BOOMER BAR SETS HIGH STANDARDS

Who set the baby boomer bar for making a better world for our children?

Our parents, our grandparents, our teachers, and coaches?

If that’s your guess, it’s a good one.

But who set it so high; why did they do that to us?

I don’t think you’re reading this for a history review, but my college senior seminar was about the causes of WWI.

So let’s skip to the finish where you scan the National Archives for your great-Grandpa.

 

With my second grandpa stripe, history hits differently.

Maybe it’s just me noticing things in ways I never have to share them with the youths?

As a kid I remember listening to some old person tell family stories while they scooped ice cream to their captive audience.

The World War veterans came back in shock for different reasons:

WWI had the first machine guns and tanks and mass gas attacks that killed hundreds of thousands of kids before the old leaders used new tactics.

From The Imperial War Museum:

 

The opening months of the First World War caused profound shock due to the huge casualties caused by modern weapons. Losses on all fronts for the year 1914 topped five million, with a million men killed.

This was a scale of violence unknown in any previous war.

 

In my senior blogger view the veterans returned home in 1918 stunned by the new death machines.

The boys came home, got married, and produced a baby boom? Not so much.

WWII veterans, along with the rest of us, have been stunned by the death factories of the Holocaust.

They came home and we all know what happened next.

 

The Baby Boomer Band Of Brothers

Mike ‘Dirty Work’ Rowe took his shot at millennials.

Did it hit?

 

Mike Rowe works for the good, not the bad, and crashing on millennials is not good.

What is real, Mike, is doing a hard, dirty, job your whole life. That’s the definition of raising children in the modern world we share.

I can’t knock you for kids. Or no kids. If you keep your private life private, that’s good.

But if you’re a single man with no kids, why go out on a limb harping on our kids?

This is where most bloggers, most writers, most whackadoos, yes whackadoos, start glossing their own kids, parenting skills, and how much better they do it than others.

But boomerpdx isn’t that blog and I’m not that blogger.

I’m also not a ‘fuck that guy’ kind of blogger, but if I were?

 

We’ve got the right to choose, and
There ain’t no way we’ll lose it
This is our life, this is our song
We’ll fight the powers that be, just
Don’t pick on our destiny, ’cause
You don’t know us, you don’t belong

Oh, you’re so condescending
Your call is never ending
We don’t want nothin’, not a thing from you
Your life is trite and jaded
Boring and confiscated
If that’s your best, your best won’t do

 

And some people have the nerve to call Twisted Sister just another hair band.

 

Boomer Bar To Make This World Better

The same things keep people together over the centuries.

Needs. Barbra was right, we are people who need people.

Those boomers living their private miseries in public are the neediest of us all, but also the ones who say they don’t need anything.

Go figure.

If there isn’t some Boomer Club, why do we get branded so hard?

Maybe it’s just a misunderstanding.

 

 

Or maybe there’s something about old boomers spewing what they learned from their parents on their kids who lap it up because Daddy said so?

That’s my go-to whenever I hear the governor of Mississippi’s name.

Or Tommy Tuberville, Rand Paul, or Mitch McConnell.

 

Who Can’t Understand Normal Thinking

There is a strong block of republicans in the south having a hard time, men who can’t understand normal thinking.

They refuse to believe what’s in front of their faces because it all fades in the glower of their leader.

From an earlier post:

 

In the Trump universe the learning curve is short and flat, as you’d expect from someone who knows everything and doesn’t see the value in learning.

Does he seem like someone who’d say, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”

With that in mind, Trump sees himself as the smartest man in the room. Any room.

JFK had a White House dinner where he invited Nobel Prize winners.

He had this to say:

I want to tell you how welcome you are to the White House. I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

How would this welcome sound in Trump-speak?

The people Trump gathered around him during his four years in the White House all come away with the stench of their time served, no matter how short.

With this picture I ask: Is the boomer bar set too high, or too low?

 

I’ll take your polite answers in comments and respond with polite editorials.

Why? Because this is a polite f-ing blog.

Setting the bar.