Tag: BabyBoomers

The cognitive decline of the Baby Boomers in comparison with past generations is not exactly a surprise.

American baby boomers scored lower on a test of cognitive functioning than did members of previous generations, according to a new nationwide study by researchers at Ohio State University.

The study, published in the Journals of Gerontology, described how the average cognition scores of adults aged 51 and older have been improving from generation to generation, starting with the greatest generation (born 1890-1923) to war babies (born 1942-1947).

But the study showed there were significant declines in the scores for early baby boomers (1948-1953) through the mid-baby boomers (1954-1959).

It would appear that pot, pina coladas, and narcissism are not good for the mind or the soul. What is somewhat of a surprise, however, is that Boomers are even more sensitive than the Millennials they deride as “snowflakes”.

Baby boomers are the most sensitive generation according to a recent study published in the Journal of Psychology and Aging. Baby boomers, or people between the ages of 55 to 73, are more likely to be narcissistic and hypersensitive. Findings suggested those in the baby boom generation were more likely to be full of themselves and more likely to impose their opinions on others.

Sadly, the researchers were unable to determine the relative sensitivity of Generation X, as none of their GenX respondents could be bothered to respond to their questions.

Somehow, Roseanne Barr figured out the conspiracy behind the Boomer Flu:

Roseanne Barr recently posited a wacky theory that the coronavirus pandemic is an effort to eliminate baby boomers like herself.

“You know what it is, Norm? I think they’re just trying to get rid of all my generation,” Barr told Macdonald during the Sunday interview on his informal YouTube talk show “Quarantined with Norm Macdonald,” in which he calls up his friends to chat. “The boomer ladies that, you know, that inherited their — you know, are widows. They inherited the money so they got to go wherever the money is and figure out a way to get it away from people.”

Macdonald seemed to play along with Barr, commenting that “because there’s so many boomers that have money and do no work, so if you got them out of society — yeah, that would be a good thriller.”

This is a historic moment, though, as it marks the first time that a Baby Boomer has actually contemplated her generational mortality and the possibility of a world without Boomers.

Adam Piggott is less than impressed by the irony of Boomers appealing to the younger generations they previously aborted, scorned, and ignored:

I am stunned at the amount of gall required to write that society is treating the Boomers as medically expendable, this the generation that pushed and advocated for abortion on demand, also known as baby murdering. The Boomers have had it their own way for their entire lives. But this virus couldn’t have come at a worse time for them. They react in outraged horror at the very idea that medical help in this crisis will be reserved for people under 65, when they themselves are the over 65s who will be left out. How can this possibly be happening? It wasn’t supposed to be like this. They are the anointed ones, the Woodstock-worshiping free love sex kittens without a care in the world, baby, hot damn, and it’s all gonna be groovy, man, except the grooviness has to be paid sometime and we may as well make it at your expense.

As always, it’s always about the Boomers. They demand the continuation of the free ride at the expense of everyone else which they have been enjoying their entire lives. The gravy train cannot be allowed to end, no matter what the circumstances. Oh the horror that somewhere a Boomer might be inconvenienced to the benefit of someone from an earlier generation.

Now, I would recommend medical triage and treating the at-risk over-65s last on purely logical, medical, and utilitarian grounds. It’s obvious that they will consume more medical resources to less avail than any other group. But the fact that doing the right thing upsets and outrages so many Boomers is not only entirely typical, it is also more than a little amusing.

Just as we salute and offer our respects to the aged victims of the virus who understand that they have already lived their lives and decline treatment in favor of it going to their younger counterparts, we should mercilessly mock those elderly who refuse to accept that their day is done and insist on clinging to the idea that they are as important to society as those upon whom the future depends.

The even greater irony here is that it is the Boomers who are apparently some of the worst culprits when it comes to refusing to stay at home. Every generation expects the youth to be foolish, stupid, and convinced of their own immortality, but Generation X may be the first generation to have learned to expect it of their elders.

