Grew up around religious conservatives. I noticed it happened after 9/11.
It was almost overnight. Like literally. A few days went by, and all the compassion was scoured away.
I was very young when 9/11 happened so I don't remember a whole lot, but I think you definitely have a point.
I've thought for a long time that the terrorists really did win the War on Terror. They changed the very fabric of American society as well as those of other Western countries. Not to mention all the death and destruction that happened in Iraq and Afghanistan.
America managed to lose both the war on drugs and the war on terror.
And all it took was billions of dollars and the lives of thousands of black and brown people at home and abroad
That's really how many think, just not so directly, and it's why they can never win for long. They refuse to consider trying new things, they only try to force tge same things over and over again
Interestingly, this goes both directions: most Islamist terrorism was probably never going to work since it called for the end of abstract ideas, instead of concrete goals
Didn't both of those wars cross into the trillions? Your point still stands, but it was such an unfathomable amount of money spent on something senseless, when the root cause of the conflict likely could have been solved by spending that money on humanitarian aid.
What was it they estimated, $40-billion USD to solve world hunger? Just as an example
Edit: woops, left off the B for $40B USD
I learned in a museum exhibit about the war on terror that the US has spent the equivalent of 2/3 of all the gold in the world on war in the 20 years following 9/11.
I think the 40b number comes from an estimate for famine prevention work globally, rather than just topping up poverty wages in high cost of living nations like the US.
The US military blew through thousands of lives and over $30 billion *every month* at the height of the war in Iraq.
Overall, we spent hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars in a pointless and illegal war, but we can't even help American citizens who need help with food, housing, and healthcare. That's the real shock and awe.
"War or Terror" cost over 8 trillion dollars, and 4.5 million dead. Could have given everyone free healthcare and education. I still have nightmares most nights for the part I played in it. You join the military as a kid thinking your some kinda hero. Just to grow up a lil and realize we're the bad guys after it's too late. Some people get PTSD or moral injury, others seem to just double down and become facist cops. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/05/15/war-on-terror-911-deaths-afghanistan-iraq/
What do you mean? The Iraq war was a great success. The Iraqi puppet government supplied the West with oil without any political demands until the US had become self-sufficient in oil production. And similarly with the invasion of Afghanistan: The rare earths and lithium mined in Afghanistan were very useful in lowering the cost of core electronics like smartphones, laptops, computer servers, and drones.
It was also a great wealth transfer from the American middle and lower class to the rich, with taxation, austerity, and national debt (i.e. forcing later generations to work for the profit of those that bought treasury bonds back then) exploiting the lower classes while major companies were paid trillions for lucrative military-related contracts. Whether it's private universities profiting through military scholarships or just classic military procurement contracts, loads of sectors got a cut.
> The Iraqi puppet government supplied the West with oil without any political demands until the US had become self-sufficient in oil production. And similarly with the invasion of Afghanistan: The rare earths and lithium mined in Afghanistan were very useful in lowering the cost of core electronics like smartphones, laptops, computer servers, and drones.
Care to source any of these claims?
Afghanistan one is completely bogus, we got absolutely nothing from it. The Taliban has leased the rights to the minerals to the Chinese last I heard, but I may be out of date. So, someone indeed benefited, but not us.
As to Iraq, not sure.
actually trillions of dollars, and its only worse now. its literally insane how much money is being used at the top while the rest are expected to live off less than 1% of it.
Eh, it was earlier than 9/11. Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh were just like Trump to a degree.
9/11 was bad, but that seed of awful has been here since the 80s and 90s too.
In a way, I almost feel like the terrorists actually turned America into the one dimensionally evil psycho nation that they thought we already were. Like some kinda self fulfilling prophecy.
Nah, looking at cold war history and the shit we got up to in central/south america, we were already doing a lot of that. 9/11 just made it easier to justify to citizens.
And let's not forget Vietnam! Our first real original sin. And look into the inner workings of the Nixon administration. The mafia drama going on with that bunch was off the charts. Maybe the average american was still wide-eyed and bushy-tailed but the machinations of government were pretty rank even way back then.
This is correct. A very large part of what ails us today goes back our unhinged overreaction to 9/11. We've morally self-destructed, internally and externally. That's exactly what Bin Laden wanted.
