They showed up for their civic rights. The youth did not. If the youth had listened to them, they would have voted, and that vote would have turned out different.
But, they aren't. The boomers I think are the first generation in historical memory to act this way. Everything is about them, it's always been about them. Look at Social Security funding/timing, look at the ages of our politicians. Look at the response to COVID (and for reference compare it to the response to AIDs). Literally every single thing they've gotten their hands on from infrastructure to politics to the economy and housing to the environment has been transformed into some kind of Ponzi scheme.
I'm in my 40s now, but I still feel in some ways like a kid living in a world run by and for boomers. Politically, economically, culturally I definitely have more in common with a gen-z than boomers.
> The boomers I think are the first generation in historical memory to act this way
No, they aren't.
> Everything is about them, it's always been about them
No, it isn't.
> Look at Social Security funding/timing,
You mean the way that, as Boomers were in early-mid career, the Silent Generation-dominated political class vastly increased taxes on workers for social security while also for the first time adopting taxes on social security benefits for the first time?
> Look at the response to COVID (and for reference compare it to the response to AIDs).
They are remarkably similar at the federal level, actually. In both cases, Republican Administrations deliberately didn't take it seriously for political reasons until media coverage of deaths and other political pressure from below resulted in a partial reversal. Everything about COVID happened faster, but the faster policy shift was mostly a result of it being a faster spreading, more acutely impactful pandemic, killing about as many people in its first year in the US as AIDS has in the US in total to date.
EDIT TO ADD:
> I'm in my 40s now, but I still feel in some ways like a kid living in a world run by and for boomers.
This is relatively normal. Boomers in their own 40s experienced the same thing with regard to Silents. The big difference is because Gen X is a so much of bust generation compared to both Boomers and Millennials, they never became or will become dominant, and because not only are Millenials more liberal than Boomers but Gen X is more conservative than both, Gen X’s influence is basically to slightly extend and reinforce the feeling of Boomer domination for Millenials.
Regarding AIDS/COVID comparison...we just spent many trillions of dollars and basically shut down the global economy for two years. There is zero precedent for this kind of response to a disease in human history and definitely was not done for AIDS. Worldwide ~45 million people have died of AIDS, 6-7 of COVID.
Regarding Social Security, my reading of history is that this was something done by working age folks on behalf of destituite elderly. Boomers have let this ride their entire lives knowing full well it needed adjustments to be sustainable, intentionally dropping the burden on younger generations.
> Regarding AIDS/COVID comparison...we just spent many trillions of dollars and basically shut down the global economy for two years.
if we had shut down the economy for two years, the resulting US recession would have been longer than two months.
Instead, within two years of the pandemic being recognized, the prime issues I the US economy were associated with overheating rather than inactivity: tight labor market and high inflation.
It's incredibly unfair to blame Brexit on youth voter turn out...
It was incredibly stupid to pose that question as a simple majority leave/stay referendum, and then equally stupid to actually go through with it given such a narrow majority.
Certain capital owners were the ones who advocated for it, and ultimately the ones who benefited, and they manipulated the older and xenophobic.
This is a disrespectful oversimplification of a very complex issue. Older people remember that Charles de Gaulle did everything that he could to keep the UK out of European politics. They remember the first referendum on remain/leave, that happened in 1975. They remember all of the exceptions, negotiations, all of the crashes. The EU is great, and I personally consider a grave mistake to leave it, but this sort of unidimensional oversimplification of complex issues is a major factor in politics polarisation.
Ya, no reason to be apprehensive regarding an extra-national apparatus, barely representative or accountable to its constituents, entirely illiberal and increasingly exercising arbitrary authority, with a clear pattern of being the predominant tool for lawmaking well beyond its original purview. No reason to look at their American contemporaries' federal government, where virtually all issues are now to be addressed at the federal level or not at all, with consideration that the original responsibilities of the federal government were basically meant to be limited to few things beyond regulating interstate affairs.
If anything, our elders have failed to impart sufficient skepticism of state authority. The current generation of young people doesn't even understand the difference between "what I think is right" and "what I'd like imposed by the state onto others," let alone "what I'd like to be imposed onto others across the broadest scope manageable by the largest authority under my influence."
I will go so far to say that the primary obligation of elders in perpetuity will be to warn that any apparatus built in the name of imposing your will onto others is an apparatus whose objectives need not, and will not, mirror your own.