UPDATE: An observation from Boomerville:

A firsthand account from Boomerville. Here in Florida, ground-zero for Boomerville, the Boomers are out in swarms. I briefly had to go out yesterday, and they’re everywhere, walking around, for no reason at all. Looking in empty shop windows, strolling down the beach, etc. It’s almost outrageous to see them acting so carefree.

In Bergamo, an elderly priest gave up the respirator his parishioners bought for him in order to save the lives of younger victims.

A 72-year-old priest who gave his respirator to a younger Covid-19 patient he did not know has died from coronavirus. Father Giuseppe Berardelli, the main priest in the town of Casnigo, refused a respirator which had been bought for him by his parishioners and instead gave it to a younger patient.

He died last week in Lovere, Bergamo – one of the worst-hit cities in Italy’s ongoing coronavirus crisis.

“He was a simple, straightforward person, with a great kindness and helpfulness towards everyone, believers and non-believers,” Giuseppe Imberti, the mayor of Casnigo, said in a statement, according to the Italian news website Araberara.

Although there was no funeral for the priest, residents of the town reportedly applauded from their balconies as his coffin was taken for burial.

Meanwhile, a reader writes from Florida:

Grocery stores in Florida have enacted a special early shopping time for “elderly” shoppers. Of course elderly is now considered 65 and up. Boomers line up in the hundreds, ignoring social distancing, and go through the store like a plague of locusts. Forget women and children, gotta give the Boomers first dibs.

Typical. All too typical. Because God hates the wicked, it is good to hate the Boomer. As with Father Giuseppe, there can be little doubt about what god they serve. The contrast demonstrates that being a Boomer is more than just a range of temporal mileage, it is, more importantly, a state of soul.

Since the concept often comes when people are metaphorically beating up on Baby Boomers, it might be helpful to understand what is meant by the generational Turnings, which is a four-phase model of social change based on the interaction of the availability and demand for social order:

Fourth Turning

The Fourth Turning is a Crisis. Old Artists die, Prophets enter elderhood, Nomads enter midlife, Heroes enter young adulthood—and a new generation of child Artists is born. This is an era in which America’s institutional life is torn down and rebuilt from the ground up—always in response to a perceived threat to the nation’s very survival. Civic authority revives, cultural expression finds a community purpose, and people begin to locate themselves as members of a larger group. In every instance, Fourth Turnings have eventually become new “founding moments” in America’s history, refreshing and redefining the national identity. America’s most recent Fourth Turning began with the stock market crash of 1929 and climaxed with World War II. The generation that came of age during this Fourth Turning was the Hero archetype G.I. Generation (born 1901 to 1924), whose collective spirit and can-do optimism epitomized the mood of the era. Today’s Hero archetype youth, the Millennial Generation (born 1982 to 2004) show many traits similar to those of the G.I. youth, including rising civic engagement, improving behavior, and collective confidence.

In Parsons’ terms, a Fourth Turning is an era in which the availability of social order is low, but the demand for such order is high. Examples of earlier Fourth Turnings include the Civil War in the 1860s and the American Revolution in the 1770s—both periods of momentous crisis, when the identity of the nation hung in the balance.

I have to say, the Zoomers look a lot more like a Hero generation to me than do the Millennials. But, we’ll see. Of course, the only two things the Boomers will take from this is a) prophet? I like the sound of that, and, b) see, it totally WASN’T our fault!

Save the useless old people first! The cri de coeur of the Boomer facing the possibility of a Corona-chan-based Boomercaust.

Throughout the developing crisis in Italy, however, I’ve noticed a worrying ageism in the language surrounding the question of who to treat first. Some medics have been openly admitting that they are prioritising younger patients over older ones.

I appreciate the huge difficulties doctors in Italy are facing, but this is not acceptable. Ageism is the last bastion of acceptable prejudice in society. Phrases such as ‘they were old anyway’ and ‘they’ve had a good life’ are bandied about without thinking about what they really mean.

