Orion's picture

    Young Author Explains Why Millennials Are The Most Depressed Generation In The History Of The World

    All that effort during that generation to desegregate. Now we have "intentional spaces" for "people of color," which will necessitate other spaces for people who aren't people of color. It's easy to mock woke ideology but none of its ideas would have gotten this far if they weren't appealing, and they appeal strongest in academia, where young people are, and apparently also in the military, where young people also are.

     

    They were trained to take charge of a technological utopia and got a medieval world instead.

     

     

    Comments

    Would help to summarize these pieces, say what you find compelling & anything you disagree with.
    (not all of us want to wade into a lot of videos, so if there's more reason to...)
    I mean, off the bat - Gen-X was promised a continuation of the post-war boom + hippie idealism and instead got malaise & Reagan selfishness. But we still cope. But there certainly is a heavier feel of monopolies that keep a newbie from making traction or for paving your way outside a mega-corporation. But that still affects more than Gen-Z or Millennials. "a medieval world instead" sounds pretty hyperbolic. Make it better, goddammit. My generation hacked computers - made some things better, some things worse. This/last generation can hack health & the mind directly. Fixing property ownership & local government's another issue, but still - these are life's problems to tackle. Some is overhyped, but when I read that Delhi's swamped in deadly smog, I can sit there & think "in a decade this will all be fixed with electric cars", in a large part due to Elon even if others are overtaking him & will deliver the majority of those cars, infrastructure,new battery tech. I lived in LA when it was horridly smoggy - we shipped our problem elsewhere with Chinese offshored production (of course for them it's on-shore). But their millennials got continual growth, move to the city, worker bee lifestyle, and a step out of feudalism. 1.4 billion Chinese in a much better space. Add to that other Asian countries including huge India - not all fixed, but improvements & a way out.
    But Covid's also painted a target on the health system - it's not very flexible, it really is old school, we can make life much better for everyone with a revolution, including in psychological care. 
    https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/11/health-care-workers-l...


    It gets harder (science edition)

    Say goodbye to low hanging fruit

    https://www.salon.com/2021/11/26/is-science-stagnating-the-great-stagnat...

    Re: "turning medieval" and the author's diatribe about "liberal hysterias" of "racism, global warming and pestilence",  i think he's full of shite, and he exaggerates where he accuses others of exaggerating.

    1) we have a pandemic - it goes up and down, but it's poked huge holes in our supposed health expertise - part by our stupid ingrained tribal politics, part because we're just not that good still - we took the low-hanging fruit, but left a lot of the more important problems & logistics & understandings behind.

    2) global warming - we've hardly done shit to mediate global warming. Installing a bit of solar & wind is great, but it's way down the critical path from where we should be to limit effects on polar ice and extreme change of climate. While Electric Vehicles are promising, we're talking 10-15 years away for the transition to complete, and that includes wiring up the outback, be it Australia or the Amazon, Central Asia or Africa. Once you take the gas pump & canister out of the equation, there's a whole different operational mode that the world has to adapt to.
    And that doesn't get into heavy machinery (running on electricity? how much torque can it generate for heavy loads?), or airplanes (how do you substitute electric for powerful jet turbines?). And if we turn around and generate the supporting electricity from coal, we've done nothing for global warming.
    Besides global warming, there's global smog, such as what's attacked Delhi lately - many cities are drowning in smoke. And relying both on electric cars & cleaner smokestacks to do it. 10-15 years can leave a lot of damaged people behind.

    [Germany's/Merkel's decision to turn off nukes before solving alternate energy is one thing leading to their need for that controversial Russian gas line. Yep, can't take energy independence out of the equation - plus what month will Russia threaten Ukraine's/East Europe's energy again? taking bets now.]

