Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Materialism, Crushed by Bills and Baby Boomers





{Caveat for this post I do not believe the above videos apply to EVERY Baby Boomer. There are good and bad people in every generation. I have friends who are Baby Boomers technically I do not apply the below to them or the good-minded people who were born during the years of the Baby Boomer generation.  In many ways the idea of the Baby Boomer generation as one commenter put it was created/manufactured by the powers that be--think Tavenstock. They got that right. For the 'conspiracy-minded" among you, the counter-culture had many of those roots where destruction of the economy, family and social networks was part of those plans.  }

We live in a society now where the monetary expectations are impossible. They are oppressing us with endless bills, in a society that never lets up. I drew a cartoon of me crushed under bills in my sketch book the other day, hey have to make myself laugh sometimes. One used to be able to choose more simple lives where life came cheap. I can see how people go Freegan,  squat and/or go to the streets with the endless lash of huge crushing bills to escape. Some may be able to live with others or perfect the art of mooching or the "underground economy" while others end up homeless.

Sometimes I worry I am driving my friends nuts, telling them I am always scared about money but I do really live in a jerry-built household. The years past by where 20 years of poverty have taken their toll. You take refuge in God, hobbies, books and friends, but the lost opportunities and pressures never seen to relent. Bankruptcy, car repairs, dirty rugs, dirty walls, everything bought used even the forks and metal pans you use to cook. Kind friends help me with food, and clothes. Churches step in, paying back more then your measly offerings made of whatever 1s or perhaps some 5s you find in your purse on a good day. My relationship with money has become one of love/hate.

The transmission could be failing on the car. Something that could send the Dominos spiraling down. Life when you are poor feels like one big emergency.  I'm not a good stoic. Aspies, well we can cry and whine too much, getting through the day to day of life takes too much processing to avoid melt-downs and a deer frozen in the headlights response.  Some people such on message boards or support boards get upset if you talk about your problems too much. A few years of poverty is different from a 20 year grind. Where can one go talk about being poor without being being told it's your fault? I wish there were support groups for poor people where we could commisserate with one another and trade services.  I'd start one if my health was better. I once had this idea that I and my husband should move to Appalachia so we'd be like everyone else around us, but then maybe we wouldn't fit into their world either. As I have written before, I would leave the grind far behind me if my bad health problems didn't keep me tethered to modern American life. 

 I watched the Intervention and the drug addicts and alcoholics aside from the homeless ones seem to be in better straits then me. People wonder why can't you get yourself together? Hey I tried. I thought even a some years ago, I would get my would be pituitary tumor out and I could go continue a new paralegal career, I never expected to find out what I did about the Lipedema.

I can be happy with little, if life remained stationary right now, I would be okay with access to what I have RIGHT AT THIS MOMENT, but the problem is how they threaten to take everything away. Greed rules and simple people can't even be left in peace anymore.  I think there are many good Baby Boomers, and some even got bit themselves by the economy but I understand what Ollie means in the videos posted above.  I wish he cursed less, but sometimes to convey points, one has to take the risk of a broad or generalized view.

 The moorings were pulled out from underneath so many people. Gen X and Millennials did get screwed. Why did it get so hard just to get a simple job to pay simple bills? And what is this doing to millions not only physically but emotionally and otherwise? Why was society changed in these insidious ways where the greedy ruled and just making a living became a WEEDING OUT instead of BRINGING IN process?

And for those with narcissistic parents who come out of my generation, there was a special kind of abuse. I've written about it a bit on here before, but I got to watch from my inner city rented rooms, and slumlord dwellings [my apt now is decent but they just raised my rent to a perhaps unsustainable amount] my mother spend money like it was water flowing in a never ending river. I can take rich people, I want no one in my fix, but why did all the blame and shame have to come with it? As I aged, and knew my life would be a whole other path, I could no longer bear the eyes of disgust she and the others had for me. That is one of the foundations of my "no contact" decision.

