From the greatest Generation to a generation of degenerates

[TEB]

We all know that our grandparents great aunts uncles. They saved the world from facist asshole pricks. They sacrificed going off to fight getting killed or wounded rationing at home. My great aunts left Appalachia to work building bombers.

And they my great grandparents lost two sons one in Africa the other in the South Pacific. I only knew them my great uncles by photos hanging on my great grandparents wall and stories I was told about them they were fine young men.

Not to be sick , once drinking beer on our back porch with my neighbor who was a World War Two vet when we lived in western Pennsylvania. He only ever spoke once about his war once I never asked him. We were buzzed and he told me of looking over and seeing a soldier trying to stand and run. Run away on two bloody stumps our human instinct drives us to survive moments before that man had legs.

So my bitch is yesterday I was at local store. And ran into my wife’s cousin and her husband. They were so proud to inform me that they went up to Harrisburg and protested the lockdown. Now these two know me I am liberal I always vote democrat I’m a veteran a union dude.

They were protesting facist Tom wolf oh fuck me they cannot go to the bar why even the shooting range is closed. I call it the rod and bottle it’s a club where you also can drink. Oh and they cannot go to the movies for The once a month Saturday dates. I really didn’t wanna fight verbally with them I said I gotta get busy and shop.

They are fucking degenerates in their way of thinking and actions , the whole confederate flag waving brain washed trump cult. Who thinks that by protesting a virus holds any morals or values or personal gain. By gathering at protest you will not win against coronavirus in their minds these sacrifices are to much to be asked of . Thank you for letting me rant Du community I have to head out and get my wife her mom and aunt hair color and wine. The coloring of their hair buzzed is something I enjoy watching them do together. Be safe and good health to you all and to those you love.

[tazkcmo]

1. Righteous rant, TEB

Soldier on and don't let those knuckle dragging mouth breathers bring you down. Enjoy the hair coloring!

[TEB]

3. Shit sarge hair color and these ladies buzzed is better than

Getting a 4 day weekend

[sinkingfeeling]

2. For some of us, it was our parents, aunts and uncles who sacrificed

during WWII. I lost two uncles fighting true fascists. My mom made airplanes and my dad kept farming to feed the troops.

[True Blue American]

8. For some of us it

Was our Dad, future husband, BIL’s plus Uncles.

[marybourg]

13. Yep. DH for me.

[True Blue American]

15. :)

[True Blue American]

4. How do you

Last edited Thu Apr 23, 2020, 07:52 AM - Edit history (1)

Think those of us still here who remember the Greatest Generation feel?

We remember the strikes that gave workers decent wages and health benefits. We watched the next generation blame Unions, bitch about paying Union dues, workers making too much money, building a middle class so future generations would live better.

We watched them vote for Republicans who cut their throats every chance they get. We watched them vote Republican because Obama, that awful black guy tried to give them a decent Health care. Now they whine about low pay, no health benefits, yet still blame Democrats!

We watched them vote in a 20 year drunk who lied us into a 19 Year war.now they chose a life long Con man. They still do not have the slightest grain of common sense. Those are the protesters you see today.

Of course they vilified the protesters against the Vietnam war. That was an honest protest like the strikers in the late 40’s, early 50’s.

You think you have a rant?

[TEB]

5. Great post friend

[True Blue American]

7. Thank you

Thanks to decent Health care, pensions, Unions, exercise and in many cases there are many of us still here. Angry at what selfishness, thinking someone one will take care of them but not smart enough to know just who provided those benefits. They are too busy swallowing the lies of Reagan, Bush and now Trump.

On the one hand they reject the programs FDR, LBJ and Obama provided them, yet whine about what they don’t have.

I am seeing a turnaround in the young. They seem to know BS when they see it. Even lazy, Fox,Rush listeners are beginning to see the catastrophe of an ignorant, lying Reality pretend star.

[Nitram]

24. The Greatest Generation turned against unions when they voted Reagan into office, and followed up

by supporting Nixon. It is the GG who turned to Fox for "news" and made talk radio great.

[Tiger8]

25. Some yes, but many hated Republicans

The Greatest Generation was never a monolithic group, and the majority were FDR Democrats who understood the Bill Clinton axiom, "If you want to live like a Republican, vote for the Democrat."

