There is a huge generational conflict going on in our society today, and it's mostly "The Boomers" versus every generation that came after them. The Boomer generation is steadily moving into retirement age, but because it is so demographically huge, still maintains huge political sway these days and that has upset the normal balance of successive generations taking up the mantle of power in mid-life, and society continuing to adapt and change with time.
Generation X (Gen X) will never substantially have political power. It's far too small, and it's sandwiched between two generations that are much larger. It is also a generation that is politically divided. Half of it is strongly aligned with the Boomer generation (and gives us politicians like Jason Kenney), and the other half is aligned with the Millennial generation for a variety of reasons. Gen X should have come into its own as a political force in the 2000s as the leading edge of the generation reaches their 30s. That didn't happen, and won't happen now.
The Millennials, and now Generation Z (Gen Z), are much bigger demographics - and combined are starting to exceed the voting weight of the Boomer generation ... and they're pissed. They're pissed with good reason.
Their parents are the generations that lived through WWII, and decided to build something much bigger for the future. They built infrastructure, social programs, and so on. They aren't perfect, by any means, but they did a lot of positive things which set up their children (the Boomer generation) for amazing levels of success - and there's no doubt that the Boomer generation has been phenomenally successful.
So what happened? The 1980s happened, that's what. The 1980s is when the boom generation discovered it had political muscle. However, by that point in time, most of them were also starting to understand that infrastructure costs money to maintain, as do social programs. Money that comes from *gasp* taxes. They looked at the hunk of money being removed from their paycheques each month and decided that was too much.
They elected politicians like Reagan and Thatcher, who happily went to work shredding everything from regulations to taxation on the basis of popular vote demanding "lower taxes". They did this and in the process happily passed the resulting "business opportunities" on to their buddies who became fantastically wealthy - creating a new class of aristocrats.
The resulting moneyed power structure then decided that businesses had no obligation to their employees, and more specifically, that employees were disposable. The idea of career jobs vanished, and suddenly you could find yourself fired at the drop of a hat (often because someone decided you looked at them the wrong way). Wages stagnated, while living costs continued to rise. Soon, it became impossible to buy a home and raise a family on one salary, you needed 2 professional salaries; now housing prices are reaching the level where paying off your home is rapidly becoming a multi-generational affair.
Infrastructure was only maintained if it was "profitable" to do so. Look at urban transit it most North American cities - it's essential, but absolutely minimal. Where I live there is an entire quadrant of the city where you essentially pay a "car tax" to live there - no car, you don't live there because it's almost impossible to function without one. Yes there's transit, but it's so minimal that few use it because it takes huge amounts of time to get anywhere.
... and then there's the privatized health care costs. More of an issue in the US than in Canada (although conservative politicians here are trying very hard to change that), health care insurance premiums are as brutal a cost as child care costs can be.
Now, how is this the "fault" of the Boomers? Individually it isn't. There are plenty of individuals in that group that don't think that way. It's the abandonment of the collective that is the bigger problem. Collectively, the Boomer generation decided to vote for the politicians that started the process of dismantling things. They didn't do this alone, either. A good portion of the "Silent Generation" became increasingly conservative as they moved into retirement, and probably half of Gen X followed along with the Boomers, without really understanding what was happening.
Today, we have two generations of people who are looking at a social infrastructure that is in tatters - making life even more precarious, wages that have stalled for at least 30 years, and capital infrastructure that is crumbling both in urban and rural areas. Live in rural areas, and access to Internet and Cellular service is sketchy at best; live in urban areas, and while there's access, things are crumbling from a lack of routine maintenance being done.
Are the Millennials and Gen Z folks right to be upset? Absolutely. A culture of "every one for themselves" took hold in the 1980s, and now what's left are the scraps. Jobs are tenuous at best, wages are stagnant, education costs more than most people can afford, and so on. Of course they're pissed - and they probably don't even realize why they're pissed because they grew up when everything was being allowed to fall apart. Falling apart is all they've ever known.
Individually, plenty of the Boomer generation can justifiably say "it wasn't me", but taken as a group, they chose the path we are currently on back in the 1980s, and regrettably, the die-hards from that era are still clinging to power in an effort to further their goals. That's part of why we have politicians like Mitch McConnell still around - and their goals are not benign.
I should note that what I am laying out here are some of the events and patterns which create the perception among later generations that the Boomer generation has "screwed them over". You can argue all sorts of things in counterpoint, but I don't think those arguments are likely to mitigate the perceptions very much. The point is very much that there are features of the past which are seen as setting the stage for today, and not in a positive way.
No comments:
Post a Comment