From a discussion at SG about Boomers and their destruction of the American way of life.
It’s hard for the younger generation to even conceive of what the generations that preceded the Boomers were like. I am speaking of the USA. Let me try to give you a taste. They loved their families, they were a cohesive civilized team, willing to put significant skin in the game to make things better. They wanted their kids to do better than they did. It was a common motto. They did try to actively curb the worst tendencies of the Boomers until they died off. You can see this in the cultural decline acceleration around 2005.
Any adult anywhere, as a member of the societal team, could and would correct me or any child when badly behaved. If you accidentally dented someone’s car you left a note, as examples. High trust, universally known unwritten rules. Everyone knew the shared history and traditions. It felt like One Great Extended Family rowing the boat together. As Gen z (and the younger generations) you very likely have not even know the experience of your own family as a team, from which experience you might imagine what a unified and cohesive broader society was. Gen X got to experience the discontinuity with in their own families, in most cases, and within society. It was a sudden mass plunge for many. Working Moms, latch key neglect, mass divorce, single parenthood, abortion. We had an apples and oranges comparison that was not subtile. Gen X suffers the grief of having lost something phenomenal that we were unable to stop and are unable to reverse.
What broke can not be fixed but maybe something that rhymes can be rebuilt. To try to do that, the Boomers need to be out of the way and the younger generations need to know what can be from what was.
The preceding generations did a lot of good, and you can be sure that their hearts and minds were in the right place even when they were spectacularly wrong. This you can easily forgive. They were human. They did their best. You loved them and they loved you.
If you want to get a taste of what it was like, look at the old cover art by Norman Rockwell, watch the old Captain America, Casablanca, anything by Frank Capra, anything with John Wayne. Look at the old Bugs Bunny cartoons and know that Bugs was the average American, modeled after Clark Gable, particularly in “It happened one night”. And we did NOT think of ourselves as a “nation of immigrants”. We were NOT full of rootless recents that only have this slogan as some common touch point. We were Americans, with both national and ingrained, globally dominant culture. Before USA USA was a “MAGA chant” it was just normal. Blue jeans were American and were like dollars. You could trade them anywhere in the world for almost anything. We also had regional dress, dialects and traditions because people were here in one place long enough for that stuff to be there. Assimilation in most places meant you weren’t “us” until the third generation, where the second married a townie and had kids. The kids were us. We didn’t think about anywhere else besides the the US much, if at all, but we did have some decorations modeled on the 17th century we used for Thanks Giving that included Indians as we knew them going back over 500 years, and I don’t mean the hyphenated come lately people named by the East India Company. It’s baloney to say we didn’t have a culture. We had a culture and national identity that was so globally dominant, so coveted that the dress and speech of the entire globe has been impacted to reflect