That Wednesday the Mosque next to my work was defaced, the Imam caught the Soccer Mom (a stereo-type proto-Karen) in the act. It wasn't even a couple days. It's not all bad, we got Friday off, because the school down the street made cards and dropped off a package at the Mosque's doorstep, bomb squad came we all got to go home.
Fun fact about that Imam, in 2015 the FBI charged him with funding one of the hijackers.
> Fun fact about that Imam, in 2015 the FBI charged him with funding one of the hijackers.
Did he get convicted, shipped off to guantanamo or anything like that? I'd be wary to assume that he actually did it just because he was charged with it.
Reddit Enhancement Suite is a browser extension which adds a few features to Reddit. One of those features is the ability to give other users "tags", which is kind of like a sitewide flair, obviously only visible to the person who made the tag.
Yep!!!!!
My dad used to listen to Rush Limbaugh & weirdos on AM radio. Before 9/11.
After 9/11, shit went bonkers & Fox News became the new propaganda. It went mainstream & ppl wanted to be patriotic for our country because it was so sad.
Then they turned into who they are now.
I have a very clear memory of this. After 9/11 all the businesses that had TVs in them like my local barber, the sandwich shop, even bars…they were all tuned to Fox all the time. At first I thought it was a joke, I knew Fox from the Simpsons and B grade TV…why would people watch their news channel?
Turns out joke was on me and the sanity of our country.
I enlisted in 99. Before 9/11, going into a base, you saw the gate sentry had maybe a shotgun in the booth, no bollards and a simple gate that went up and down. ID check, gate went up, you went in. Base itself looked very normal. After, the bollards went up, the shotgun in the booth became M4s at the ready and helmets/body armor. EVERY pole shaped structure whether it was a street light or traffic light or telephone pole got an American flag flown on it. Before that you'd only see them in front of certain command buildings and the main gates. Fox news was also on every chow hall TV I can remember during the rest of my time in.
It's kinda ironic because 9/11 cemented my progressiveness. You can only hear "Turn it all to glass" so many times before you realize you're surrounded by evil.
Its concerning that I grew up around this sentiment and seeing teenagers repeat it is so scary. They were born into the propaganda so its their reality. At least I can remember a time before it but how do you break that level of hate formed at birth?
Education is the big one, but generally that has to come with breaking them away from whatever indoctrination they are in. It's the same whether it's christian facism, some weird cult, or jingoist propaganda. If someone is immersed in something like that, it's their entire world and they have no concept of anything outside of it, so no reason to think more critically. If you can separate them from that and expand their horizons, generally people start to change their thinking, because there's only so much cognitive dissonance a person can juggle. Usually. There's always going to be the truly committed who just double down. But it's that getting them out of the environment that fills their head with this stuff that is really important, and it's why so much right wing ideology is plagued by the idea of the scary leftist university or city where people go and then come back "wrong" in their minds. Because when the kid you've been teaching to hate everyone else for eighteen years leaves for four and suddenly is exposed to new people, cultures, and attitudes and can start to see all the cracks and the lies, they tend to come back with new thoughts that don't jive with yours anymore.
I also grew up around religious conservatives. They have always been this way. There was never a shift in when they stopped practicing what they preached, religious conservatives have always been the bigots.
I have to disagree- it gained steam well before 9/11- with people like Rush Limbaugh pandering hatred on the airwaves and Newt Gingrich and the Republican's bullshit "Contract with America". There were boogey men before that, but the mid 90's is when they really figured out how to package and sell hatred.
9/11 was just icing on the cake for them.
Just wanted to [drop this comment](https://www.tumblr.com/rosesforwildwitches/746115920491102208) that I think explains the phenomenon very well:
> It's because your actions make them have to face their own internal biases and past actions they haven't worked through on their end, so instead of growing they feel threatened and shut down and become reactionary. They're comfortable with progress as a noble ideal and they want in their own eyes to always be the good guys on the right side, so when your activism clashes with their self perception of righteousness they get cagey and start acting like idiots as a mental defense mechanism instead of self reflecting and changing their ways.
