You already took everything from me, Mom. I don’t have anything left to take care of you with. Now we’ll both starve. I’m the frog, you’re the scorpion on my back, and these are the consequences of you stinging me.
“I’m not worrying about it. I will be dead by then”
It’s not older generations fucking younger generations. It’s the wealthy people fucking the vulnerable
The wealthy don’t care who you hate: the elderly, foreigners, immigrants, muslims, jews, black people, white people, the chinese… They’ll be fine as long as you’re fighting amongst each other.
The
<insertGroupCategoryHere>-war is a proxy for the only war that ever mattered: The Class War.
Guess who’s got all the money! Hint: it’s not young people.
It’s also not the old people. Sure, the rich are old people, but that doesn’t mean old people are rich.
My grandfather died and his wife sold their 200k lake front cabin to a stranger for 40k. She wastes thousands of his pension at the casino every week. It sickens me he worked his whole life and it’s all just being given to strangers.
There’s a traditionalist/conservative band in Québec that made a very popular song about this about 20 years ago called “Dégénération”. The song is pretty good but I always hated it because at some point they whine about some young woman that’s always with a different partner and “saves herself” with abortions, saying she secretly dreams of having 14 kids, like her great grandmother. The rest of the lyrics are pretty bang on, but they’re really insisting on the traditionalist aspects and it sours the song for me.
But essentially, the first bits are going like this:
Your great-great-grandfather, he cleared the land
Your great-grandfather, he worked the land
And then your grandfather made the land profitable
Then your father, he sold it to become a civil servant
Row 2 would kick in the teeth of Row 3 if they saw them voting for fascists like they keep doing.
oh yeah fuck women, homosexuals and minorities, those were the good old days full of good honest people
You’re talking about the generation that was literally in charge when American society was desegregated, when women were first allowed to have bank accounts, and when homosexuality was legalized, but go off.
Exactly, it’s the abject willful ignorance that angers me. It’s not like the facts aren’t there, but profiling is easier than thinking.
Good and bad can coexist in a worldview. Teach your kids that they should love their neighbors but your neighbors are all white and straight (-presenting), etc. They were terrible in aggregate in a lot of ways, but there was solid agreement that Nazis could go fuck themselves. If boomers wish their kids would listen to them more, maybe they should remember their own parents’ stances on fascism.
Nazis could go fuck themselfs unless they needed them to go to the moon
Boomer here, the first moon landing happened before I started high school. The same “greatest generation” that fought the nazis also brought them into the space program. Please get your fucking history straight.
what? that was exactly the point. I mean what to expect from americans lol
Probably not actually, the Nazi party was relatively popular in America, they really only entered America to make some money and essentially takeover the global economy and politics.
[Citation needed]
I was curious, and it was german american groups like the Gemran America Bund which had ~25,000 members. There were also groups that opposed them and pro nazi leaders were arrested when the US entered the war. So not really broad support by any means.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism_in_the_Americas
Also US companies kept making money in nazi germany, even using forced labor in some cases…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_collaboration_with_Nazi_Germany
The USA was already making money from both sides of the war in Europe. That was mostly the reason they didn’t enter it until Japan bombed them because Japan didn’t like having their fuel supplies cut off by the USA because the USA thought the USA should be the only ones to expand an empire into the Pacific. Following that they wanted support for their retaliation to Japan’s retaliation to their retaliation to Japan’s expansion into the Pacific so they picked a side in Europe (probably the side who owed them the most money) and entered the war against the Nazis.
so they picked a side in Europe (probably the side who owed them the most money)
Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying, but it seems Japan was allied with Germany and Italy at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack. Given this is the case, I’m not sure what fight against Japan and alongside Germany could have possibly looked like.
They had a loose alliance from 1936 and signed the tripartite in 1940 but that really amounted to keeping out of each other way and sharing information. They only mutually declared war on the US a week after Japan bombed pearl harbour. The US was still profiting from both sides of the European theatre up until then so whos to say what backroom negotiations were happening between Germany and the US in that week. The Nazis werent really renown for treating people from different ethnic groups as equals so who’s to say what their first preference of allies were. We can only rely on our written history which is conveniently written by the winners …
You’d make a good history teacher.
You’ll upset a lot of yanks who ignore how 'Murica sat out most of the war, how Henry Ford and others were huge fans of Hitler, and that they didn’t rescue the rest of the world
Yeah it’s not like boomers showed up for anti-war marches, anti-racism marches, environmental marches… no, nothing like that, we just said “fuck you entitled brats”. This manufactured hate is as ignorant as criticizing young people for not having kids, or thinking they all sit around eating avocado toast.
Not my parents. They’re consuming everything they can and are explicit that they don’t worry about after them.
Born in 1947 and 1952.
Same, 46 and 50. And all of their siblings that are still alive. Zero plans to leave a cent of their gains to their families.
And yet none of the boomers I know think or act like that. Whaddya know - people are individuals and aren’t defined by the public perception of their generation. It’s almost like people deserve for you to treat them as the individuals they are instead of regurgitating memes about them.
As a 13th generation North American I don’t get this meme.
Mayflower material, eh?
let’s calculate: mayflower in 1618 to today, roughly 2018 is about 400 years. first child was mostly had around age 22 for most of that time, so that makes 400 / 22 ≈ 18 generations if you’re descended from a long row of first-borns.
