Reply #15: the boomers were also the generation sent to Vietnam [View All]

and came back to be hated and spit on, remember?

I'm an early boomer -- 1948 -- and I personally find the OP just about as bigoted and closed-minded as any racist crap anywhere else.

Our parents' generation -- mine were born in 26 and 29, hubby's in 22 and 26 -- grew up during the Depression. Some of them had really hard times. Just as they were getting back on their feet economically, they got hit with WW2. My dad and my father in law served; they were in their 20s and had their whole lives ahead of them, but they went. And they came back members of "the greatest generation." They had GI benefits out the wazoo, enough to make the 50s a time of material prosperity for folks who never had it so good before. Plus the benefits of a booming consumer economy.

So they had dreams for their kids, to have it better than the Depression. And those kids, like me and hubby (1946) grew up in a country that was struggling to come to terms with segregation and gender discrimination and fears of nuclear annihilation and then a sucky, sucky war that seemed to be eating us alive with no reason.

We weren't in power in the 60s. We did what we could. A lot of us "dropped out" in the 70s, went counter-culture and stayed there. And some of us never did go over to the left side of the aisle. There were a lot of boooooshes and john o'neills and other chickenhawks even back then, and they had the backing from then onward of the folks in power, the daddy booooshes and the whole neocon machine that was building and building and building under the radar.

The boomers didn't operate in secret. We were out there, never hiding, never making excuses. And now you're blaming us for what was put in motion at least as early as 1964, when not even my husband was old enough to vote? (His dad, an army air corps pilot, came home to Indiana on Christmas Eve, 1945; hubby was born 11 October 1946. You do the math.) Much of the rightwing agenda was in place when Joe McCarthy hald center stage; that wasn't our doing.

Methinks that people who want to paint any one group as "responsible" for what happens are generally looking for easy answers. Why not blame the Gen Xers who didn't vote in 2000? We know the younger voters got out in 2004, but they weren't there in 2000. Maybe we should blame them.

Clinton was a boomer -- shall we blame him? Or Hillary, who was probably at some of the same conference football games I was at in high school?

Our parents grew up in the aftermath of WW1, during the great Depression, and then the holocaust (lower case) of WW2, the atomic bomb, Korea. We got a reprieve, economically, in the 50s, but we then got sent to Vietnam for ten long bloody confusing years. We got the heart ripped out of us. We came back to be called baby killers. We came addicted to drugs and plagued by nightmares. Only when it was too late for a lot of us did someone say hey, these folks were only doing what their country told them to do. It wasn't their fault. Not all of them, anyway.

In spite of that, a lot of us continued to fight -- against Reagan and the crooks of Iran-contra, only to see the steady rise of the right. It sucked in our parents' generation and it sucked in some of us, and the kids coming up behind us didn't seem to care. They were the Alex P. Keatons of the world -- and they weren't boomers. They had easy college money and their boomer parents' expectations. Those born in 1970 didn't go to war, not as a generation. The army put on fancy fireworks shows in Baghdad, and mostly no one died. Abortion was available and the pill was practically free, and if you used some common sense, you could pretty much avoid the big scare, which was AIDS. Life was pretty good if you were born in 1970 and coming of age in the 80s and 90s. There weren't any wars.

There are a lot of us boomers still out there, still fighting, and the way to keep us in the fight when we should be looking forward to our "golden years" is not to bash us for letting *you* down.

And why didn't you follow when we were trying to lead? Huh?


Tansy Gold

(edited to add to rant)