The world seems to back up that abuse, in a way, crushing people under impossible bills, offering no way to make a living, or one's where you are always looking over your shoulder. Many of us pray to God to meet our needs but we are worn out. Sometimes I think there should be more to life. I am not a materialist, this is not about being able to shop or have the newest or latest but feeling secure, and feeling I have a place in society. Everyone wants to be somebody to somebody. You do not want to be forever the taker instead of the giver. No one wants to be in that position. One insidious form of abuse I have noticed in my evil family, is how all of them talk about how hard they worked and they imply I never did, and that being disabled means I am a lazy bum. I heard it today from one I have limited contact with, "It would be nice laying around all day". My response was, "Want to trade?"

Why did the Baby Boomer generation or better yet their media controllers decide to call us Generation X? There seems to be a slew of projected blame and hate that started in the 1990s when they told us that we were all "slackers" and bums hanging on in record stores and coffee shops. Anyone here remember the movie Clerks? Yes I know I am dating myself with that one. Maybe the hatred between generations is part of the media controller's job just as they push hatred between races and other groups. Here's how the plan worked, allow this prosperous generation that got the bennies and build-up from WWII, take it all for granted and then hate the new debt and failure riddled generations. This way they could keep people fighting while they ran off with the money and created debt-slaves. It's not the bankers ripping us off, but your lazy, sad sack kid, who even though he has a bachelors degree can't get a job to save his life! It's his fault!

And that is what I was told even as I attempted to get teaching jobs circa 1990 and failed the MEDICAL TESTS to do so. "It's your fault!" This is why you hear some complain about entitled and lazy younger people. None of them think this out, that when your life is permanently on hold and you can't afford to buy that house, ,marry or support children that you may take refuge in things like music concerts or sadly for some like drugs and dead end life styles. Then consider the ones who have all those student loans, that cost something equal to mortgages! Who set this system up? Many Baby Boomers are suffering too but maybe the ones who blame their kids for being "losers" or feel hatred for their Boomerang kids who are entering their 30s or even their 40s, ought to think this one out a bit. I am not a liberal or conservative remember but when you watch Fox News and see the rhetoric about the poor, hey the powers that be know what they are doing. It's easier to blame the kids then admit the system is falling down around you while you still benefit.

I remember telling my mother once, that it was sickening they built this new casino in her town, and  who had that much money to basically burn? Religiously and otherwise I am against gambling though I have will admit I bought a few Lotto tickets in my time. She got angry at me and told me, "People have plenty of money!" Maybe in her world, though I suppose some desperate types may darken the doors of casinos with their last dollars. She told me she went to the casino.  Aunt "No Pictures for You" made a habit of casinos too. The idea of laying 20 bucks down on a slot table, to see it disappear, makes me nauseous.

 You always hear about some in the Baby Boomer generation, who say things like "I am spending my children's inheritance!". One thing I have noted in old books, is how generations used to have a different view of their children, they wanted them to succeed. They did not compete with them. They saw themselves as leaving a positive legacy for their children and grandchildren. They did not want them to suffer. It seems to me, that the powers that be have turned this thinking on it's head. Don't get me wrong here many GOOD people of all generations want their children to succeed, and this isn't everyone, but who got this attitude started out there? Where the old should spend til they drop and make sure their kids are left bereft?

In the case of those with narcissist parents, while they may give voice to desiring your success, they will do everything to make sure it does not happen. I was not allowed to study, and had to do housework which meant all school work had to be done at school. This put me at the 3.5 level when maybe I could have done better with study time and not having to write papers during other classes during the school day. I know my parents had and used connections to get other people middle class jobs, during my inner-city severe poverty years and later too. My father was the co-head of an organization where high school graduates were given office jobs with no college. When I and my brother asked, including me after my health care rejections, he turned us down. Years earlier he had gotten my non-college degreed business school drop out mother, a middle class job making $40,000 a year shuffling paper at the same place. She got to work there 26 years and receive a full pension. These weren't people relating to my household's job troubles.

