Escapism & the Boomer Generation
- NoBull_Lady
- 2 days ago
- 10 min read
Updated: 3 hours ago
There were 3 political commentators who pulled the wool over my eyes once.They were Steve Bannon,Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson. I'm not sure they weren't fake MAGA to begin with or if they turned on MAGA eventually. Does it matter it?
All 3 turned out to be anti semites; or they always were and didn't reveal their true selves until recently. They turned out to be anti Trump. They're not the only ones but they are definitely prominent in my mind.They're anti American. Prove me wrong.
I've learned to be cautious now. I have to be clear though and make a distinction between Never Trumpers,people who turned on Trump and people who slowly came to support him (notably JD Vance and Mark Levin). They were NOT Never Trumpers. Some people believe they were; i beg to differ.They were skeptical about Donald Trump as President.They thought he would govern as a liberal but they were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. They were pleasantly surprised. I'll write more about that later.
Background
My parents were lifelong Democrats. They voted Democrat. They went to most of the local fundraisers and picnics. Kennedy was our President. Times were good. People had work. People were building new homes. Those Republicans were for the rich and privileged. The Democrats were for the working class and poor. Republicans were racist. Democrats were civil rights champions. Some things never change. We were told this and believed it.
The middle class was growing. We were a middle class family. Dad was a WWII vet. Mom was a homemaker.
We weren't rich by any means but we had food on the table, clothes on our backs and our own bedrooms in the house that dad built. We were the first among our relatives to own a tv. Everyone came over to watch the few channels it carried. It was black and white if you can picture it. We had a large extended family; the everyone who came were those relatives.
Mom and dad had a station wagon that took
us out for many Sunday drives or we'd go to the drive in on a Friday night. I had a transistor radio and i tuned in to NY for Cousin Brucie as the Beatles were landing.
The folks didn't know but i stayed up most of the night listening to his blow by blow narrative. I saw their 1st appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show;.
These were our luxuries,culture and technology of the time.We had one threat-the nuclear bomb
Boomers know the drill we did in grade school.
It could have been a reality during the Cuban Missle Crisis but the strange part is nobody i knew seemed particularly worried about it. My parents never said a word. The people in our neighborhood weren't making a big deal of it either. Mom was more concerned about acid rain(whatever that was)and didn't want us playing in the rain.I thought it was silly and ignored her.
We were supposed to be heading for an ice age. I got a kick out of speculating what it would be like, all based on imagination; forget science. There was a Time magazine cover about the coming Ice Age. It never came.
Our life was idyllic. The Kennedy administration was known as Camelot. Our parents wanted to give us everything they didn't have.The boomers are usually characterized as being rebellious and anti authority.
I can tell you from experience that we were expected to do our homework. earn an allowance, respect our elders and go to church on Sundays. I'd gotten my share of spankings.
Our teachers, police and parents were to be looked up to and obeyed.You didn't question authority. Legalized abortion and gay marriage? They weren't controversial because they didn't exist. Not yet anyway.
Shattered
The vehicle President JFK and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy were riding in through the streets of Dallas Texas on Nov 22,1963. it is a far cry from the vehicle our Presidents ride in today.
Our class in the Catholic grade school came to a halt as we were told the news that Pres Kennedy had been shot and stopped to pray.
JFK was only the first. The next to be assassinated were his brother Robert (fondly known as Bobby), Rev Martin Luther King Jr and Malcom X.
Our idyllic world was shattered but it doesn't end there.
"You don't need a WEATHERMAN to know which way the wind blows" sang Bob Dylan
There was a group on the campuses known as the SDS or Students for a Democratic Society.
+Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was the largest and most influential student activist organization in the United States during the 1960s, serving as the principal expression of the New Left movement. Founded in 1960 as the youth wing of the League for Industrial Democracy, SDS gained national prominence after adopting the Port Huron Statement in 1962—a radical manifesto advocating for participatory democracy, social justice, and opposition to authoritarianism and inequality.
Initially focused on civil rights, economic justice, and student autonomy, SDS rapidly expanded in response to the escalation of the Vietnam War. By 1968, it claimed 50,000 members and hundreds of campus chapters, organizing large-scale protests, teach-ins, and the first major antiwar march in Washington, D.C., in 1965. The group also launched the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) to build an “interracial movement of the poor” in urban communities.
SDS was a non violent activist group. Out of the SDS we got the Weather Underground or Weatherman. They shared an ideology but that's where it ended;their tactics separated them. The Weather Underground wanted to achieve the goals through violence.
The leader was William Ayers along with his wife Bernadine Dorn. They ended up being fugitives of the FBI for various criminal activities including bombings that killed some of their own members. Martin Luther King adopted the tactics (ie civil disoedience)of Ghandi to achieve Ciivil Rights; the Black Panthers, like the Weather Underground, adopted violent tactics to achieve Civil Rights.
The National Guard shot 4 students at Kent State University in Ohio.
I remember being horrified by the shooting.They were young like us & the Guard was a symbol of authority.
We watched the Viet Nam war broadcast in the news every night and the protests in the street against it.
I was a pacifist. Did i know what pacifism is? You opposed ALL wars.Period. That was all i knew.
On a personal level I was worried that my brother would be drafted. He could have been.
I was the poster child for young and dumb.
Remember the kid who did what he/she was told and didn't question anything? We morphed into the generation that questioned everything then basically threw it all out the window You would have thought we would find some values and traditions that were worth holding onto.Nope.
When your slogan is don't trust anyone over 30 there is a problem. It is a lack of introspection. Simple: generally speaking everyone reaches that milestone. We didn't stop to think that one day we would be 30.
I loved the clothes,hair,music,creativity and free spiritedness(is there such a word?)then. I wouldn't characterize it as a peaceful time or a violent time. It was a turbulent time.
