less anti-capitalist over time (i.e., the wailing distress of associating capitalism and the West with social oppression) as practical realities set in, and they accumulated property, families and communities they had to safeguard, and so forth.
As my father lay dying, I considered the pathway through adult family housing, hospital, and memory care with hospice, and, having actually found him a place at the top-rated facility available at Medicaid rates, reflected on the point that not even Boomers deserve the Hell they have wrought.
Z perceives the realities that X struggled to grasp and cope with, and Millennials are thus far unable to reconcile. Leftists have been shouting about real wages, for instance, for generations, now, and somewhere between consumerism and declining financial prospects, the future can easily look bleak, with continuing decline suggesting increasing insecurity. Moreover, look at the Overton window: Actual livable wages are viewed as extreme, radical, or on good days the stuff of the leftward fringe. Human rights are viewed as an extreme and even radical proposition. Maybe the world isn't quite a sci-fi dystopia yet, but when our Overton window says that
not going there is the radical, extreme, or otherwise impolite discussion, Gen Z might have reason to believe things are bleak.
The thing about Boomers and practical reality is that they presumed a social contract that was never actually in effect. Even now, they cling to it. No decent person who shares the values we pretend in our society would design this way of dying. Boomers did not set out to create
this for themselves. But what were they trying to create?
Because it's not just this. It seems like they thought there was something to do, and if they just did their part, everything else would work out fine. And this has worked out, it seems, somewhat poorly.
A loose analogy is that many people who are very sensitive, even conspiracist, about the government this and that, have no problem trusting certain aspects of their lives to capitalists and corporations. How many of them really said, explicitly, that their privacy concerns are just about the government, and they're just fine with advertisers, political activists, and identity thieves being able to gather up their vital information from private-sector interests? They didn't. But they also didn't think about it much. Indeed, it was not any one generation, taking part in the Wednesday Putsch, that we could watch walk up and down the street via their perpetual font of metadata. It's just weird that they weren't really worried about spying, but, rather, one particular spy, as such, who could just turn around and get the information from all the other spies.
It's kind of like the Underpants Gnomes; there is a giant question mark in the schematic. It remains unclear, even now, just how Boomers expected everything would would work out fine.