Shouting at the radio...

[elfs]

I have to remember to recharge my MP3 player more often. I've been stuck in the car several times this week listening to the radio, and flipping through the dial I inevitably land on a talk show, and in Seattle we have one liberal station, one sports station, three "socially conservative" stations and one "fiscally conservative" station.

I stumbled into one of the socially conservative stations and there was some caller on the line. She said:

I hate the baby boomers. They're the ones that ruined this country. Back in the sixties they did all those drugs and did all that damage to their body [sic], and now they're old and they want Medicare to take care of them and it's expensive.

I hate to break it to this still-adolescent mind, but the salient fact is that very few people in the sixties "did drugs" to any great extent.

But more than that, she hates the baby boomers for one reason and one reason only: they're getting old. That happens. Getting old is expensive. Bodies start to break down, start to fail, start to show the accumulated damage of a lifetime of living a human life. And she's going to be right there, fifty years from now, worrying about her own health and wanting the next generation to help her survive longer and healthier.

Hey, lady, maybe we should introduce Carrousel.

Comments

[hugh-mannity.livejournal.com]

Most of the people who "did drugs" in the '60s in a big way shuffled off their mortal coils and are pushing up daisies now. Or at least the ones I knew. Between OD's, hepatitis, violence, and general poor health brought on by doing drugs instead of eating, sleeping and other life-maintaining things, they didn't stick around all that long.

Like it or not, we all get old and die. Except for those of us who die young. Life is a sexually transmitted disease with a 100% fatality rate*.


*There are no documented cases of anyone either living for ever, or being assumed bodily into heaven. Mythology and scripture Do Not Count as data.

[shunra.livejournal.com]

And *that* is the problem with an atomized meritocracy of the type too many bright young people want to imagine we have: everybody hurts sometimes. For parents it comes earlier, because kids create a constant emergency that just doesn't relent to grown-up plans, but even the most independent, do-it-myself-or-do-without, childfree life comes to the aches-and-pains and debilitation of old age.

A system that *requires* every member, no matter how dumb, isolated, or broken, to become independently wealthy before growing too old to work is unrealistic. Which is why it's failing.

I look forward to seeing how we resolve this. Our culture is so strong and in many ways, so lovely.

Us boomers are to blame?

[slutdiary.livejournal.com]

Well I'm a boomer who did drugs in the 60's, and somehow I managed to survive it. Hell, I was hanging with some of Kesey's Pranksters - you expect me to do that straight? I also stopped doing illegal drugs over 35 years ago.

Right now, turning age 60 in a month, I do have a lot of bodily ails. How much can I blame on the drugs of the 60's? None of it. The drugs of the 60's helped to open my mind and to give me a particularly peculiar view of the world. The medical problems I have today, however, I can blame on tobacco - not unique to boomers - and to the terrible toll on my body from very non-hippie activities. Military, fire department, night nurse on the psych ward, and so forth. All very contributing to society and very body on the line taking lumps. Not really falling into that lady's bumper sticker understanding, I'm afraid.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

This is why I don't listen to talk radio. Let the poisoners poison each other - I have better things to think about.