Democratic Primaries
In reply to the discussion: Joe Biden is not a Boomer. Just so you know. [View all]Hekate
(90,616 posts)An old journalist wrote a worshipful tribute to his dad and the hard times his dad & mom lived through, and called it The Greatest Generation. Nobody called them that before then, no disrespect intended.
When the young men of my generation were being sent off to war in Southeast Asia we were accustomed to thinking of ourselves (the USA) as the good guys, the guys who won wars, the guys who fought on the right side of history. I was raised to believe that. Ending two World Wars and liberating the concentration camps ought to count for something, one would think.
Instead the politicians in Washington DC (all of them part of the so-called greatest gen) sent our men off to fight an unwinnable war for all the wrong reasons, and because they could not admit it was a god-damned mistake, they kept on drafting and sending soldiers until the revulsion back home tore the country apart.
Excuse me for some of us having had the youthful idealism to believe that we could do better than that. And by gods some of us did -- though power creates its own vortex, and while we rejoiced at unseating Nixon, Newt Gingrich was getting his start.
Also excuse me if we got old. The children we begot are in their 40s and 50s, and those of us who are still alive are trying to eke out a retirement from pensions that vanished while providing at-home elder care for their own parents. Some of those people are DUers.
It wasn't us who "pulled the ladder up" after themselves. Go to the rich and powerful GOPers for that -- only what they did was knock the ladder out from under us and everyone else.
Which brings me to this: STOP DIVIDING US BY GENERATION, AND GET A GRIP ON THE REALITY OF CLASS WARFARE. Class warfare crosses generations and seeks to perpetuate itself at the nexus of money and power.
primary today, I would vote for: Joe Biden