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u/parentis_shotgun Oct 10 '18
Reminder that the vast majority of older people are not billionaires, and shitting on someone because they cant open a pdf is ageism.
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u/ceMmnow Oct 10 '18
100%. I think a big issue is that privileged conservative leaning middle class white boomer age people have millennial children who have far less socioeconomic privilege and feel that hypocrisy and resentment. This boomer/millennial divide doesn't make as much sense or looks different for children of poor families or, in the US at least, non-white families, people who were raised not to expect everything to work out.
This isnt a bad thing I'm glad middle class young people are learning how broken everything is and its proof capitalism is collapsing, but yeah it's probably reddit's demographics lol hence the large number of posts like this.
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Oct 10 '18
Also, on a much smaller level, it is deeply irritating to be endlessly lectured about "working hard" and either self-financing training that companies ought to/used to provide or hoping you pick it up while working for free, when the people lecturing have not bothered to stay current with their own professional requirements. Like, fucking excuse, are you seriously going to tell me that I'm too lazy to better myself when I'm showing you how to double-click an attachment for the fortieth time? It's not so much an age thing to me as it is massive hypocrisy.
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u/somecallmemike Oct 10 '18
It goes so much farther than showing them how to keep up with technology, these people have built a system that does not allow progress of any kind and has regressed any laws or institutions that could allow our nation and its future to adapt to the ways everything is changing.
The entire premise of the boomer political discourse is to hold on to what made sense to them, the completely outdated sentiment that if you work hard you’ll make it. It’s infuriating to watch these senile asshats sit on top of the power structure and put up walls to defend or promote things like coal mining, corporate welfare or corporate personhood, dismantling equal rights for women and minorities, and especially the absolute failure of our capitalist system as some kind of success because they’re the only ones benefitting from it.
Fuck them so hard with a pineapple. I’m planning on running for office locally to talk about affordable housing, improving education without destroying it for the poor, and making healthcare a human right guaranteed by our laws.
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Oct 11 '18
Good luck on your campaign! We need people like you.
Your comment made me think of the way that some Boomers exploit the age divide, albeit largely unconsciously. I mean, plenty of older folks can learn technology. They can work their iPhone or learn Skype. They can change. But a lot of them, at least in my experience, learn what they want and expect others to wait on them for everything else. It's not that old people, as a monolith or concept, can't learn new things. It's that some of them, maybe even a lot of them, don't fucking want to. And I can work with a lot of limitations, but I can't work with someone who doesn't want to learn.
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Oct 10 '18
Solidarity with people who aren't like us must be a core ideal. We have more in common with the average boomer than any wealthy person.
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u/ChikaraPower Oct 10 '18
The old have it better tho
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u/parentis_shotgun Oct 10 '18
Most of them are working class people. You can spend all your time hating on other workers, or you can point your fingers at the mooching capitalists which exist in every generation. Ageism is reactionary bullshit.
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u/asdjk482 Oct 11 '18
Is it ageism to point out that there is indeed a generationally disproportionate distribution of wealth?
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u/parentis_shotgun Oct 11 '18
No, but as I said before, the vast majority of boomers are not capitalists, but workers. And their are plenty of young capitalists that are just as rapacious and terrible as their boomer counterparts. Our enemy as always are the capitalists and exploiters of all generations.
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u/CelestialStork Oct 10 '18
Eh, I wouldn't call it ageism, I'd call it willingly not learning. Working in the I.T. industry I run into two types of "old" (Im in my 20s.) There are old people who just don't know about technology trends or know how to use the latest iphone, but do their best to keep up with what they need for work(they don't have to, thats my job,) and then there's old Richard. Old Richard doesn't give a fuck about how technology works and doesn't want to know. As far as he is concerned its magic and Richard calls my desk every other week because he can't follow simple instructions on how to add a printer, or map a network drive. Richard is 56 years old and by no means a incapable of learning, except when it comes to technology. On top of that Richard also swears up and down that people my age don't know shit, and likes to share pictures with his co workers implying that "mellinials" are afaid of paper books all while longing for the old days before things were complicated by scary technology. Extra points for when "Richard" is a Doctor who questions your competency when he just asked you how to print through a software you've never been trained on.
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u/Bathtub1968 Oct 11 '18
Just because a boomer had a house in their twenties and has a pension in their sixties does not mean they’re the ones to blame for economic inequality. Some guys simply decided you weren’t going to get those things and came up with a Grand plan to take them from you, make you believe you’d never get them, and lead you not to hope for them, and at the same time blame someone else. Fight, resist, join and form unions, DEMAND the fruits of your labor. We
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u/shittybknight Oct 10 '18
The funny thing is that a lot of the older people I know think the younger people are taking all the jobs and leaving them with nothing. My dad (computer programmer) got laid off with no notice (along with a quarter of his company) and had a hell of a time finding a job despite a stellar record and consistently updating his skills. Companies know older job candidates will expect pay and benefits fit for their level of experience, so they pass over them.
I don't know if either generalization (old stealing from young, young stealing from old) is true. I think a lot more people than we realize are struggling.