In a society growing in wickedness, there are many who are selfishly affecting their children's futures in negative ways. What kind of people think it is okay to sell their children's futures on huge student loans they then expect them to pay for with McJobs? Why do so few question all this? Why all the projection instead of helping the young, they decide to malign them instead and if some young people are shallow, and "lazy", have they given up in some cases, or were they raised wrong in other cases? One thing I have said to my husband is, if the work world becomes nothing but low wage jobs that can be taken away on the whim, motivation levels are going to drop. The majority of people in life want to give and be part of something. Even being on disability, it has been rare that I have not been engaged in one volunteer enterprise.  I remember my insane 4 job schedules. All this talk hides the facts of what is happening and how America is becoming a third world nation, blaming the young who are under circumstances some can't even imagine, isn't going to fix anything. It makes me sick hearing Gen Y called lazy or seeing magazines like Time call them "bums" when there the economy has been ravished. This magazine cover is a classic case of narcissistic projection.

The prices are insane now, the jobs limited and unable to build decent lives, the outcomes of this stuff is going to be a 100 years in the making. I agree with Ollie on the swathe of destruction.

I don't advocate class or generational warfare. Remember I warn the powers that be love that stuff, it's easier to turn people on each other. Too many have bought into the false rhetoric, the Baby Boomer narcissistic dream, told they were the biggest and best generation ever and the only one that "counted".  Is anyone sick of hearing about Kennedy and Vietnam? I sure am. Too many embraced the throwing away and blaming of youth and ignored the bigger picture. Maybe some of the decent Baby-Boomers should speak out next time they hear millennials called lazy or some who prosper making excuses for the endless rip-offs, and corruptions that have been accepted in our society today.  One thing about my life, is that my viewpoint of this world is completely different from that of my parents. Maybe that is one good positive that came out of. I wasn't blinded by shopping at the mall or Keeping up with the Joneses or conforming to what was sold. I refuse to be an "X" no matter how poor I ended up.







13 comments:

  1. I love your posts. They are so comforting that I find myself reading them with a tea. This one of course I'll have to read again. I'm sorry about the troubles and wish this can all be different.

    I'm sick of the nightmare I have to constantly deal with these days. Discovering I'm an ACON has plunged me into despair. I can't take it. I wonder what it is to be a normal person. To discover I've worked so hard all my life for it to amount to nothing is unbearable. It would have not become something either way, cause I was doomed from birth. I just realized I had no ability even to defend myself at the age of 3! I'm mad at God, but still I pray to him.

    I feel there is nothing worse than being an ACON. It's like being born blind and not knowing it and stumble through life to find out much later you were blind and could not see anything. That's why other's were well off and you weren't. And someone did this to me just to feel good.

    I'm scared to tell other ACON's that I hate being and ACON but I have no one else to tell. No one knows what an ACON is outside the internet.

    Thank you Peep for letting me rant.

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    1. Thanks Joan, I know it is very hard to discover you are an ACON, I know it helped me see many things and I am sorry about stumbling through my life and thinking things like if only I knew then what I know now. I know no one knows what an ACON is outside the internet. This experience is hard for normal people to understand it is so beyond the pale. Don't blame God, the wicked evildoers worked on behalf of the devil. The Bible says Satan is the prince of this earth. I know I struggle feeling like I climbed out of a hole from being bombed....that is the ACON experience.

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  2. Peep,

    This morning I awoke to this song. My husband purposely played it. It's on U2's new album just released yesterday, last track. Listen to the words. This is a song on NPD....called "The Troubles" who has NPD in Bono's life.

    http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RGNoUtFiOC4

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    1. I'll have to check this out, thanks. :) I saw U2 in concert in the early 90s. Bono gets a bit too friendly with the global elites for my tastes but they did have many good songs.

