Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for July 21, 2019

“The younger generation is going to hell. The future is doomed.” —graffito found inside an Egyptian pyramid, ~2500 BCE

They’re always at the Baby Boomers – if it hadn’t been for you, the world would be a better place. Right. We supplied our own shopping bags; we brought things home in paper bags; we fixed things when they didn’t work any more, rather than buy a new one and chuck the old one out. Yeah, we sure did do it wrong in those days.

Well now I know what ‘life hacks’ are.

Every generation blames the generation before them and then they go on and make the same mistakes.

I’ll go for the last option: All Of The Above.

The Rolling Stones refute that old age is uncool at each sold out “event” they perform.

Lifehacks used to be using regular items in a different, smarter, way to help with other things. In same with the word meme it is rather watered down these days.

I saw the ultimate in life hack articles the other day. “If you are eating bananas…you are probably doing it wrong.” How seriously useless do you have to be to dedicate time to finding the “correct” way to eat a banana? And writing an article about it?

Whenever I hear a Boomer criticize modern hairstyles, I want to laugh out loud.

Hey, lighten up people. A lot of comics would be out of work if generations didn’t have anything to complain about other generations.

Bernie’s pretty cool in my book, to come up with a definition like that for life hack.

As a baby boomer, I wondered what happened to my generation. We were the generation that was going to “stick it to the MAN.” Now many of my contemporaries have become “establishment.”

Where did the enthusiasm go? “We haven’t had that spirit here since 1969.”

I was 50 years old and a high school teacher. One day I decided I had reached my limit of being called ‘the old guy who didn’t know anything about life.’ So I suggested they take a good look at anyone in their family about my age and who they were said to resemble. Then I said, ‘Years from now, you will look into the mirror and be shocked to see that old person is you. And you also will see me looking over your shoulder and laughing.’ Of course, they said I wouldn’t be alive then. And I replied, ‘Even where you say I’m going, there will be entertainment.’

34 years later, I can feel the after shocks building and I’m laughing.

Yes and we Baby Boomers felt that we had a right to cheep gasoline at the expense of others, and if we needed to dispose a legitimate ruler in some middle eastern county to do so, that was fine. We are now paying for that one.

We are the generation of the cold war, free sex, recreational drugs and urban sprawl.

We are the generation that took the greatest economy in modern history and mortgaged it to the hilt for all of our wants, there by bequeathing a runaway national debt and a gaping federal budget shortfall to our children and grandchildren.

Baby Boomers have many accomplishments as well to be proud of. Much of the basis for todays technology comes from Baby Boomers, Microsoft, Apple and the World Wide Web to name just a few.

Frankly as a Baby Boomer I do not see us as the greatest generation. The Greatest Generation was the one that spawned the Baby Boomers.

They survived a depression, fought a world war like no other in history and they were the ones that truly define the gains in civil rights. Oh I know, that some of these things happened during our generation, but let us not forget that Truman desegregated the military in 1946, the year the first Baby Boomers were born. Not one baby boomer in 1954 could vote when Brown vs The Board of Education case desegregated schools in the us. The first Baby Boomers to vote did not do so until 1967.

Every generation has its accomplishments and failures and one can not take pride in their accomplishments without feeling shame for their failures.

I like this as the young adults of today rant about how they are so smart and will do things so much better because those of us who are old don’t care about (fill in the blank). Yeah, I remember my generation saying the same thing (to be honest, some things did improve).

Being Green

Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the much older woman, that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment.The woman apologized and explained, “We didn’t have this ‘green thing’ back in my earlier days.”The young clerk responded, “That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for futuregenerations.”She was right — our generation didn’t have the ‘green thing’ in our day.Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over.

So they really were recycled.But we didn’t have the “green thing” back in our day.Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags, that we reused for numerous things, most memorable besides household garbage bags, was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our schoolbooks. This was to ensure that public property, (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribblings. Then we were able to personalize our books on the brown paper bags.But too bad we didn’t do the “green thing” back then.We walked up stairs, because we didn’t have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks.But she was right. We didn’t have the “green thing” in our day.

Back then, we washed the baby’s diapers because we didn’t have the throwaway kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy-gobbling machine burning up 220 volts — wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing.

But that young lady is right; we didn’t have the “green thing” back in our day.

Use it up,Wear it out,Make it do,Or do without

I remember watching Elvis Presley on his first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show with my parents. My father (who thought Irving Berlin wrote the last good music) watched in disgust and asked if “this is really what you young people like today?”. Plus ca change.

The generation born between 1946 and 1965 consume more resources than any generation before or since, created the current throw-away society and prevent politics from dealing with the consequences. Public transit, green energy projects, polluter pay, emission cuts, and many other things get blocked by Boomers who don’t want change. But hey, everyone born since ’66 is the problem.

Nailed it!

This old guy appreciates younger people, listens to them, and learns.

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” — Mark Twain, although there is some question to the quotes authenticity.

“Why can’t they be like we were, perfect in every way?

Oh, what’s the matter with kids today?"

Funniest article in one of my Smithsonian magazines were letters from the first century CE in which parents groaned and complained about the kids’ behavior and manners, and kids complained about the ridiculousness of their parents’ beliefs and mores. . . . And the beat goes on . . . and the beat goes on. . .

I thought my fellow baby boomers were the dumbest and laziest generation ever – and that turned out to be true. Gen Y and Gen Z are far less likely to do drugs or drunkenness, are absent less at work, are better educated by far, and are more productive at work (all data available at BLS). However, like all young ones, they tend to be judgmental.

Today must be generation gap day for comic artists: https://www.gocomics.com/candorville/2019/07/21?ct=v&cti=1552592

You want a Life Hack get a CRISPR

The generation after the Millennials is called “Generation Z”. I’m very worried about that, is this the last generation? Are we at the end of human kind? I’m not sleeping well.

My favorite part is how most all comments here prove the comic right and perpetuate the cycle.

“Millenials,” the Inconsiderate Generation.

We made mistakes, sure. But I point out to these children that they are not radioactive debris—yet. We avoided that, kids, see if you can … or don’t you care, because nothing bad can happen to you?

This cartoon is not about Baby Boomers. Those are two old men.

It’s funny that the generation that relies on search engines for ALL their knowledge thinks they know everything.

I believe it’s been like that since, at the very least, somebody figured out how to cook food (tasty, but not traditional).

The issue is of course that we never imagined we would reach the age where we’d be saying things like this…..

Strauss–Howe generational theory

They identified a sequence of four generational archetypes—which they call Prophet, Nomad, Hero, and Artist—that have recurred in that order throughout American history. The generations in each archetype have similar age locations in history, and thus share some basic attitudes towards family, risk, culture and values, and civic engagement, among other things. As each archetype ages, its persona undergoes profound and characteristic changes. Yet each also has an underlying identity that endures over the centuries.

As of 2019, the breakdown by age looks like this:

Baby Boomers: Baby boomers were born between 1944 and 1964. They’re current between 55-75 years old (76 million in U.S.)

Gen X: Gen X was born between 1965 – 1979 and are currently between 40-54 years old (82 million people in U.S.)

Gen Y: Gen Y, or Millennials, were born between 1980 and 1994. They are currently between 25-39 years old.

Gen Y.1 = 25-29 years old (31 million people in U.S.)

Gen Y.2 = 29-39 (42 million people in U.S.)

Gen Z: Gen Z is the newest generation to be named and were born between 1995 and 2015. They are currently between 4-24 years old (nearly 74 million in U.S.)

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The boomers are out numbered and could be out voted.