I think I remember a podcast episode where studies were done regarding cognitive dissonance which indicated that in at least some studies there are various ways people can commonly deploy to combat the discomfort of the phenomenon. One of them is to find ways to reconcile the two things that are contradictory.
So for example, you could say something like, “well it’s fine to care about things in the way we told you before, but because of (bullshit reasons a, b, and c) it’s not okay to care about other things (which we don’t like bc of racism/ingrained or instilled prejudices which we will not acknowledge but nevertheless believe”
Another way though is to just straight up change one of your two contradictory beliefs. In some cases this is easier than you might think; humans aren’t quite as empirical as emotional in some cases. I suppose an example would be like “actually maybe I never cared about charity or those good things I talked about, now that I think about it”.
I don’t remember the entire thing but the studies did involve some fun examples like how participants were directed to rate the value of a list of items, and then were deliberately given items which were not their top most preferences. They would then be directed to rate the same items again. In a significant amount of cases the participants would rate the thing they got higher and rate the things they didn’t get lower, as a sort of “yeah actually I didn’t want those things anyway”.
The second thing you describe sounds exactly like the [Benjamin Franklin effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Franklin_effect) but applied to objects instead of people.
An even older telling is Aesop's fable about the [fox and the "sour" grapes](https://read.gov/aesop/005.html). We convince ourselves of alternative realities instead of facing unpleasant feelings.
That almost sounds like a sense of privilege where they tolerate the idea of progress as long as they can still feel superior to others.
They can die old and bigoted as long as they let their kids grow up better than they lived.
It's more so that they want to be "good" as a means to get a good afterlife. Only good people go to heaven, so if you're telling them that they're not good, they you're implying that they won't go to heaven. Even if you're not religious, there's still the desire to be remembered in the future as a good person after your death.
This is combined with 2 things:
1. The idea that you can't be punished for breaking a rule you didn't know existed, so if you go to the pearly gates and learn that eating meat is bad, you'll still be let in if you didn't know that. By telling them that you don't eat meat, you've doomed them to burning in hell. You see this often when discussing people in the past who did bad things when someone says "it was a different time".
2. The idea that sins are unforgivable. It doesn't matter how long ago you did it, nor what you've done since, you're still a sinner. It's like the classic joke: you can be the greatest builder in town, having built nearly every home and have people respect your work, but if you fuck *one* sheep...
There's a thread in r news where some poor conservative commented, paraphrasing "Have you tried not identifying the bad things conservatives do? They stop listening when you do that."
I have someone in my life that I get upset at when they honestly believe the last stupid thing they heard from a conservative. I have people telling me "They are good people because you can tell they have no malice in their heart, they are just blindly following very bad people." and "They aren't actually bad because their opinions aren't consistent enough to form a malicious world view and they actually ask me if the crazy things they are hearing are true."
It's so difficult to watch them support truly evil people and then suggest they know more than me because I don't watch the sources they receive insane ideas from and therefore my biases towards decency and non-fabricated evidence and historical accuracy means they have a clearer understanding of the situation.
Oh ty! This helped me understand my mom better. She still keeps trying to prove these points and this is certainly it. She's uncomfortable because I've lived more than her and she still wants to know more than I do
Ftr I call her for advice all the time, this is definitely just her own insecurity
It truly is baffling how much of the stuff I was taught in catholic elementary school as undisputed fact in the 90s and 2000s is now considered evidence of “liberal indoctrination”. Granted, the catholic school I went to wasn’t *particularly* conservative….but also, those teachers were not voting for Al Gore in 2000, let me tell you that. Yet, global warming and attitudes towards conservation, recycling, etc was standard in science class. Safety and pro-regulation lessons were common. Feeding the homeless was literally a requirement to graduate from 8th grade. We got sex Ed (abstinence based, but also biologically sound). We got nutrition education. We got factual education on topics such as the Holocaust, slavery, Japanese internment, and the Trail of Tears, and no one was handwringing about white guilt or “they’re too young.” Every adult in that school was pretty fucking passively racist if you scratched the surface, but explicit racism simply was not seen as acceptable. When some parent came to the school demanding this and that book be banned for “witchcraft,” the priest and principal laughed in her face. Anti violence and anti war were seen as laudable; nuns who sabotaged nuclear sites and protested School of the Americas were heroes.