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  3. Excellent Post! I'm a Baby Boomer and I haven't been at all offended by Ollie's youtubes. Sometimes, the TRUTH HURTS. And let's think about this fact alone, OK? The Boomers are a huge bulge in the demographics. It makes sense SIMPY FROM A MATHEMATICAL analysis there would be a corresponding INCREASE in the sheer NUMBERS (or percentage) of the population in that demographic that were/are Walking Cluster Bs. If you can get offended by numbers-so sorry for all the PC folks out there-that are not emotional measures, they just ARE, you're gonna get your lil' feebwings hwrt when non was either implied or indicated: It is what it is and it makes sense simply from the world of math. Unfortunately, there's so much emphasis on the "Sex-Drugs-Rock-n-Roll-Woodstock" aspect of the Boomer's experiences by the media, much has been left out, IMO. Let's face it, the more salicious, the more sales/reads generated. OTOH (if you can bear with me for one more reference/reality) when JFK said to us, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what YOU can do FOR your country," many of us took that call to heart. Whether it was the Peace Corp, VISTA, Teach for America, Voting Rights etc. we went. We had Vietnam tearing our generation apart on the daily, our role models being shot in front of our eyes-one after another, our cities burning down, our President(s) bold-faced lying to us and sending many off to be killed or maimed for life-it goes on and on. The '60's were NOT, by any means one big self-indulgent party for so very many of us. But hey, who wants to hear/read/see that?! And yeah, we've mythologized Kennedy ad nauseum.
    Poverty: Why is it so easy to pick on the poor? IMO, in large part because the poor don't vote. And WHY don't they vote? Look, when each day is a struggle just to keep a roof over your head, some food on the table, the utilities on etc. you don't have time to be concerned about politics. It's meaningless to you: "Met the new Boss, Same as the old Boss" (The Who, "Won't Get Fooled Again".) The stress of living in poverty-THROUGH NO FAULT OF YOUR OWN-is indescribable and you did an *excellent* job in this Post explaining how it comes about, the daily very real fears, challenges etc. of just trying to survive and the cumulative effects of living under relentless uncontrollable stressors. NO ONE CHOOSES TO BE POOR. And every place you look, you're constantly bombarded with images of consumerism that might as well be from a different planet than the oblate spheroid where you're located.
    I live in a very large, very remote, very impoverished area: Poverty is not just an urban phenomena, it's more likely to be a rural phenomena. There is no public transportation, very few services even "in town" and employment? P/T, minimum wage if you're lucky. We have 4 universities here (that own tons of property-ALL tax exempt, btw) and even when our local kids attend them, they have to leave the area after to find any kind of employment. We have decimated our blue collar working class by making it far more profitable for corporations to send their work off-shore than keeping those jobs here. When I first came here, I was just shocked by the poverty with all these natural resources-just the rivers, the timber etc., the very resourceful, hard working people. These people are no dummies at all and many WANT to work. Then I learned the local people own NONE OF THIS. All resources are effectively owned by mega-corporations, many not even US owned. My late DH grew up here and he told me decades ago, "It doesn't matter what the national economy is doing, we're *always* in a recession if not a depression here."
    Thanks, Peep. I'm getting too wordy here because there's so much "good stuff" in this Post to address in one comment. FWIW, I just want you to know I hear you: I know WELL what it's like to be literally starving here "in the land of plenty."
    TW

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    1. Hi TW, I am glad you were not offended and not offended by Ollie's posts too. I agree the truth hurts and many good willed people in baby boom generation suffered too. I agree with you the numbers and babyboomers being told you are the BIGGEST generation ever helped float some of the "we are the best" attitudes. Surely there are baby boomers who don't fit the sex-drugs-hippies-free sex-Woodstock nonsense who are disgusted by the lot of it too, and the manufactured steering via the powers that be. The 60s definitely had some of the first mega corruptions starting, so yes it was a dark decade in many ways. I see it almost as the time when a cloud came over the whole country and many things worsened. Kennedy definitely was turned into an idol.

      Yes they can pick on the poor because they don't vote, too many are burned out trying to survive. I have noticed even locally no one I vote for wins and every measure I am for or against, does the opposite. Agree old boss same as new boss. More of the poor see through the right and left sham job being done to the country too.

      Yes the stress of poverty never lets up. Thanks for understanding. What is scary is we tried to live a 'decent" honorable life and just slipped through the cracks.
      I am sure this is happening to many others. The country is getting poorer as the greedy scoop out the tills. Many members of the middle class tell me they are so crushed by their bills and the increased cost of them all, they don't get to enjoy their better money on paper at all. Nope no one choose to be poor. The rampant consumerism on my TV set makes me laugh with the 40,000 dollar cars and other expensive products. I suppose this is why the poor are invisible on TV even the working class now as the corporations all compete for a thin sliver at the top.

      continuing...

