Quote:
Originally Posted by cathexis
Biden is correct. Those of us who were actually fighting the battles of those 60s-70s that are so readily dismissed know how rough it was. What I am reading is an attempt to smooth the creases by using terms like "civil rights," "women's liberation," and "Vietnam War." Tell it like it was, race wars where activists were getting killed often for merely registering voters, the fight to legalize abortion and Equal Rights Amendment where women and lgbtq were being assaulted on a regular basis, and the Anti-War Movement where you had thousands of people in the streets protesting a conflict, we had no business involved in, that had the daily deaths tallied by Walter Cronkite each night at 6. Young men were having to escape the country to stay safe or even alive. The draft, where a simple paper burning could get a man beat up or worse.
Today's struggles don't even hold a match, let alone a candle, to what was happening during that period. It was not the romantic time of purple haze and flower children that some remember, the times were really tough.
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Mr. Jenny went to jail in bar raids, and her family were not allowed in her hometown's drug store or the burger joint until 1973, because Jim Crow lasted into my lifetime down here, and applied to Mexicans, too.
Minorities like us faced brutality, but Joe Biden's share of that struggle was selected from a place of privilege. Our blood is not his to claim.
The economic struggles that millennials face now, that they did
not select, are likewise not his to dismiss. And even if ya'll are correct, and Millennials aren't deserving of empathy, what kind of candidate says that out loud? Take it from an X-er, 60s nostalgia has a very limited appeal.
Boomers like Joe Biden could pay for college off a summer job sacking groceries-- they didn't have to take on a lifetime of debt to attend college, and they didn't face bankruptcy over medical bills. They didn't need gofundme to get chemo.
Boomers were able to retire. Millenials won't have that.
In the 1960s a high school graduate could own a home and support a family of four all by themselves. Now there is no city where the minimum wage will cover an apartment.
Their moms stayed home. Their parents stayed married.
Our incarceration rate has tripled.
Our war now is even stupider than Vietnam, it's just less culturally painful because not so many white kids are going-- and i say this as someone who is watching her father die of Agent Orange exposure.
The draft saved as many lives as it destroyed-- the draft was what drove the protests that made the war unpopular. Our current wars can continue indefinitely precisely because the kids of the privileged aren't at risk.
If life was so much harder in the 1960s, why is there a 30% increase in suicide since 2000-- largely among boomers?