My father was GG and he loved a nice car, so he always drove Lincolns. You might see that and assume he's a Republican, but nothing could be further from the truth. He was an FDR democrat, and a union guy who worked hard for his money. He'd tell me about growing up during the Great Depression, losing his boyhood home to the bank in the 1930's, and Hoovervilles, slums named after Republican Herbert Hoover, another heartless Republican asshole like Trump.

Dad never complained about taxes because it means you're making a good living. He continued to buy Lincolns long after BMW or Lexus became popular. He'd tell me the Ford Motor Company people will buy my products, while the Germans and Japanese won't. So I drive Fords today, because I was taught that we're all in this together.

[whathehell]

27. Thank you!

Your dad sounds so much like mine -- A union member and lifelong FDR Dem who despised Reagan and the Republican Party in general.

[whathehell]

26. My Greatest Generation Dad hated Reagan and NEVER turned against unions

Stop stereotyping entire generations -- There is lots of blame to go around.

[Nitram]

34. That's what I'm taking about. Stop stereotyping and scapegoating entire generations.

Every generation has its good, its bad, and its ugly.

[Tiger8]

35. Your dad was an admirable GG American! Both my GG parents hated Reagan and Bush also.

Dad called Ronald Reagan "The Parrot" because he just repeated the BS his backers told him too - rehearsed his lines.

The only Republican I don't recall them hating was Gerald Ford, but they supported Jimmy Carter in 1976, as with every Democratic presidential candidate prior and subsequent.

[ProfessorGAC]

6. I'm With You, TEB

It's just blindingly dumb.

[3Hotdogs]

9. My uncle and F.I.L., were both in WW II. Both came back but they were never right

in their heads.

Uncle was waist gunner on a bomber. He never talked about it. He just wanted to be away from people so he moved to a small town in Florida. His kids didn't even know he had been in the war, until my aunt applied for V.A. benefits when he went into dementia. They never asked and he never said.

F.I.L. was D-Day + 1. He was a radio operator. His buddy, next to him in a jeep, was blown to shit. Herb was physically unharmed but his head was never right after that.

[True Blue American]

16. Husband,18

Wounded on Omaha Beach. We just saw videos of that a couple of years ago at Wright Pat Museum.

Medal of Freedom awarded 50 years later.

[LiberalLoner]

10. It's not the greatest generation who voted in Trump. It is the Silent Generation

Basically the children of the greatest generation. Look them up. My father is a member of that generation and they are the most conservative generation we have.

https://www.people-press.org/2018/03/01/1-generations-party-identification-midterm-voting-preferences-views-of-trump/

[Chainfire]

11. That is truth

I am a member of the generation that has ruined the country. Even as far back as the late 60s and early 70s, when we were teenagers, there was a strict social divide. There were the hippies, the preppies, and the rednecks. The preppies and the rednecks are the ones who ended up running the country.

Us old hippies come to the DU to complain.

[LiberalLoner]

12. My father is a bully, wife beater and child abuser but did well in the Army as he was also

Good at lying and bootlicking those above him.

He is a malignant narcissist and has traits of antisocial personality disorder, just like Trump. He has been ultra conservative all his life and has never loved a president the way he loves Trump.

There are good elements and bad elements of every generation, including the silent generation. But when I see people like my father and Trump, I think they are like the farts of that generation...silent but deadly.

P.S. God it must have been awful to have people like Trump for your peers. I can’t imagine the bravery it took for you and others like you to stand against them. Thank you.

[whathehell]

28. As a boomer and fellow old hippie..

I'm going to have to ask you to speak for yourself.

No.one generation "ruined" America. Most contributed both positively and negatively -- All dealt with the hand their particular era dealt them.

[LiberalLoner]

31. It's true, there are good people and bad people in every generation.

I just happened to have one of the bad ones for a parent and that has affected my views. But I also greatly admire the silent generation civil rights leaders, progressive thinkers like John Lennon, etc.

It’s the bad eggs of each generation I don’t like. And Trump has been so triggering to me, because he is a malignant narcissist like what I grew up with. I have PTSD from my childhood, actually.