Does your age mean your life is worth less than someone else’s?

Yes, absolutely! There are multiple reasons to prioritize saving younger people in these circumstances and every elderly individual worth his salt wouldn’t hesitate to agree. Damned Boomers can’t even die with dignity; it’s no surprise that so many of them are going out caterwauling and crying about their importance to the bitter end.

First, the principles of triage dictate that the old people most at risk be treated last. Their treatment consumes more medical resources to less avail than any other population. Second, the principles of economics dictate that old people most at risk be treated last. Their treatment costs considerably more, which means fewer of them can be treated. Third, the principles of fairness dictate that old people be treated last. They have already lived most of their lives, where the young have not. And fourth, the principles of societal survival dictate that old people be treated last. They can neither maintain or sustain society, while the young must live if society is to survive.

Prioritizing medical treatement for the young over the elderly is not only acceptable, it is absolutely necessary, especially in times when resources are limited. Not only is it not “agism” to deprioritize the treatment of the elderly, it is pure anti-societal narcissism for any elderly individual to demand equal medical priority for his age cohort.

Generation X finally finds its hero: Pillow Man.

A Dallas County Grand Jury on Tuesday indicted Billy Chemirmir, 47, on murder charges in the deaths of Leah Corken, 83, and Juanita Prudy, 82. The two women lived in The Tradition-Prestonwood in Dallas and died suddenly in the summer of 2016. Court documents claim that Chemirmir smothered the women to death with a pillow.

Chemirmir is suspected of being involved with more than 1,000 unexplained deaths in Texas.

And here I always thought The Day of the Pillow was just a metaphor.

A Boomer booms defensively:

It’s always hilarious to read a Gen-Xer’s attempt to blame things on Boomers, instead of where it belongs: in Obama’s generation, GenX. Projection is ugly to look at, but it’s alive and well in the GenX Boomer Bashers. 

Barack Obama was born in 1961. The Baby Boomer generation ended in 1964. In addition to their vast panoply of other generational flaws, Boomers are observably stupid.

Captain Capitalism addresses the Baby Boomers and how they produced the Millennials:

The Millennials didn’t grow up in a vacuum.  They weren’t born in the cabbage patch, sprouted legs one day, and then “POOF,” 22 years later found themselves $120K in debt with a Master’s degree in Diversity and Inclusion.  Like everyone else they were a product of their environment.  And a huge part of that environment, if not the most influential part, was the elders who would raise them.  Parents, teachers, professors, guidance counselors, therapists, bosses, even politicians and media personalities would directly and indirectly wield incredible, if not total influence over the Millennials and would be the single most determining variable in how the Millennials would turn out.

This is the way it has always been throughout human history because there’s no other way for it to be.  Younger generations have to be raised by older generations.  But the Millennials were going to be raised by a very unique generation of elders.  A generation of elders that the world had never seen before in terms of its wealth, stability, pampering, and privilege.  Nor had the world seen such an arrogant, self-important, completely delusional, and completely wrong generation before. And it was this generation that was going to prepare the Millennials for the real world – the Baby Boomers.

What I absolutely love about the Baby Boomers, what I find so incredibly rich is how they were the generation that coined the phrase “Never trust anybody over 30.”  And you need to really break down this statement to appreciate how hypocritical, delusional, arrogant, and simply wrong that statement is and therefore how wrong the Baby Boomers are.

First, Boomers said this when they were young.  Not only stupid, but inexperienced and young.  They were a bunch of teenage, 20 something know-nothings, who never worked a job, had yet to start families, draft-dodged a war, but somehow they thought they knew better than their elders and the culminated eons of human history.  Not only is this against common sense, it’s the epitome of hubris and arrogance.  Many of them hadn’t even gone to college to have a political religion installed in them so they’d parrot such outlandish stupidity.  They were just that naturally stupid and arrogant on their own!