No, those are 15th generation.
We came from Germany to Philadelphia via Dublin a little after them because the French burned our house down.
Oddly, I’m a 13th gen Mayflower. They liked to keep cranking 'em out for a while I guess. Might also explain the offshoot that became Mormon. We don’t associate with them.
Strangely, I’m a 12th generation Mayflower baby (via John Howland), but unfortunately my whole family has long been Mormon (not me since I graduated high school at least)
I estimated the generations for mine and just added two because we came 40 years after. Depending on the fecundity of my line it might be more than that.
Kids have a way of happening.
A hundred years from now, there will be a small dip on the chart for this time, that’s it.
Women have multiple ways to avoid pregnancy. Men have multiple ways to avoid pregnancy. People who are educated about their options exercise those options like all the time, which is why so many of us don’t have kids at all. Myself very much included. Thats why birth rates are declining so drastically.
Unless you are saying women can’t use birth control or get abortions for some reason…? Or abstain entirely as young people seem to be doing in surprisingly large numbers?
“Kids have a way of happening” is basically saying other people don’t or shouldn’t have bodily autonomy… kinda fucked up.
Men and women in developed countries have had multiple ways to avoid pregnancy for decades, but it’s only recently that birth rates have fallen below replacement in most of those countries. So there’s something missing from your story, at least.
Yeah, so this post is POV North American per title, the problem of selfish boomers is one that afaik only developed countries even have, so while you are correct, its entirely irrelevant to the conversation at hand, which is why I didn’t say anything about it.
I don’t understand this, sorry
On re-read I think I may have misread what you wrote but ima leave this up anyway.
People used to have like… hopes that they could support their kids… we haven’t had that for a while now so birth rates are falling faster than they would otherwise. That’s all thats missing from my story above.
——
The post title is “point of view: you are a 4th generation North American” thus it’s specifically about North Americans to begin with.
Baby boomers are a thing that really only exist (at least to my knowledge) in developed/western nations, due to them being a post-war cohort. Basically countries involved in WW2, after the war killed off millions of young men, saw a surge in births to recover population. Baby boomers. Countries not involved in the war didn’t have the baby boom the way western countries did, because why would they? There was no pressure to restore their population numbers.
Since the meme is about baby boomers, specifically, being selfish, which is inherently a developed-country problem, as well as specifically about being a north American, people in developing countries having less access to family planning is entirely irrelevant, even if it is true.
Hope that helps :) if not I can try again.
That helps. I think you misunderstood - what I was trying to say was something quite similar: the person I replied to (who I think wasn’t you) was talking about access to family planning, and I was saying this has been available in developed countries for a long time. So although it did lead to a decrease in birth rate decades ago, it’s only recently that we see sub-replacement rates, so that latter effect specifically is likely not to do with access to family planning.
Hope that also helps, haha!
I mean, its kinda a boomer take. But what they are saying is that a lot of people reach a certain point in life where they change their minds and decide to have kids even though they didnt want them or thought they werent ready yet. The person who says “ugh, no, there is no way I would ever have kids” and then 3 years later rolls over in bed with their partner and says “yaknow… what if…?”
Which, really this shouldn’t be surprising. As a biological organism, essentially all your drives are oriented around survival and reproduction.
Of course, declining birth rates around the world push back against this theory… But with a wider view, we expect evolution to take its course, and for traits that encourage greater reproduction to be selected for.
One of the tiresome elements of Reddit was always this childrfree tribalism that seemed to span thousands of subs. Have kids, don’t have kids. Entirely your own business and nobody else’s. Neither decision should be worn as some sort of badge of honour.
It’s not biological evolution but social evolution that’ll happen. Right now you have immigrants coming from a family with 7 siblings. They move to a Western country. The second generation immigrant will be at the same 1.x reproduction number as the rest of that country. It’s the environment, the social arrangement.
It means that the countries supporting of children in the long term will survive and pressure cooker ones with very child unfriendly traditions and policies will slowly fade away.
I have to say, this feels like a take that I’d like to see some evidence for. Because often those immigrants are coming from countries with essentially no social safety net and very regressive social customs. They have 7 kids because the mom was raised in a tight knit religious community where it was made very clear that her worth as a person was dependent on birthing and raising many children, and she carried that belief into adulthood. When these nations gain access to birth control, better education and autonomy for women, and more knowledge of the outside world, birth rates drop.
On the other hand, I have yet to hear of any developed nation successfully reversing declining birth rates via social welfare programs. I’m not saying that a properly executed program couldn’t work - I’m just saying I haven’t seen one yet.
If anything, based on the evidence I can see, we should expect the exact opposite effect. Welfare states will need to import population from more virile regressive states
The only real counterexample at the moment is Israel. It’s maybe not the most promising example for the future but they do have the culture and policies in a modern nation that promotes more children.
That doesn’t make any sense
I dunno, for Australia at least it seems pretty dire and continuing to worsen
The total fertility rate required for replacement is considered to be around 2.1 babies per woman to replace herself and her partner in the absence of overseas migration.
Australia’s total fertility rate:
- was 1.481 babies per woman in 2024, lower than 2023 (1.499) and the rate 10 years ago (1.795 in 2014)
- has been below replacement since 1976.
for Australia at least it seems pretty
diregreat and continuing toworsenimprove.FTFY, as that’s what your numbers show.