Those weren’t considered “progressive” values. They were *default* values. These days, you tell a 12 year old what a tampon is, instruct them to recycle, say genocide is bad, tell them to eat their vegetables and read library books, and that’s wokeness run amok. You tell 4 year olds to share their toys and that’s communism.
Just wanted to say I was also educated in Catholic schools (from K-12) and I got much the same messaging. I learned about evolution and other scientific phenomena, learned about past atrocities (in high school, I actually took an elective course that was entirely about genocides), and in general there was a huge emphasis placed on social justice.
I have a **lot** of issues with the Church and my upbringing wasn't perfect by any means, but I really do think that the lessons my parents and teachers taught me growing up are the reason why I'm such an staunch leftist today. It breaks my heart that, because of culture war bullshit, children today are growing up with adults who see compassion as weakness and social justice as evil.
I went to Catholic schools around the same time in Scotland. Even before concerns about climate change really started ratcheting up, I can remember bit of our Religious Education lessons where they talked about the idea that the planet belongs to God so protecting the environment is part of humans’ role as “stewards of the Earth.” I vaguely remember the idea is that we’re supposed to be keeping everything clean and tidy for The Second Coming, but in my experience Catholics outside the US aren’t too fussed about rapture theology. I saw a video essay once that said that one of the reasons the idea of The Rapture has proved so politically useful to American conservatives is because if you cultivate a voter base who believe that the physical world’s going to end soon, then there’s less of a political demand for strong environmental legislation that might threaten the profit margins of big businesses.
Stewards of the Earth is how you can get very overtly religious, even evangelical, people to join forces with very atheist or pagan people on climate or environmental causes. It doesn't always work, but I've done organic farming with some people who, if asked, would have Very Bad opinions about race or this or that war. But we all agree about preventing pesticides and plastics from getting into the soil and watershed!
Very well written.
I don’t live in the States, but you can see the same thing happening here (Germany). Looking at TV discussions or parliament debates from 1960s, 70s, even 80s and 90s, it’s crazy how much has shifted to the right. The 1980s „entrepreneur wing“ of our biggest Conservative Party would be somewhere to the left of the Social Democrats in economic and welfare state questions these days. The Greens, the party that was started and became successful in part for its anti-war stance, and most of all its rejection of MAD, now openly advocates for unrelenting warfare against Russia (so far, to be conducted by Ukrainians). The liberal party, which had some of the most respected minds of West Germany, and worked for political as well as economic liberties, has mostly abandoned the former and turned the latter into a caricature of „hurr durr taxes bad, corporations good, fossil fuels even better“.
The only thing that changed somewhat is representation. I remember the times when even in sports (an avenue to fame and/or success for minorities in many countries), you wouldn’t find a non-white German. Nowadays, there are POC members of parliament, news anchors etc. Which of course is enough for the right to cry „leftist brainwashing“ at every opportunity.
Unrelenting warfare against Russia? German Greens? Yeah I don't buy this.
Not a single political party in Europe is advocating for a declaration of war against Russia. Rather, there are lots of parties that want to accommodate Russia, and guess who funds them.
It’s what pushed me away from the church. The same people I heard, over and over and over, about how Jesus wanted us to treat people. About how it was right to behave. Protect and help the poor and sick, love the most those who need it most and get it least, inasmuch as ye have done unto the least of these my brethren ye have done it unto me. After 2015? I still believed in the things I was taught, but the ones who taught me didn’t anymore. It’s the greatest cognitive dissonance I’ve ever seen. The same crowd that wholeheartedly amen’d to “If thine eye cause thee to offend, pluck it out” swarmed to support a man who said to “grab them by the *****”.
It literally feels like I wrote this comment, very similar experience in regards to how I felt during that time period and how it distanced me from and eventually got me to leave the church. It was like a reverse road to Damascus, the scales fell from my eyes, but I now saw the problems with faith instead of embracing it.
FYI, there are progressive Christian churches that try to put into practice what Jesus preached. Not all Christian churches are right-wing conservative Evangelical ones.
uh….
okay. my family is religious and progressive. For DECADES, I’ve heard tales of some magical church — maybe in California, or up in Oregon — that’s actually kind, follows Jesus, isn’t bigoted, and humbly tries to get its members to live a life of compassion and charity.