    3) racism - get real. We are half enlightened, half Neanderthals in our evolving on race, and for those of different races there are a ton of everyday hurdles that do show up more often than for white folk, at least in our culture - if we're in Africa or the Mideast or Asia things can be reversed - tribes often discriminate against non-tribe members, that's still part of our DNA. Sure, some people cry too much about racism in everything, but there are huge structural problems that remain as well. It's obvious the GOP writes voting laws to disenfranchise blacks in numerous locations (absence of voting booths in black districts, etc.). We have more quotas for minorities, but we also have screwed up schools in heavier minority areas - it's 2021 and we still seem helpless to make a real difference - to get say 80-90% of those students reasonably educated and productive? Instead it's always social problems social problems. Blacks are undoubtedly going to draw more attention from police, and it's harder to get through adolescence without something seriously bad happening - due to bad decisions & pressure from others, as well as unwarranted profiling and an often unfair system. Call it 30% slanted and it's still a pretty big thumb on the scale. We can do better. That's not "hysteria" by any means. Of course that also includes controlling guns - when i was growing up I thought The Man was sending drugs to the ghetto to kill people off, but now it just takes a bit of firepower. Pretty horrific. And certainly enough blame in many directions, but it's something to solve, not just banter on about. That is perhaps the only "Medieval" aspect to the situation - that a continual subclass of dog-eat-dog criminal behavior rules large segments of society, and we can't seem to fix much of anything, generation after generation, it only gets worse, even as some educational and acceptance improve? Makes little sense.

    But yeah, woke speak is an easy target, but it's a bit like the #MeToo craze of 4-5 years ago - it will get a lot of attention and then settle down into a more normal state, or perhaps too little (it's still galling how "Take a Knee" based on police shootngs was so offensive to so many of our snowflake citizens - even now there's a big self-defensive movement, "Racist? we can't be racist, blacks are not repressed, everyone has the same opportunity". Maybe in a San Francisco startup with 20-somethings around foosball tables, but there's quite a bit of racial & gender (& age) discrimination that goes on in the daily workplace - even IT's "cultural fit" is also code for "weed out the extreme ones". Now look at the long climb for the kid from East St. Louis or Anacostia or Algiers. Doable for some, but certainly a huge challenge.


    Ok, I broke down & watched - tell me the inherent difference of the oil embargo, the collapse of the Rust Belt with Carter inflationary malaise (yes, he helped Reagan by being the adult), the dot com bust, and what not?
    I know the Jetsons promised us flying glass cars & a robot greeting us with martinis coming in the door, but I'm not sure any of us believed it, just like earlier generations didn't believe in War of the Worlds or what-not.
    By brother graduated with a prime degree and spent his 1st professional year making Xerox copies. I recall near 0 jobs advertised, and that was in the days where you had 1-2 classified sections to skim through & that was it. Everybody started at the bottom, just like we all had crappy pizza jobs in high school and mowed lawns before 16. I don't recall a huge number of guaranteed jobs for early graduates, except law students from cherry schools in the best of years. [yeah, Wolf of Wall Street is our real future too, amirite?]
    The idea that the internet has changed that much - well, we've had movies for a hundred years to show these dance to success tales/chorus lines, and then there's TV smiley personalities, and all these game shows - you too are a winner! and whatever other fantasy football people are peddling for whatever generation.
    The only real difference I see in all of this was 1) the Great Depression was real shit, that led into the largely shittier but romanticized World War II, so it's pretty amazing to hear anyone complaining about oh, a recession & a pandemic in 11 years! [try World War I where much of Europe had a huge bloody war & then 2 years of the more brutal Spanish Flu]. and
    2) after World War II, the US economy was pumping at full speed, industry successfully transitioned from wartime footing to consumer goods, all the returning soldiers got GI Bill with cheap housing loans and school benefits, while Detroit cranked out cheap cars and builders stacked up cheap suburban housing everywhere, and since Europe was still destroyed, they could rely on a decade of heavy exports to make life wonderful.

    But that post-war bonanza was back in 1945. seventy-five years ago. Who promised everyone Camelot would continue indefinitely? If you graduated into Korea or Vietnam you didn't have all those "career opportunities" unless you didn't get your dick blown off and made it back in one piece, including your noggin'. If you were female in the 50's, well, you mostly went for that housewifey thing and gave up those amazonian Rosie the Riveter factory wench aesthetics, and instead worked on the color combo for the living room set, and dreamed of linoleum.