It’s remotely possible that the Baby Boomers aren’t the worse generation in human history. But they certainly did manage to destroy what was once the wealthiest, freest, most powerful nation on Earth. It wasn’t entirely their fault; they did not plant the seeds of that destruction. But instead of weeding the garden of those evil shoots, they enthusiastically watered them.

And that is why future generations that never even knew them will hate them. They will not hate the Boomers for the same reasons that Gen-X and Gen-Z hate them, but they will hate them all the same.

Back in 1986, Jerry Pournelle published an essay in Imperial Stars Vol. I: The Stars at War, in which he addressed the economic concerns of the USA’s aging population as it faced the prospect of bankruptcy:

If a family can see that over the next five years they’ve no choice but to spend money that won’t be coming in, they’ve got some decisions to make. Perhaps a second job, or a new source of income; but suppose there aren’t any?

Sell something? But if there’s nothing to sell? Cut expenses? Perhaps, although if the expenses are taxes that’s not going to work either. And governments, it seems, can’t cut expenses. Reagan’s “cuts” were only a slowdown of increases; the 1983 budget is considerably larger (in real dollars) than was the 1982 budget. So while we talk of budget cuts, we don’t mean it, and I don’t suppose we ever will.

Then what’s left? In the case of a family, it’s obvious. Speculative investments. If you’re going to go broke anyway, take a high flyer and the worst that happens is you’re bankrupt sooner; at best you make enough to keep going.

Return now to the US: we have an aging work force. It is absolutely predictable that in a few years there are going to be more people retired, and fewer able to work; and somebody’s got to support the retired. They’re voters, you know, and they’ll be organized.

Project this scenario ahead twenty years, and you can scare yourself; yet I think of no single institution, none whatever, that can and will do anything about it. All parts of our government operate on a much shorter time frame. If we had one hereditary house in Congress—heresy as it is to say—we’d at least have an institution that worried about the next decade, since its members would know they’d still be there to face the problems. They might also be concerned about their children. But we have no such institution in government, and now that the family has become relatively unimportant we don’t have many private ones to look that far ahead either.

Does this mean we’re doomed?

I don’t know. It’s sure a hell of a challenge.

How, then, can we prevent our children from cursing our memory?

The best way, it seems to me, is investment; to do what Keyworth said the administration wants to do; but do it in a big way. Look: we’re facing bankruptcy. They keep projecting federal deficits larger than the whole budget was during the Johnson administration. The remedy, some say, is to raise taxes, but we all know that’s asinine. All higher taxes do is stimulate people to spend effort on tax avoidance rather than wealth creation. Right now we have teams of the brightest people in the nation working for the IRS, and other equally competent teams working for their victims; the vectorial sum of their activity is zero. How is the Republic well served by this?

No: if we’re headed for bankruptcy, we’d as well be hung for sheep as lambs. You’re going to have deficits? Pity; but if so, take some of it and invest. Back long shots. Like space industries. Lunar colonies. Heave money at the universities. Change tax laws to provide really heavy incentives for industry to do basic R&D.

What you’re praying for is a breakthrough; some way to change the very rules of the game. That’s happened often enough in history, although seldom in response to deliberate stimulation; but what the hell, we’re desperate, or should be.

And I mean that: we should be in a state of near panic just now. How can you look into the future and be anything but scared? The work force gets older. Our machines get older. Our taxes get higher, and our savings get lower. More and more people become concerned with “survival”, the underground economy is the only thing that’s booming (and what a marvelous thing that is! We get surgeons out painting their own houses, because it’s cheaper than hiring it done. A real accomplishment). We ought to be scared stiff.

One thing we now know with the benefit of 34 years of hindsight: permitting mass immigration to import a younger work force is absolutely not the answer and will not prevent succeeding generations from cursing the memory of the preceding ones. Bankruptcy and a lower standard of living would have been vastly preferable.

But, unfortunately, that was not considered an acceptable option to the Baby Boomers. Now, ironically enough, and as we may be seeing sooner rather than later in Virginia, there will be war.