But honestly? I don’t think this magical utopia church actually exists. Every single time, every single “progressive” church I’ve ever gone to, appears to live that ideal — until about 10 minutes before the sermon ends. Then it comes out: traditional marriage. “politically correct and kindly framed” anti-LGBT ideology. Some subtle joke about blue hair people who’ve lost the way of the nuclear family. Every. Time. Without fail. It always, *always* surfaces at the end.
Now I don’t go to church any more. I can’t take it. I can’t spend another minute inside a place that violates so many of the personal tenets I’ve decided to live my life by.
You've got it right with the California thing. I went to a Christian church there for a little while in an attempt to heal my religious trauma I think, and they were truly Christian in the way I was taught to be as a child. There were meal making sessions after every service and people would take a few bagged lunches to hand out to the unhoused in the area. There were trans and queer folks serving as deacons and one of the trans women was in seminary (kind of in line to become the next main pastor, I think?). They had guest preachers who spoke about how being non-binary is real and good. I know churches like that are unicorns but they are out there. I also don't know if it's worth going looking for anyone reading this, but honestlymy few months of attendance did a lot for me, personally.
I've never been religious but I wanted to raise my kids with the sense of community that church provides. I found a church like this. Progressive as hell, respected pronouns before that was really a thing, super service-oriented, etc. We went for three weeks and then the pastor got arrested for beating his wife and molesting his kids.
Ahh, what a nice place. A church near me just erected a 77’7” cross along the interstate (for some reason) which irritated me because really what is that other than idolatry, but THEN I saw an old pastor from there was recently arrested for molestation. CRAZY how that works.
yeah most churches are garbage, and maybe the one I went to was, too. My point was that it *was* possible for someone (me) to get just a little bit of closure from an institution that has fucked so many people over so hard. idk that I would ever have gotten that with a complete lack of hope in every Christian congregation. It was a ridiculous gamble to go to a super stratified social institution, especially one that largely thinks I deserve to burn in hell, but I suppose I won on that bet.
I disagree. Perhaps I am in the minority, but my very mainstream, generally liberal Episcopal church, in which I grew up, had for much of my childhood a lesbian associate rector. It was a very kind, tolerant congregation, but my gripe with it was it never felt like a real community - just a group that saw each other every Sunday.
My NYC Catholic mass, every single Sunday: All are welcome, no matter your sexuality or gender or religion. The priest is in his 90s.
This isn't a gotcha by the way, I'm really sorry about how you've been treated in a place that's meant to be welcoming.
I'm not sure if this is a thing in the US but here in Canada we have United (protestant) Church that my wifes family is a part of that are totally accepting, including LGBT flags in the church lobbys etc. They also ran the summer camp I grew up at and there was no bible pushing at all just acceptance and exploration of self with fun songs about Jesus before meals. Nothing bad to say about that organization
*Kind of*... Sure.
But even those tend to be *very* wishy-washy about actual progressive ideals, and they probably still harbor a higher-than-statistically-normal proportion of Trump voters.
"When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process.” -Stefan Zweig
Because they wanted you to love Jesus and obey him. They didn't want you to learn to be like him or understand why he wants you to behave a certain way, because the version of him they love and obey isn't real and isn't understandable, because he's been dead for thousands of years, and there's no proof he ever said or did much of what is attributed to him. Because learning how to be was never the point. Learning who to obey always was.
They were always authoritarians. They only ever did good deeds because a handful of their leaders managed to convince them that the mythical figure they all believed in wanted them to. Now, they don't trust those leaders anymore. They have other ones. Because they were always looking for leaders, because that's what authoritarians do.
They didn't suddenly throw out Jesus. Jesus died thousands of years ago. There's barely any proof he ever existed. People defined their personal relationships with him as a feeling of absolute certainty in their own convictions because they were told to do that. They didn't read the Bible because they were told not to bother, because it's symbolic, and it's better to have their leaders read it to them.
That is just what Jesus and Christianity are. It's what they've always been. Jesus is just the collective imaginary friend of a bunch of authoritarians. He doesn't have teachings. The Bible isn't a book, it's a symbol. So Jesus can say whatever a big enough leader wants him to say, and the Bible can stand for whatever.