Trump isn’t technically part of the Silent Generation, he was born one year too late, but I feel his views on women, children, anyone who isn’t a white male with wealth, is very much in line with the worst members of the silent generation.

President Obama was a late Boomer, as am I, born the same year, but I’ve read articles that say his thinking and values were much more in line with Generation X and honestly I feel much more like a Gen Xer than a boomer too.

President Obama is an example of the highest elements of Gen X and Trump an example of the lowest elements of the Silent Generation.

I don’t mind the Silents at all, just wish we could have gotten a President who represented the best of them instead of the worst of them.

[appalachiablue]

14. Terrific rant, there are so many stupids like the in laws u describe

it's disturbing and explains the state of the nation.

As far as damaging democracy in the U.S., Britain and Australia it's on the Murdochs media empire, including Fox, The Sun, and more that have promoted anti democratic, authoritarian elements that have always existed.

In the years following WWII, 'democracy' was invoked a lot, but since c. 1980 not so much. The beginning of the demise.

My father & uncles were in WWI, grandfather in WWI. They fought & sacrificed, so did their wives & families-- for this?

Father in Germany was KIA twice, something I just learned a few years ago. He was a real fighter, before & after the war.

Thanks for the enjoyable post and have fun with the hair coloring ladies, love it!

Murdoch's Grip On Democracy, by Kevin Rudd.
https://kevinrudd.com/2019/01/05/citizen-murdochs-critical-grip-on-democracy/

[ananda]

17. Many of them were saving it for white people.

My dad was one of those.

[True Blue American]

19. Bull!

They saved it for future generations, then came back, worked to create the middle class.

[whathehell]

30. Thank you.

So tired of this shit.

[paleotn]

20. You stay safe too!

The rod and bottle. I'm going to have to remember that. Priceless.

[soldierant]

21. Every generation has its share of A-holes and its share of decent people,

Sometimes there are both kinds in the same generation, sometimes one or the other will sjip a generaton or two.

I don't personally want to give any whole generation a bad rap. No one is predestined to be one or the other because of what generation he or she was born in., not is one's generation ever an excuse for one's choice to behave badly.

That said, yeah, that's a real pair of jerks and the rant is righteous.

[Nitram]

33. I agree 100%.

[Warpy]

22. Self centered right wing dumbasses will always be with us

but if you looked at the size of the "crowd" they managed to gather, you'll notice that we outnumber them.

I just wish our party would start acting like it. And on it.

[Nitram]

23. I empathize, but I object to characterizing this as the result of degeneracy since the "Greatest

Generation." My parents were of the GG, and they taught us good values growing up. But they turned hard right in their later years and renounced much of what they had taught us when we were growing up. The GG grew up while African Americans were being lynched in both Southern and Northern states, and they did nothing about it. It was the "degenerates" of the 60s who marched and gave their lives for Civil Rights and died in Vietnam, a war that the GG defended until they died. It is not a generational difference. Racists and conservative capitalists have existed since the founding of America, and we all have to fight until their ideology is pushed back into the shadows with all other degeneracy.

[whathehell]

29. Do you imagine

Last edited Fri Apr 24, 2020, 10:06 AM - Edit history (1)

that those lynchings, in the north, especially, got ANYTHING like the publicity then that later generations saw?...Stop looking for scapegoats.

[Nitram]

32. I'm not looking for scapegoats. Postcards of those lynchings were sold. They tolerated public

separation in buses, movie theaters, concert venues...virtually every public facility. The signs were ubiquitous. If we don't face history, we will never overcome the past.

[whathehell]

36. Postcards?

They wete hideous, but one can hardly compare the circulation "reach" of postcards to that of television, and/or the Internet..Mass media it's not, and in terms of awareness, that's what we're talking about -- The vast majority of Anericans werr NOT seeing those cards.

The segregation of public facilities, you've noted were a feature of the Jim Crow Laws of the South. They were NOT enacted in the North and that segregation was not practiced there.

