Yet Another White Conservative Who Doesn’t Get It

It is interesting that I come across this article now as I just wrote an article directed at people like you who are still incapable of grasping that racism is still a problem having major impact on African Americans in the US today.

And before I get called a millennial, for the crime of caring about somebody besides myself, I actually belong to Generation X.

OK Boomer” stems from the fundamental need of Generation Z persons to minimize, disparage, and erase the great accomplishments of the 60’s.

The people opposing the civil rights movement in the 60s spoke just like you. Except then they were like “we already got rid of slavery and everybody is happy.” I have seen the footage of conservatives whites interviewed back then. They all claimed in full honesty that everything was fine. That whites and blacks lived in full harmony and it was just these leftists stirring up the blacks and causing trouble for no good reason.

In the 60’s, the Civil Rights movement fought and overcame legalized overt racial discrimination. The nation transformed from one in which segregation was the law to one in which segregation was illegal.

It was one step on the way just like the end of slavery. But often there are two steps forward and one back. After slavery ended. Slavery quickly go reintroduced in the form of the convict lease system which which quickly expanded in scoped and pulled in ever more African-Americans.

Likewise America saw a regression after the civil rights movement with people like Ronald Reagan, a proven racist who eagerly used dog whistles appealing to white racists. He pulled the rug under many poor African-Americans by beginning a dismantling of the modest welfare state built up by FDR and his successors.

What they refuse to see is that the US no longer has de jure discrimination, that the big battles were already fought and won fifty years ago.

So what? Institutionalized racism still exist. This is not unique to the US. Many countries never had explicit racist laws like the US, but many minorities still struggle to get ahead due to how racism has been instititionalized. Policies such as Red Lining e.g. isn’t explicitly racist in the sense that race is mentioned explicitly. However it clear was used to further a racist agenda, which hurt African-Americans.

Now the focus is on why the median wage of women is 70% of what it is for men. Many of the Woke don’t believe there a law mandating Equal Pay for Equal Work. If a Boomer explains such a law exists, that knowledge is met with “OK Boomer”.

A rather disingenuous argument. In most professions there are great variations in pay between people of the same gender. To prove that a specific employee is paid less because she is a women is next to impossible to prove. What exposes the differences is when you run statistics across a larger group of people within a profession. One can look at medical professionals such as doctors e.g. and see that there is a clear gap.

There has been articles writing about how in countries with very high participation of women in traditionally high paid professions held by men such as medical doctors the salaries for that profession is much lower. Basically it seems, that when women to a job, it will quickly get devalued. The more associated with women the job, is the more the salaries will stagnate over time relative to jobs regarded as more male jobs.

This kind of discrimination is impossible to prove in court. Thus systemic pay differences can persist without any clear solution. You cannot legalize your way out of every problem.

They incorrectly assert CO2 is a pollutant, but it isn’t. Our biosphere partners of the plant kingdom breathe it.

So you think you can ridicule the whole environmental movement because some activists are idiots? Do you seriously think climate scientists who have worked for decades on preventing global warming think CO2 is a pollutant? Not only are you disingenuous but you are also no less ignorant than the people you attack: No, buddy plants don’t breathe CO2. CO2 is consumed in the photosynthesis process. However plant cells just like cells in the animal kingdom depend on Oxygen for respiration. If you remove all the Oxygen in the atmosphere and only kept CO2, then the plants would all die.

The concern for CO2 emissions exist because CO2 is a greenhouse gas. This effect was discovered and described all the way back in 1859 by Irish Physicist John Tyndall.

To give their concerns more heft, the Woke generation now stresses that only a dozen years are left before it’s too late.

It isn’t any less true, just because it upsets you. No, we are not going to keel over and die in 12 years. What we are talking about is the window we have for beginning a dramatic reduction in CO2 emissions. If we don’t we will not be able to stop the earth from heating up significantly within the next 50 years.

They insist Hate Speech must be prohibited and what is classified as Hate Speech keeps expanding.

Funny how you guys always insist vocally that you are not raist. Yet there seems to be nothing more precious to you than defending the right to saying hateful things. I am pretty big on free speech, but that is hardly the area one should be most concerned about. I think it is far more troubling e.g. how employees are shut down from discussing unions in the workplace. That is something that actually has major impact on people’s income, work conditions and well being.

For some, drugs and suicide are the way out.

The opioid pandemic has to my knowledge not been primarily an affliction of the millenials. Quite the contrary.

They are worried however, anxious that the next Generations are going astray.

I am far more worried about your generation going astray. Your generation is the one that has enabled people like Donald Trump, leading to an extreme radicalization of American politics which has sever consequences for the whole world.

Children are watching their parents and grandparents getting lost and radicalized by the toxic stew emanating from FOX News. One by one they are loosing their marbles. First it was the rejection of the science of evolution. Next came the rejection of climate science. Then anti-vaccination. Next there are conspiracy theories about COVID19 and that Bill Gates is trying to control the world with his evil vaccinations. To topple it off are the flat-earthers. When will the madness end?

Being caught in the middle as an X’er, I have more faith in the millennials than in the boomers. At least they are mostly accepting science and not lost in conspiracy maddness.

They don’t want to hear what the Boomers have to say, even if it’s right, especially if it’s right.

There are plenty of boomers who have something intelligent to say. But the part of the boomers you represent have completely lost their way. You have become adherents to a cult.

They have only a slim hope the next generations will one day want to learn about what they did

The problem with your analysis is the belief that the boomers or the millenials are some kind of monolith. Not every boomer fought for civil rights. People like Bernie Sanders was on the barricades with black civil right activists. And he is fully aligned with millenials and they admire him. To me this seems like a bunch of conservative boomers who did nothing during the civil rights movement, who try to hijack it and take credit for what happened as a way to lecture their offspring.

listen to them without throwing derisive retorts back in their faces.

To many the problem is the opposite. It is conservative boomers so stuck in their ways that they are utterly incapable of seeing the world for what it is. Unable to listen to what others have to say. They live in a conservative bubble. They try to lecture the young about the evil of democratic socialism, something conservative American boomers actually have zero experience with. When I try to tell them that I actually have grown up in a country which has been run by democratic socialists for over 70 years, are they curious hear anything I have to say? No, not at all. They are not interested in my experience. Almost without fail these conservative American boomers proceed to attempt to lecture me on my own country.

The arrogance is simply astonishing. I feel sympathy with American millenials. They have actually been willing to listen to the experience of people outside their own country.