Jeremiah

This is a general worry I have with anti-boomerism.

In many cases, hating the boomers for doing something is an excuse to do the same thing yourself because you're just, quote, or whatever.

I think the real story is that the boomers did the thing for the same reason you did.

In this case, the real story is about increasing longevity.

It's fine to care for a 70-year-old in your house for a few years until they get felled by the flu and harder to care for a 95-year-old for 30 years until the Alzheimer's finally gets them.

Leah Labresco-Sargent, who writes at Other Feminisms, linked here, writes, quote, I think this against-against boomers leaves out a common line of complaint, that boomers benefited from traditions they received and chose not to hand on.

I've got a bit from Michael Brendan Doherty's My Father Left Me Ireland in my review, linked here.

Doherty writes, The adult world that I encountered was plainly terrified of having authority over children and tried to exercise as little of it as practicable.

He could write to his father, he could order Gaelic books, but there was no clear way to regain what had been given up by the generations that came before.

This is also, in miniature, Patrick Deneen's contention for why liberalism failed.

that, gradually, people dismantled the traditions they themselves had benefited from because they saw them as cruft, not realizing they were load-bearing.

End quote.

Leah gets a pass on this one because she's one of the tiny handful of people pumping against entropy and trying to rebuild old traditions.

For everyone else, I make the same accusation as above.

The boomers didn't raise their children properly because they were evil people who hated the social fabric.

UUGR writes, quote,

It seems like you're proposing the blame that's currently directed at boomers is, in part, the fault of population collapse.

It's not that the boomers are stealing on the wealth, just that they have all the power because they're so populous.

Could it be that this is a legitimate sort of boomer hate, though?

Not that they didn't leave enough to the kids, but that they didn't leave enough kids to leave things to.