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    2. I have seen rural poverty too, so understand what kind of place you live. Our park was full of homeless people and I was friends with homeless living in campers--one moved into a friend's house and one escaped to another city at my advice to be a caretaker at an apt building for free rent. I stay here, as a poor person surrounded by middle class and upper folks because there are far more services, so yes I have been there. No charity dentists, very little transportation--my old town at least had a bus service that went door to door, but have seen many with out this. People in 40s and 50s living at home with parents on the farm due to lost factory work. Employment is either fast food, Walmart and the temp agencies have infected rural places just as much as urban so even the factory jobs unless you know someone to get in permanently are fleeting and even then prone to lay-offs and closures. Just wait til the university bubble goes bust after enough young people figure out the huge loans can never be paid on McJobs, we had that too, a college propping up providing a few middle class jobs. I agree about the working class being destroyed by the likes of NAFTA and outsourcing and even Obama signed or is going to sign the TPP to destroy it further. They keep touting education as a pathway to jobs, but outside a few rarified tech fields and health care [which is in it's own crises] what does one tell a young person to do make guaranteed money? In my old town, the people didn't own anything either. The college had some assets, but many of the megacorporations owned the land or a few families in town owned all the stores. So I have seen this too. America is being sold off to the highest bidder. Yes rural areas are usually more impoverished. I think the USA of course is wholly in a hidden depression. When you have 100 million people unemployed, that says something. I have three cousins in their late 20s almost 30 years old who have never left home being unable to manage even a low income job. One even got a worthless college degree. Those cousins are being betrayed too by the connected narcs with good employment. Sorry you are facing this too TW. One thing I know has happened is the media is owned by certain types. People with our story have been ostracized to the max and have only alternative ways of getting the word out. I have noticed that some of the wealthy are overly offended by any truth being told what life is like for millions here. The narcs of course are offended and don't fail to let the rest of us know it!

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  4. Technically I am a baby boomer. But only by the date of my birth. I too feel like I was sold bill of false goods. It seems that as the media was telling us what a great generation we are, my parents were denying me access to the dream.

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    1. I relate to you feeling like you were a sold a false bill of goods. I think that started early. Of course Gen X was too. I remember the lies they told us in school. Wonder if they still tell the young people these lies in high school, they probably fire anyone wanting to tell them the truth. My parents denied me access to the dream directly and I am sure yours did as well. Narc parents set up adult children for failure. With the destroyed confidence and other obstacles to overcome including how to relate to people in a healthy way it makes things very difficult. I want to barf seeing the media go on about how the economy is improving as I drive by even here in this wealthier area by endless empty store fronts and parking lots.

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  5. And I apologize for my typos. A couple of strokes will do that. I can flummox spell check on my 'puter, but hopefully, you get my take: It's embarrassing in view of my history of people/family saying, "Hey TW? How do you spell (what ever.)"
    Thanks.
    TW

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    1. Hey typos are okay. I don't edit heavily just don't have time. I do read through articles one or twice. I had some people rip me a new one for an article I wrote in 2010, for it's bad grammar. Hey back then I was trying to just get things out and up.

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  6. I'm technically a baby boomer too - born in 1960. And I (mostly) agree with both you and Ollie.

    This generation is a huge bunch of entitled assholes - we want it, whatever IT is, and we want it now. I think for a lot of them/us - shit, we were promised things like space cars and rocket packs and now that reality has set in, that we aren't going to live forever, that cars are still shiny metal boxes on rubber wheels - well, they're pissed.

    I tell every college age kid everywhere, to get into something that has to do with healthcare. Whatever it is - pharm work or advertising or sales or whatever - because us boomers, man we want new knees, new hips, erections until death, thick hair, ALL OF IT. The health care industry, even the vanity side, should be fat with money until all of us (finally) die off.

    I actually feel the way you do, but about my parent's generation. That bullshit 'greatest generation' stuff. If you watch movies from the 50's and 60's, it was all about martinis and new cars and business meetings and new washing machines and kids were told to just shut up and 'be good' and look nice and all that. My husband's parents would throw lavish cocktail parties while the kids fended for themselves, finally finding their tribe of surfers and stoners at 14, 15 years old. Roaming the canyons and beaches of San Diego with nothing but time and no supervision. They are horribly self-centered people still.