    Look at the whole British ashen horizon of the 70s - much of Bowie's apocalyptic vision was based on grim factory realities and an economy in eternal doldrums - Britain not being much better off than East Germany. Punk was born.
    Sure, make things better, but this illusion that we all thought stuff would keep growing, that we'd flourish without effort, that we could just find our chosen field and push on, that's pretty delusional. We've know for decades that the age of the super industrial titans like the Big Three, GE, IBM, and so on wouldn't last, especially once we got a taste of Japanese competition and then the shift towards offshoring - before 1990 two-thirds of the world was blocked off. Afterwards you got competition. So what do they think competition means, "guaranteed better cushier jobs"? Hardly - it means some successes, some failures, though actually usually cushier (if employed), even if not as well paid.
    As for drugs & alcohol, I'd guess on average there was a helluva lot more in the 60's and 70's as well - even driving drunk used to be no big deal, and coke's been a mainstay since the 70's, while speed got half the people through exams. The bigger issue is opioids & speed in terms of improved quality  and severe use.

    But yes, I understand for some these recessions have been career blockers. But even if you were a taxi driver, once Uber came along you were toast. If you sold real estate, online listings took half your business. Worked hotels? meet AirBnB. Though this isn't intrinsically different from when Southwest shook up the premium airlines in the early 70's, changing a high priced/high margin business into a cutthroat barely surviving crapshoot. Vegas used to mean a kind of luxury status - now it's Disneyland. Online trading's been heavy since the 90's, more flexible investent since the 80's - that field was going to get weeded out. So who exactly said everyone's quality of life would be better? Of course if we made wise political choices and built up needed infrastructure and resources, and big corporates responsibly helped pay for government services that filled in holes as the shifting economy moved on, maybe it'd be more like Europe...

    And then there's types of jobs. We're not so much working out on the farm or in mines or the assembly line or the steel mill, and where it does, the conditions are vastly different than yesteryear - I don't believe robot-enabled Amazon warehouses & car assembly is anything close to as grueling and soul-destroying as 50 years ago. Building highways is all heavy equipment, unlike the Eisenhower years. "Fast food" is largely pre-prepared food, punching buttons, bagging stuff, smiling, not a lot of dishwork. It's a tradeoff of ease, not necessarily higher pay, not necessarily the career you wanted. If you look at all the successful co-existing bands at Woodstock and Monterrey - that industry doesn't exist anymore, nor does music radio, just syndicated hate speech. The print industry? First they came for the newspapers - now it's robot-generated content half the time. Film is all digital now, easier to fly in effects than live locations, much less time required for editing & post-production... Lawyering - a lot of clerk stuff is handled through better document management systems, search, AI/Machine Learning algorithms - the 1st year law clerk is basically operating a better, much smarter Xerox machine.

    So I still don't get it. Even health is being designed for faster, lighter weight delivery of services based on more and more clever uses of technology and organizational structure. Covid gave a big push to telepresence/video conferencing/remote monitoring, but it's been in the cards for decades anyway. So why exactly is there this Millennial "we were promised" thing? It's always a new version of eat-or-be-eaten, whether with better manners or fewer.


    We actually got a lot of the technology that was promised in the Jetsons, and we still went medieval. surprise


    Hippies wanted the Rainbow Festival and Burning Man, while we cut off moon launches by 1973. Spacely Sprockets never lived upt to it's promise, buy i think you should acknowledge we went *pre-Medieval*, Dawn of Man and all that jazz.


    Hippies never did anything of real significance. Their movement never got anywhere near political power. It certainly never got as far in to power as woke movement has.


    Causing the lowering of the voting age from 21 to 18 and getting rid of the military draft wasn't significant?

    Also, did you ever hear of the sexual revolution?


    Voting age change wasn't a huge deal. The military draft is still there, just hasn't been used because they haven't needed to use it. And the Sexual Revolution's goal was literally to make things insignificant.


    It's not possible to discuss this until you define your terms. The people that came of age in the 60's created some massive changes in culture and law. That generation are called boomers. Nearly all the hippies are boomers but how many boomers are hippies? How many of the boomer feminists were also hippies? How many of the boomer environmentalists were also hippies?  So who do we credit for the great changes in the 60's and 70's? Before we can do that we need to have some idea of who and how many are in the subsets of the boomer generation and how much overlap there is between those subsets.