There was some good, some bad, some ugly. The highest point was the Civil Rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. This changed our country forever for the good.
The Vietnam War ended, the draft ended, discrimination ended.All good. There were 50 million young people heading for Woodstock to revel in 3 days of peace,love and music.The music was good, the free thinking was good, the spirit we had was good. The ingratitude was not. The mistaking licentiousness for liberty was not. The total rejection of tried and true values was not. Our lives were too soft. We could afford to be stupid.
Better Dead than Red
If you're a boomer you probably vividly remember the Soviet leader Krushev pounding his shoe on the table at the UN. i remember the communist Soviet Union promising to bury us; the U.S. and the West. We were taught in our Catholic grade school that communsm was godless and evil. True.I knew that Hitler, Mussolini and the Nazi's were fascist. My dad fought against them in WII.
I didn't think i'd live to see the day that a communist would become an elected official in our country. In the United States of America. i am shocked and disappointed. I went to Catholic grade school (1-8)and it was impressed on us the evils of communism. the Soviet Union was our mortal enemy. Communism was godless and anti human rights. We were taught about the evils of the Nazi regime and their leader Hitler. It was real to us because most of our fathers were called off to war against Hitler. We were told about the evils of anti Semitism. I read the Diary of Anne Frank and was impressed forever. We learned about the Crusades from a Catholic perspective. They were justified in protecting the Holy Land from the Muslim invasion.
This was the foundation of my own world view as an adult so it seemed to me the Democrat party was on the wrong side of history.
I'm also shocked and disappointed by people in the public eye spewing anti Semitic hateful nonsense. What's the matter with these people?
If they think they're MAGA they ARE nuts. They're posers. I don't like that some genuinely MAGA people have become deceived. Bannon, Carlson and Owens are despicable. i thought they were good people; they're antisemitic and should know better. Where does this hatred of the Jews come from? Why are people letting the lslamists have any influence over them?
I am totally disillusioned by the Democrat party at this point. It all began for me with them treating abortion like their religious sacrament; they protected it at all costs. They tried to destroy Clarance Thomas when he was nominated for the Supreme Court because he was pro life . They would try to destroy anyone who got in their way.
They made sure same sex marriage was legalized. Something i will never accept. What they tried to do to President Trump sealed the deal for me forever.
This was not how i saw the Democrat party growing up.
Liberalism just didn't do it for me anymore.
Maybe in that crazy period from 1964-1970 it did. On the other hand my understanding of the evil of communism was so ingrained in me I could see it infecting the Democrat party and it's acceptance into leftist ideology.
Remembering Our Parents background
My generation was a mixed bag. We had it too good growing up.
We were right in questioning the status quo. We were wrong for rejecting values we should have hung onto; it was a wild pursuit in hedonism. We had great music and could be known for our creativity. Our pursuit of Utopia was nonsense but youth is idealistic and dumb at the same time. We were useful idiots for someone. Our parents did not have a cushy life. The way they grew up got them prepared for the tough world they would have to face What tough world? the Great Depression and World War II. While we've become known as boomers, they became known as the greatest generation. They were. They wanted us to have a better life than they did (think about the conveniences we have and they didn't) We did. Wouldn't you know we rejected much of what they gave us. Let's be honest here. We had some goofy ideas
They had to work hard, sacrifice, play by the rules and survive.
They saved themselves for marriage and rarely got divorced. There was no welfare, food stamps or credit cards to help them. If you wanted anything you had to postpone and save for it.There was no instant gratification. Good things came to those who waited.
Their world was a whole different world than the one we grew up in.
Today
The current generation is trying to blame the boomers for their own ills. Suggestions:
1. think for yourselves
take responsibilty for your own decisions
Some of the boomers are stupid. They can't let go of the liberal ideology they grew up with. Their utopian dream makes them easy prey for Marxism.
I can't believe the boomers who once questioned everything are so gullible that they fall for all the media lies. The biggest flaw of the boomer generation was not their liberal ideolog, their utopian vision of the future or their relentless pursuit of pleasure(hedonism); it was their escapism. Everything about that generation boiled down to escapism; for the majority. Unfortunately escapism infected the whole culture. A lot of the radicals went into acedemia, poltics, media particularly journalism Another words the whole of our culture
Escapism
"Turn on, Tune In, Drop Out" Escapism at its finest. Think i remember that quote as being from the mouth of Timothy Leary. Look him up.He's in the video of San Francisco; briefly but he's there.
Still the next generation can't blame all their ills on the previous generation. At some point, no matter which generation it is, people have to take responsibility for their own decisions. We boomers need to admit our time was a mixed bag of good, bad and ugly. We can't pretend it was all good. We blamed our ills on the previous generation when a lot of them were self inflicted or imagined. That's not to say we weren't handed some problems.
The greatest generation earned their title. We earned ours by the sheer numbers. There were a lot of us.Remember by the time we got to Woodstock we were half a million strong. There they were indulging in escapismThis may be where me and the boomers part company.
In the opening i noted that legalized abortion and gay marriage didn't exist. They were the 2 issues that became a deal breaker for me and i could no longer BE a liberal Democrat.I was convinced abortion was about women's rights at first. I didn't approve of same sex marriage at all. I would come to believe that abortion was wrong and should never have been legalized. This didn't happen over night but i did open my eyes eventually and I quit voting Democrat*. In fact i voted for Pres Trump 3x and have been solid MAGA from the day i decided to vote for him. I actually started to take a realistic view of my own generation. Once you start to see the lies we're being fed you can't unsee them. You have to actually SEE them first.
*Please stop calling it the Democratic party. It's Democrat. PERIOD.
The Media Doesn't Lie(when have they told the truth)?
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