    Taking care of ourselves, I think that's what a lot of boomers did. It made a lot of us very selfish. And as TW said, a bigger demographic will have a bigger sampling of mental illness.

    I'm also amazed at how my generation suffers from mental illness more than the previous - or is it just more well researched? My conspiracy-theory-brain wonders if we were pushed into an expectation/depression cycle on purpose, to keep us medicated. Machined food, FDA involvement with food, Monsanto crap - all engineered to keep us sick, keep us imobile.

    And poverty - *whew* do I understand it. Poverty is almost impossible to get out of - like quick sand, there is almost no escape. And with poverty comes the inability to move (better jobs) or MOVE (health care issues). There is no way to afford to try the latest supplement, to eat organic meat and not eat processed foods because it is so damned expensive to buy anything other than what the government wants you to have.

    UGH I could go off on that subject forever, maybe I should cover it on my own blog, lol. I think this generation, the boomers, have isolated themselves into a bubble and (I hope) a revolution is coming.

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    1. Hi Gladys

      Thanks for your post.

      LOL I asked some friends as a joke once, "Where is my flying car?"

      You are right the narcissistic entitlement was helped along with the false dreams they were given. Funny how in the 50s, the future was this bright Utopia, and now the future looks like dystopian hell on earth. Being a Christian, I take the book of Revelation pretty serious, but I find this of sociological interest how things appeared so "bright" or were made to be after the horrors of WWII.

      I still think too many of the Baby Boomers think they are going to live forever and ACT like it too. You got that right with the health care obsessions, new knees, etc, and even Viagra. Be sexy and young to the day you die. Society became even more appearances oriented.

      I agree the so called SILENT or "greatest" generation helped set some of this problem up. Was it the combined neurosis of returning soldiers fathering children returning from WWII? I'm not sure but you are right about the consumerism really going whole hog and this is when the Keeping up with the Jones stuff really got going.

      We have some of the old hippies even in my narc family. Aunt Scapegoat is essentially one. I realized with horror before going NC with her, she was completely self-centered but in a different way. The woman doesn't even have one close friend and has lived in the same area her entire life. You are probably right many had to fend for themselves and it took them into selfishness.

      I think the break down of society and social connections and toxins are increasing the depression. Also all the focus on consumerism--buy your way into happiness. The increased expectations. Of course the powers that be pushed more medicines, more perfection, more depression. The 1950s is when the psychology culture got going too, before it was just a few rich people being analyzed by Freud, it went mainstream. Some probably figured out the profits that could be made via human suffering and desire for relief.

      I told one friend regarding the poverty, its been 20 years of never getting anywhere. I know disability checks are shrinking, bad bodies don't mean much money is being made but that was a hit enough, watching husband lose his career was a double trouble whammy as well. The poor even move like us, and it seems there is a limitless supply of "I love to fire people on a whim" bosses to destroy my life. My husband got to the point where he sees another move as perhaps another useless gamble. I want roots and got tired of having no friends from my end. One can only start over so many times and even as they age it gets more impossible. I wish I could tell the man who fired my husband here what he did to our life.

      Food costs are hard. This time of year I can eat well, because there are veggie stands galore and even a friend who lives on a farm who shares some bounty with me, but coming by food that is good, it does cost more in the store. This means constant cooking too and higher prices. I was rolling down the aisle in the scooter at our local grocery store, pointing out to husband all the cheap frozen food that makes me sick and how much more the stuff that is good, is in cost.

      The boomers need to realize they one day will be very old. Do they want nothing but bitter and pissed off younger people around them or ones so poor all they can offer them is a newspaper to lie on in the corner of a dirt hut? I'm surprised more of the young haven't protested the lack of jobs. Still so many lining up to become debt slaves for a university education. Just wait until people stop believing in that and then that will be a big bubble to burst. I read an interesting article where Zero Hedge predicted property values and others will eventually have to plummet [well they may just sell the country off to rich foreigners] because Gen X and Gen Y has no where near the assets and wealth of the Baby Boomers.

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