    Birth control was pushed for going back to the eugenics era. Once these old progressive goals were achieved, the hippies just made it all look dysfunctional and led to a whole generation of electoral failure until Barack Obama made progressive politics attractive in 2008. They thought they were rebelling against something but were riding a wave of individualism that benefited Republican politicians and business interests a lot more.

    And a lot of those hippie communes - it was like the intentional communities formed in the Civil War era except a lot less functional and a whole lot more drugs. I remember old hippie professors back in 2005 - it was hard to tell if they were talking about current events or having an acid flashback. I'm not sure if they could tell the difference, either.


    It's funny, Orion - you're so into the psychological, yet here you are dissing the guys who opened up the psychological to the mainstream. In the 50s it was about electroshock, Frances Farmer. In the 60s it was doors of perception, Gestalt therapy, finding yourself.... The hippies made the US half Buddhist-Hindu when Christians ruled the roost. They pioneered whole subcultures of acceptance and fraternity - veggie food co-ops, shared rides that would even give you the Turtle to Morocco and India. They created super festivals of unbelievably diverse bands, where it was ok to listen to Sha-Na-Na and The Who and Melanie and Otis Redding back to back and no one questioned your sanity. The hippies popularized peaceful organized mass movements, protests, revolution, Citizen government.


    That's a fairly good point and I'm not about to dismiss a movement wholesale but a lot of psychological discoveries were made in the 1950s and early 1960s, in a rush to pivot away from totalitarianism. Books like Games People Play, etc. That era was way more creative than people give it credit for. Hippies dismissed the work of the progressive era as that of squares, making it easy for pseudo-libertarians to take the reigns of power.

    Also, the preceding generation was imagining trips to the Orient in a much different manner. :P

     

    But on the original point, wokeness is as far as revolutionary politics has ever gotten in this country. It has hallmarks of being the real deal that the hippie movement never did. Radical politics has never gotten this close to power. 


    What are you talking about? The hippies tracked the beat generation's path across the US, Neal Cassady/Dean Moriarty even driving the Merry Prankster bus, Burroughs & Gysin's Dream Machine keeping  Wilhelm Reich's orgone accumulator and anti-fascist psychological ideas alive, the Kinsey Report led to 60s love-ins, Leary and Alpert (Ram Dass) mixed Esalen cool with globetrotting exploration, Alan Ginsberg the resident Howling poet. Obviously the hippies were rejecting the McCarthy freaks and the Rand Corporation, but were fine with LBJ Great Society and the hip cat jazz - who didn't have Miles Davis and Roland Kirk in their dorm room, who didn't know Ferlinghetti and North Beach? Pretty sure Panthers and SDS were far past just playing "woke" - have the bullet holes and rap sheets to show for it. 


    And Woodstock really was the shocking "youthquake" realization moment that it wasn't just a bunch of isolated weirdo groups here and there like the beats, just a few kids getting here and here kicked out by their father for having long hair, but a whole generation. It was on all the nightly network news and pictures were on the front pages of every local newspaper in the country. I was 14, when I saw the Milwaukee Journal it was like 'YES! I and my friends are not alone". Everyone knew it all of a sudden. Because it all happened word of mouth, there was no such thing as social media, people just started heading there from all over and they just kept coming and coming and coming, there was not enough food or anything, the highways were clogged. No one knew it was going to happen, not even any of the participants. This song really captures that

    by the time i got to woodstock they were half a million strong

     

     

    It was a shocking, shocking moment for everyone in the country, especially for Greatest Generation parents. This was not isolated beatniks, this was real generational change. There had never been anything like it.

    (edit to add a few words to the beginning for clarity)


    Also I should mention that it seems that Orion has no idea of how depressing and soul-deadening the postwar-Eisenhower years were for most people as far as any kind of culture is concerned. And how constricted life was, without little inspiration for anything different or any ideas at all.

    My mother, a farm girl Depression baby who dreamed of a better life. used to say to younger people who questioned her infatuation with the Kennedy's: you have no idea, it was the light after the dark. Culture, beauty, excitement instead of dead, dark and lifeless robots going through their assigned roles.