[Nitram]

37. I'm afraid racism was rife in the North, and segregation was enforced in many communities, country

clubs, universities, and elsewhere. Members of the GG who were not overtly racist turned a blind eye to a system that discriminated against African Americans in every facet of life. Here's an excerpt from one description:

Malignant racism appeared throughout northern political, economic, and social life during the 18th and 19th centuries. But the cancerous history of the Jim Crow North metastasized during the mid-20th century.

Six million black people moved north and west between 1910 and 1970, seeking jobs, desiring education for their children, and fleeing racial terrorism.

The rejuvenation of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 20th century, promoting pseudo-scientific racism known as "eugenics," immigration restriction, and racial segregation found supple support in pockets of the North, from California to Michigan to Queens, New York—not only in the states of the old Confederacy.

The KKK was a visible and overt example of widespread northern racism that remained covert and insidious. Over the course of the 20th century, northern laws, policies, and policing strategies cemented Jim Crow.

In northern housing, the New Deal-era government Home Owners Loan Corporation maintained and created racially segregated neighborhoods. The research of scholars Robert K. Nelson, LaDale Winling, Richard Marciano, and Nathan Connolly, through their valuable website, Mapping Inequality, makes this history visible and undeniable.

Zoning policies in the North preserved racial segregation in schools. Discrimination in jobs contributed to economic underdevelopment of businesses and neighborhoods, as well as destabilization of families. Crime statistics became a modern weapon for justifying the criminalization of northern urban black populations and aggressive forms of policing.

A close examination of the history of the Jim Crow North—what Rosa Parks referred to as the "northern promised land that wasn't"—demonstrates how racial discrimination and segregation operated as a system.

Judges, police officers, school board officials, and many others created and maintained the scaffolding for a northern Jim Crow system that hid in plain sight.

New Deal policies, combined with white Americans' growing apprehension toward the migrants moving from the South to the North, created a systematized raw deal for the country's black people.

Segregation worsened after the New Deal of the 1930s in multiple ways. For example, Federal Housing Administration policies rated neighborhoods for residential and school racial homogeneity. Aid to Dependent Children carved a requirement for "suitable homes" in discriminatory ways. Policymakers and intellectuals blamed black "cultural pathology" for social disparities.

As Martin Luther King Jr. pointedly observed in 1965, "As the nation, negro and white, trembled with outrage at police brutality in the South, police misconduct in the North was rationalized, tolerated and usually denied..."

...Many northerners, even ones who pushed for change in the South, were silent and often resistant to change at home. One of the grandest achievements of the modern civil rights movement—the 1964 Civil Rights Act—contained a key loophole to prevent school desegregation from coming to northern communities.

https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-racist-history-of-the-north

[whathehell]

38. I'm afraid you're doing something called 'moving the goal posts'

Having failed on the facts to indict an entire generation for lynching and Jim Crow Laws, you're now left with little more than vague, generalized accusations.

The history of racism in this country is no secret, but it is something many of the Greatest, the Silent, and the Boomer generation tried and continue to try to rectify.

That, of course, will.never satisfy those whose primary interest lies in finger pointing and grudge nursing. I'm not one of those and have no interest in engaging them. Have a very nice day..

[Nitram]

40. Please read my next post before you completely dismiss my point. It has taken some time to research

the topic. Once again, I nurse no grudge against the GG. I am merely pointing out that every generation has its strengths, its weaknesses, and its good and bad players. As for lynching "being no secret", others who posted here excused the GG by virtue of ignorance rather than indifference.

[Nitram]

39. For those who believe the Greatest Generation was just ignorant of what was happening to African-

Americans in the south (and to a lesser degree in other parts of the country), I recommend reading the report titled "Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror." https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/ The topic of lynchings was widely discussed in newspapers, periodicals and in both houses of Congress from the turn of the century into the 1940s. It was left to a younger generation to actually do something about racism, including the college kids who became "Freedom Riders."

"Due in large part to the racist propaganda disseminated during World War I, and the nationwide outbreak of racial violence that characterized the “Red Summer” of 1919, lynching became a major national issue by the 1920s. The NAACP launched a renewed campaign for federal anti-lynching legislation that succeeded in winning passage of the Dyer anti-lynching bill in the House of Representatives on January 26, 1922, by a vote of 231-119."

[TEB]

41. Thank you for posting