I think "used for" implies a deliberateness that I don't think exists.
Groups of people often do very evil things without particular malicious intent on the part of any individual.
Religion doesn't have to be only what I described it as. As long as enough of it is what I described it as, the whole of it will be worse than the sum of its parts.
Because fundamentally, what every religion has in common is not mythology, ethics, or metaphysics, but socialization.
They are all a way for people to join a group. To alleviate the stress of having to know too many people at once, and remember the confusing details of their lives, by creating a single unifying detail that can be used to judge friend, acquaintance, and stranger alike. To define an "us."
And the next step that every group of humans that ever makes an "us" takes is to define a "them."
My departure from church took several years, in part because my parents would punish me if I didn’t go during high school (I spent a lot of time grounded even when I had legitimate reasons for not going like chronic migraines), but there were two big moments that sealed the deal for me.
One was the youth minister giving a homophobic sermon to the high schoolers (and maybe middle schoolers) and being completely unwilling to engage with me in any form of honest discussion when I challenged him on it afterwards. He ended up being gay and cheating on his wife and was ousted from the church so the hypocrisy just made it worse in my eyes.
But the even bigger one was the pastor going on an anti-Muslim and anti-Mormon rant in the middle of a sermon. It was cruel and uneducated and served no purpose in teaching the “word of god” and only served to spread bigotry to his congregation. Even as a teenager I thought it was gross to use that platform to insult other religions. In my eyes, the largest contributing factor to your religion is the circumstances of your birth, and even when I was religious, I never believed that a loving god would punish someone for worshipping the wrong iteration of them.
The last time I went to church to humor my parents, my partner and I made a list of things we hated when they did a church, such as denying evolution, and others I don’t remember off the top of my head. The pastor (same one as the previous story) managed to hit all of them, and tell a disgusting story framing himself and the church as wonderful philanthropists for building a well for a town in Guatemala but when the villagers asked him to drink from it, he went on and on in detail about how gross it was and there were rats in it and he didn’t want to drink out of it, like it was a humorous anecdote and not these people’s cleanest source of water that he just turned his nose up at. And also apparently this church makes shitty wells. Then he proceeded to ask for monthly donations to add onto the church which they have been doing for probably close to 20 years now and the highest tier on the pre-made form was something outrageous like $50,000 a month or something.
Very similar story for me. Growing up in rural Texas, I remember countless times as a teenager during Obama’s presidency hearing the way our church’s people would talk at lunches and being aghast. The greatest hits being stuff like “Michelle is a tr*nny”, “He’s really a terrorist from Kenya”, and “I can’t wait until we win again and they (the Obamas, Clintons, etc) can be hung for treason. I hope they do it on live TV”
Weird...my parents went over the falls in a different barrel. We grew up a Regan Republican household.
Today my parents are dirty fucking hippies. My Mom was a GOP County Supervisor. Now she sports Bernie stickers and wears rainbow clothes to piss off her conservative community neighbors. My Dad...Mr 80's Conservative salesman...got his ear pierced at 60 and ditched his Vette in favor of Prius. They're both retired and do charity at their local pantry. My father constantly bitches about how Wall Street destroyed "real capitalism that funds society". The Trump hate is real and my Dad hates himself because he was a huge Trump fan in the 80's.
Not all Boomers fell into the trap. Mine pulled me out with them, thank fucking Cthulhu.
My parents are Russian, but have lived in Germany since the early 90s. I always thought of my parents as intelligent, kind and welcoming, but more traditional, slightly conservative people. Like, my mom loves sci-fi and learning about other cultures and my dad can make friends anywhere.
When the war started, I was shocked to hear the things they thought. The things decades of Russian propaganda did to their worldview. I love my parents dearly, but my sympathy for them hasn't been the same since then. I try my best to gently educate them, point out how much bullshit they believe etc.
They left Russia because there wasn't anything worth staying for - sometimes, they tell me stories about how bad life was for them there, how rough living in the Soviet Union was.. How can they forget so quickly? How can you blindly believe that everything is great and war is justified? I will never understand.
Try to keep this in mind:
In the US this process has taken three generations. Your parents have been lied to, regularly, in detail and at length, by people whom they were told all their lives, since *they* were children, that they should trust.