    Mamie Eisenhower dresses. Girdles (lady's "foundations") Nothing like decent food in stores and restaurants as we know it today. Canned vegetables and canned peaches and pears, Wonder bread, iceberg lettuce, tennis ball tomatoes, jello, apples and bananas, bologna, chicken and round steak, day after day after day

    Everyone had rigid roles, men with crewcuts went to work in the single family car and had heart attacks at 50 and women stayed at home and cooked (there was no "fast food"). There were no credit cards, no credit nor investment for anyone but the wealthy, so the bounds of your life were restricted by your paycheck. If you were lucky your parents gave you the money for a down payment on a little ranch house. Without that, and if you were on a bus driver's salary like Ralph Kramden in The Honeymooners, you lived in a shitty apartment (Lucy Ricardo had a "fancy" apartment because her husband Ricky had a well paid job as a nightclub band leader.)

    The world of Mad Men in Manhattan, advertising and marketing, was just being born, they were the exotics leading radical lives, no one knew about them and what they were doing.

    Yes, there was rock n' roll and Elvis, but this was very controversial and radical, with people swiveling their hips and such, white people listening to black music, it was recognized as a threat to the enforced culture of supposedly no one having sex before marriage, letting your hair down was a bad thing, these kids are up to no good listening to such stuff. (My mom told me as a young wife with like one baby she used to watch American Bandstand cause she could at least see some creative fashion on the kids, a teeny bit of inspiration.)

    I would suggest people like Orion who are maybe under the mistaken impression that the decade before Kennedy became president was a hopeful one filled with innovation, watch the movie The Graduate for an idea of what the east coast upper middle class life was like and read Evan S. Connell's novel Mrs. Bridge for an idea of what the absolutely rigid, soul-killing life was like for the upper middle class in the "heartland".


    I've watched movies about it and am aware of it, but the movie has yet to be made about the millenial young woman who is 32 and is mentally still a child - trying to file a lawsuit against her uncle for trying to kick her out of his house and she is unaware of who even owns it or pays the rent. This is someone I really met. Or AOC - who worked as a waitress after getting a Bachelor's Degree. 

    Okay, there were confined roles in the 1950s. Nowadays many families never even talk to one another and don't even have any idea who one another are. A lot of that atomization has to do with the alienating infrastructure that was indeed built in the 1950s, but that wasn't taken down by hippies, evidence that, as I said, they didn't accomplish their task. 

    We talk about democracy but our government is like the worst of Africa or the late Soviet Union's gerontocracies - Baby Boomers and even Silent Generation leaders hanging on to power at nearly 80 years old. Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi. 

    All that effort during that generation to desegregate. Now we have "intentional spaces" for "people of color," which will necessitate other spaces for people who aren't people of color. It's easy to mock woke ideology but none of its ideas would have gotten this far if they weren't appealing, and they appeal strongest in academia, where young people are, and apparently also in the military, where young people also are.

    If the world is going backward, then something went wrong with those who thought they were going forward.


    So AOC worked as a waitress - her father had died, the house was foreclosed, her mother needed help, and waitressing brings home cash every day. AOC got a dual degree in International Relations and Economics - useful, but not easy to step out of school and land a high paying job day 1. Everybody in the fucking world knows this. But it's better than an English degree. And still, there are student loans to pay back - yes, that part has gotten out of control (though wiping out all student loan debt means we'll be subsidizing divinity degrees and other stupid shit, when kids could really think about wage potential of their degree program a little bit). By 27-28, AOC was a Congresswoman - was her struggle so tough we have to make an economic martyr of her, or does it give an idea that our system's actually pretty flexible?

    Why the fuck was "taking down alien infrastructure" the hippies' task? Their task was to do what the fuck they wanted, and they did that pretty well - revolutionized a lot of things.

    And fuck your gerentocracy - Nancy Pelosi is kicking Republicans' butts because she knows what the fuck she's doing, not because Leonid Brezhnev places her there and said "don't go away". You're turning totalitarianism structures & legacies of gerentocracy into ageism. Pelosi earned her votes, no one gave her anything. She fought off a challenge 2 years ago. Trump's a prick, but he packaged his bullshit to attract voters, so that's what we got - whether he wears a diaper or not. Biden had lots of young competition - along with Bernie. Where's Pete? Where's Beto? We keep waiting for the next generation, and Biden was all we got - luck of the draw, our farm clubs aren't that interesting, and we shoved Al Franken out the door, and wassisname from New Jersey just isn't that exciting (and looks like the Cuomo's are gone). At least we don't have Chris Christie or Rudy on our side - could be worse.

    Anyway, the world is fine - enough disaster mongering. Ideas will come and go like pet rocks and Tamaguchi dolls. That doesn't mean they were especially profound - they just caught traction. A lot of the wailing about racism is *because* there's more interaction so some can hyperventilate over every friction while most don't have time for the bullshit so you won't hear them speak. Yes, the whiny woke spokes get the grease, and in the age of social media their voices get amplified. Learn to ignore a bit - watch the donut, not the hole (one of those Burl Ives songs amplified by one of the famouser hippies).

    Acting like housing insecurity just began yesterday? The few homeowners got smacked by high mortgage rates under Carter. Home ownership was pushed in the 90s, part of owning your community and fighting high crime - but of course the bankers came in and cleaned out the bin - but we saw that coming for a decade - i knew a foolish woman who could barely make herself breakfast much less stay employed, but she took out a 2nd mortgage because it was the trendy thing to do, like free money. Eventually we'll pass some laws to improve on some of the worst of the situation without having to declare a generation martyrs because they had to live at home more than others and ate too much avocado toast. Somehow getting your ass shot up in Vietnam still seems worse. Still having physically legally segregated schools when i was a kid still seems worse. Having a $600 billion a year Soviet army staring down Europe while China is killing off 10 million in a "cultural revolution" and Cambodia slaughtering another million in a backwards drive to "Year Zero" still seems worse.


    "All that effort during that generation to desegregate. Now we have "intentional spaces" for "people of color," which will necessitate other spaces for people who aren't people of color. It's easy to mock woke ideology but none of its ideas would have gotten this far if they weren't appealing, and they appeal strongest in academia, where young people are, and apparently also in the military, where young people also are."

    I'd go as far as to say this statement is evidence that hippies were a reactionary phenomenon. The ultimate expression of bourgeois individualism. Their backlash against the Vietnam war under Lyndon Johnson helped get Nixon elected. That war was ended under Gerald Ford and, by that time, the Democratic political infrastructure that existed throughout the Progressive Era had been demolished. A lot of causes of that movement, like legalizing marijuana, went on to become libertarian pet causes.

    Also, getting shot in Vietnam is terrible, but getting called a "baby killer" when you get home isn't fun either. That might have to do with why their ideas never got as far as wokeism has.


    FFS, *NOBODY* was called a baby killer coming home from Vietnam. It's one of the biggest urban myths out there. Calley was called a baby killer because he was found guilty of killing babies. And yes, they got LBJ out and Nixon in, and Nixon drew troop levels down from 500k to 0 in 3 1/2 years (when Obama had trouble with 100k in 4), plus Nixon got a lasting peace deal with China, the most populous country in the world, and he created the Environmental Protection Agency, and he took us off the archaic gold standard. The Democratic political structure included the Cro-magnon figure of Mayor Daley, and J Edgar Hoover had the run of tracking down protesters, occasionally killing them, so things weren't all beautiful in The Great Society.

    Please stop making a big deal of flashes-in-the-pan like "intentional spaces". It's like talking about how we'll be coping with COVID in 2030, when we all pretty well know it should be done in a year. Or the brain fart of "defund the police" which is already last year's news except for some insatiable juveniles.


    How do we know Covid will be done in a year? There might be a new Kryptonite variant come next year.


    Yes, Mon-El may take over. But usually Superhero series like pandemics last about 3 years and then are replaced by a new cast or reboot.


    Nixon+Wallace got 57% of the vote to Humphrey's 42.7%. Vietnam plus other factors killed any Democratic bounce. Certainly there were cultural divides between hippies/youth and older straight arrows. Still, besides the gotcha of Nixon saying racist things in the Oval Office, he also pushed Affirmative Action, funding for black colleges, did final enactments of the Civil Rights Act (tho not a fan of busing), and had a special advisor Robert Brown to oversee and coordinate Black-facing initiatives such as black promotions in the military. Nixon was a weird dude, but his election wasn't a disaster for progressivism.

    (Probably have to download the image below)


    super understatement: Certainly there were cultural divides between hippies/youth and older straight arrows.More accurate to weight on the side of a generation gap possibly like never before in human history.