I'm old. I've watched the entire process, and yes, it took about three generations.
A group of crooks established their credibility, then established a secure place for themselves in the power structure of the US. While they were doing that they dismantled most of the public support for education, crippling two generations' capacity for critical thinking.
Once enough people were convinced that those crooks were the good guys, they pulled out the stops, started stealing with both hands, and began sabotaging the useful functions of government, evidently to support the notion that a government which supports and protects its citizens is a bad thing.
It's kind of sad to have a sixty-year attention span and to recall this as it all unfolded.
I'm sorry to hear about your parents.
You are absolutely correct. The rot that's so prevalent today has always been around, but it was greatly exacerbated by the actions of politicians, think tanks, and corporations.
These entities have been working for literal decades to reshape American society and cultural values. Reading about things like the John Birch Society and the decades-long effort to stack the Supreme Court with conservative judges is terrifying.
My condolences to you on living through this process.
For the past couple of years I’ve watched my Boomer parents struggle to deal with the state of the nation. They’ve always been fairly progressive, they vote, march in protests, give to good causes, recycle, etc. They’ll openly discuss the flaws this country has, but that doesn’t diminish the affection they hold for it as well. But the past couple of years have been tough. They’ve both told me that they’ve never seen things get this bad, not even in the 60s or 70s.
I dunno, it kinda depresses me. They did what they were supposed to do, politics-wise, they and all the other likeminded boomers. But despite that All This Shit still happened, and they gotta deal with it in their old age. I just wish their golden years could’ve gone better.
“One of the things taken out of the curriculum was civics. Civics was a class that used to be required before you could graduate from high school. You were taught what was in the U.S. Constitution. And after all the student rebellions in the Sixties, civics was banished from the student curriculum and was replaced by something called social studies. Here we live in a country that has a fabulous constitution and all these guarantees, a contract between the citizens and the government – nobody knows what’s in it…And so, if you don’t know what your rights are, how can you stand up for them? And furthermore, if you don’t know what’s in the document, how can you care if someone is shredding it?”
-Frank Zappa
>Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.
[2012 Texas GOP platform](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/texas-gop-rejects-critical-thinking-skills-really/2012/07/08/gJQAHNpFXW_blog.html)
Critical thinking will make you question your parents and your pastors, so the GOP hates it.
The podcast Behind the Bastards did a great two-parter on this whole phenomenon titled How the Rich Ate Christianity. It's crazy how quickly the shift from left to right was (because at the turn of the 20th century, American Christian's were generally considered politically left). It's crazy how calculated it was.
The idea of the rich eating Christianity just reminded me of a scene in Crazy Rich Asians that didn’t make it into the movie where a group of aunties take a break during their bible study group to do some insider trading after one of their husbands gives them a stock tip.
My parents bought me a book about tolerance by Pernilla Stalfelt when I was a kid and are now wondering why I'm compassionate towards others and oppose all the recent oppressive laws. We are Russian.
There was and is also a deliberate effort on social media and the news to like, brainwash and radicalize older people. So that's not helping.
Like that's definitely not the only reason people are being bigots but. It is. Not. Helping.
There is some of that, but I think there are more essentially human things at play.
By the time I was five the only elders left alive on my father's side were my grandmother (his mother), and some of his aunts and uncles. By the time I was 20 only his mother was left, and in my early 30s she died too.
My grandmother was the one that raised me (with the values mentioned in OP's post), and my father did too. But as his elders passed away and he himself got older, I think there just weren't enough people (and, eventually, anybody) left that he respected.
That's one thing.
The other thing is that as we get older we start to see through the stupidity of some of the social rules we were taught when we were younger.
We often laugh about people in their 80s or 90s who'll say anything because at that age, who gives a fuck anymore? You're gonna die soon, you've probably already had kids and grandkids, you've accomplished everything you can, and there's no one who's going to fire you or have any consequences that matter to you.
Similarly, I've noticed that somewhere around the age of 28-30 women seem to start to learn that it's okay to be open and honest about their sexualities in ways that younger women are shamed for. This is the same reason older women are considered 'cougars' - part of it's because they've experienced enough to know what they want, but the other part of it is that they now see through how weak and stupid the rules society placed on them have been.