    Partly this is the education gap of working class, including the parents, not being college-goers. The counterculture hippies are seen as throwing in their parents face the belief of climbing the class ladder, "the American dream" by going to college and then protesting. That is not myth, that tore apart families. Dad's with crewcuts who worked 1st shift at GM to help their kids go to college and become a professional knew exactly what that long hair on their son meant - it was an insult to what they believed in.

      Another difference between hippies and yippie types is that the former knew construction workers were looking to beat some hippie's heads in, they were hopeless enemies that wanted to hurt you because of your counterculture, and you'd better steer clear, but the latter thought, in the same old same old way of Marxists, that they could win over the uneducated working class to the revolution be allies if they just tried harder.

    Fast forward a decade and the construction workers have long hair and are wearing earrings and smoking dope. And little old ladies are actually wearing tennis shoes and casual clothes rather than girdles, orthopedic shoes and rolled nylon stockings, and helmet hair enforced with hair spray (Noticeably and curiously, people like Margaret Thatcher and Queen Elizabeth continued with that whole thing for much longer than most!)


    Don't forget Nordic sticks!

    My Mom thought I was immature for riding a bike around town in my late 20s ((i also had a car). Now that her friends do it as she ages, it's A-OK. Of course I wasn't doing it to stay healthy - it was just the easiest way to move.


    LBJ was the only one called a baby killer, I remember it distinctly.

    It was not by "hippies", though, it was by radical lefties that were called "yippies" to distinguish them, or Weathermen if you like. They admired communism, like "tankies" do today. Your stereotypes are way too broad, the extreme generalities you are applying are making you take away very simplistic analysis, you need to learn more complexity about the eras you make judgments about

     Are all millennials or ar all woke tankies? Nope they aren't "Hippies" didn't blow up buildings, nor did they riot at Democratic conventions in Chicago, causing Nixon to be elected, they were for peace and free love.  They didn't want a literal revolution nor to bring down the government, they wanted Americans to stop participating in war in Vietnam, not for the U.S. to become like East Germany.  The part in the movies where you see soldiers hating Jane Fonda? That's real, that's because she was a tankie, she actually climbed up on a communist tank. Hippies went to college and at war protests put flowers in the end of national guard barrels but some of them ended up being shot at anyway. Yippies were fans of Mao.

    They started Earth Day, they started concern for the environment, "Silent Spring" was a bible. Their parents could give a damn, didn't believe any of it, the more consumption of resources the better the more cars and roads and sprawl the better. (See One word: plastics. in The Graduate.)  Greta Thunberg is a retro revival hippie to a T

    BTW, hippies started "car sharing", but they called it "hitchhiking".

    They thought the Pentagon should be "defunded." Senator Proxmire agreed with them, so a lot of their parents slowly started to agree. Same with trusting big corporations to care about people. The pre-spoiler Ralph Nader agreed with them, and slowly convinced a lot of their parents. They learned in college that advertising was actually telling lies to people for big lying corporations, before that, people trusted and believed advertising. They were very interested in psychology, this was something the Greatest Generation thought was nonsense, just go to church, goddamit. They were not fans of organized religion as it existed then, thought it taught people bad things, like tribalism.

    Your judgment that "hippies" were just like the identity politics fans of today is totally wrong and opposite the truth of the matter, as even the advertising men knew, they wanted to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, they believed in inclusiveness and globalism and everyone getting along to the point of naivete, including

    When they grew up and got power and became practical people like Bill and Hillary Clinton (and Al Gore, Mr,. Earth Day), they did things like help reduce crime in a major major way, something never thought possible. And introduce earned income credit to stop the societal destruction of the welfare state paying babies to have babies over generations,. And take care of infinite almost religious care of economy and international trade to the point where they proved that what. economists believed was not possible since Eisenhower: low unemployment and low inflation at the same time, and not just a balanced federal budget but a paydown of the national debt./

    Comes to mind Gov. Moonbeam was a hippie, you might know something about him...

    Don't get me wrong: I am impressed with your real good instincts and that you properly question things, and I always like to see what you're thinking, it's just that your stereotypes of times gone by are too simplistic and broad and you just need more learning time to gain some more nuanced understanding of the eras you are judging.

     


    Ken Kesey showed up to speak at a Yippie anti-war festival, and just kept repeating, "Just walk away. Don't take the gauntlet - just walk away." He thought by getting all involved and heated up in this "us vs them" conflict we would become largely just like them. Just don't fight. Do what you were going to do instead. How's that for non-confrontational hippie tactics? He pissed a lot of people off. They wanted him to help lead the counterculture, but not *that* way.


    absolutely there was wide interest in the principles of non-violent protest, the tactics of Ghandi (moreso than MLK who was admired but seen as too tied up in race war and as a minister a little too conservative or mainstream) Ghandi who was also anti-imperalist and a believer in globalism. that tribes (Hindu & Muslim) could live in harmony, he could go to the textile workers in England and make them understand the problem in India. The interest of rock groups like The Beatles in India and Hinduism and Buddhism and meditation and "yogis" is actually related to this zeitgeist, looking for an alternative to western ways


    p.s. whaddya know, the public internet (that great invention by Gen X "slackers"), has refreshed my memory, it's right here-tho in Italian, hah- the song lyrics that ended up being the protest chant I remember Hey, hey LBJ! / How many kids did you kill today?" ,. the page even has a photo of a protest banner with the chant on it.

    and again, it was truly like he was the only one called that, I never saw evidence of any "hippie" calling a soldier a baby killer or spitting on them, it was like the opposite: enormous pity for what they got forced to do, to the point of naivete where things like the MyLai masscre was seen as all the Pentagon's fault. Remember there is a draft, most grunts are not volunteers, and the draft is the point of all the protesting, so the grunts are victims of "the system." A lot like you are doing now, hippies were simplistically blaming the power people of the grownup generation in charge.

    I vaguely recall Defense Sec. Bob McNamara being a big target of protest slurs too...



    Watching Alannis Morissette, basically 1990's hippie stoicism, "things are messed up but I'm/we're working it out". A bit of Pere Ubu dadaism and Bob Dylan harmonica thrown in to keep things from going too serious.

    Is anyone that light on their feet even while landing heavy punches today?

    https://youtu.be/_dppVIxmPLs

    Well, Snoop obviously - how bad is racism when this feels completely normal?

    https://youtu.be/hACIJUdXlUs


    1969 population ~200 mill, 1:400 at Woodstock

    Yes, at home we were listening to Ray Conniff and Andy Williams, while my hippie art teacher is turning us on to Janis and Jimi. Think what that meant across the South, especially after blowing away MLK? Those parents who'd supported the Korean War unflinchingly just 15 years before. Can we say "divided"?


     Harvard tells us young Americans are increasingly hopeful. Really?


    When Bruce has a hammer everything looks like a political nail.
    Could young people be depressed from spending too much time on mobile phones & social media, and it has nothing to do with politics?
    And pretty sure Bruce hasn't looked at any BLS reports to figure out which jobs are growing.
    https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-sector.htm
    And like any good propagandist knows, if the data doesn't fit your message, drop some of the data:

    In 2019, the U.S. suicide rate dropped for the first time in 14 years, driven largely by a significant decline in firearm-related deaths, according to a new analysis of National Vital Statistics System data...
    Significant declines also occurred in several subgroups: Whites; those aged 15-24, 55-64, and 65-74 years; and those living in counties classified as large fringe metropolitan or micropolitan (urban cluster of ≥ 10,000 but less than 50,000 population), they said, based on data from the National Vital Statistics System.

    So let's look where the youth of today is most depressed:

    Oh, so flyover country and listening to too much Sarah Palin is the problem? Why didn't you say so? I thought it was all the woke youthful progressives regretting they can't burn Hillary at the stake. My bad. It's that sane youngsters realize most of their states are controlled by radical rightwing nutcases perhaps. Like Boebert and Noema and whoever. Or just that there's nothing to do there and having adults intent on living in the Middle Ages doesn't quite jibe with what they see on Netflix.
    Seriously, Lulu - have you ever considered getting a valid reputable source to go into discussions with?
    [I did find a good suicide-by-age graph that highlights the youthful suicide rate isn't increasing that significantly, but I can't link the graph as an image: https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/ ]


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