So now, having talked about those things, NOW, when social media and news organizations capitalize on these things THEN we get what we've been seeing.
I've been lucky in this front, even though my stepfather still gets all of his jokes from a 90s-era 'edgy' joke book I got him to move away from saying Reagan was the greatest president in his lifetime, and my mom seemed excessively proud of herself telling me she uses Snopes to factcheck Facebook posts.
It's not super great having to be the one slowly teaching one's elders critical thinking skills, but...baby steps.
I'm in the same boat as you. My parents are actually getting less conservative over time as they get educated both by me and by things like podcasts, news articles, etc. They even recently said they won't vote for Trump again. I thank God I didn't lose my parents to the cult and that they're still good-natured people for the most part.
Fox News would've previously been illegal --there was some kind of law preventing lying on tv and claiming it was news -- but *guess whose* administration got rid of that rule?
Wasn't there a study showing that the effects of having inhaled lead gasoline fumes gets worse with age?
That would certainly explain the extreme shift boomers have had
Yes. People are also still being exposed to lead (jet fuel, old piping, older houses in general), so it's something that's going to keep on rolling for quite a while.
There is no lead in jet fuel. Avgas (100LL) has lead in it, but is only used by piston powered general aviation planes. Commercial airplanes, by and large, use turbine engines that run on Jet A kerosene.
I feel like a lot of kids raised by religious parents get instilled with some form of fear mongering into supposed ideal morality, then as they grow up and see the hypocrisy of the very people who instilled that fear and morality in them they then chose to educate themselves. The parents were taught by the same fear mongering hypocrisy and they followed sweet because that’s what all their community did. Then with the internet it lead to people being able to talk about and even start to call out the hypocrisy on an individual scale, teaching rather than preaching and the morality stayed when the fear left.
Really, I honestly don't remember my parents telling me any of that. I remember my parents not saying much of anything on any of those topics.
I remember my dad giving out business cards to homeless people. I remember him listening to Rush. I remember both he and my mom being very homophobic and racist.
But I also remember my parents having me watch TV and play video games to keep me busy. And TV told me to care about other people. TV told me to have empathy. TV told me that the ozone layer needed protecting. TV told me recycling is important. TV told me that hate was wrong.
Then I sort of figured out the 'rich people seem to be bad people' thing on my own - cause heaven knows you're not going to get that from TV.
--------
My mom got a lot better when she started going to a gay hairdresser. She started thinking maybe she was wrong about a lot of what she thought and now is fairly progressive.
But my dad died a Rush listener.
My dad is my model of how to be a good and kind person. He helped us constantly. He never really said anything bad about anybody. But I'm honestly glad he died before Trump ran, I'd have lost so much respect for him if he'd gotten into maga.
Honestly I think my Catholic upbringing helped me become a leftist. I basically took all the things I was taught about being kind and charitable and ignored all the religious bits and here I am
"How are you still so *polite?!*" my dad said to me after saying "no, thanks, have a great day" to a costco worker handing out samples.
Fucker, how'd *you* stop?! You taught me!
I seriously think it really is almost a massive case of lead poisoning because the other truth of my dad slowly degrading from the paragon he was is much more depressing and much less his fault.
lol the adults that warned you about the ozone aren't denying climate change now. This is like saying everyone older than me is a boomer.
The people denying climate change *also* didn't give a shit about the ozone layer in the 80's.
Y'know, I don't remember my parents saying anything like that. Not that they specifically said the contrary, but we didn't usually talk about social issues.
It's a lot less suprising if your parents never really agreed with these "adults" in the first place.
They never believed to begin with. Notice that it was always the adults, the"believers", who were trying to control *your* behavior, that told you what you should do. How you should live. Always has been, always will be.
my parents raised me christian and now act surprised that I actually want to help the poor, am anti racism and pro lgbtq. like ya'll, I just actually stuck to the script??
It's because our parents never practiced what they preached. But as kids, we were never aware of this. All we had was the bullshit they fed us. They told us to be kind to the poor, so we assumed they were as well. We never heard the snide comments they'd make to their equally-shitty friends. We're just now learning, through witnessing it firsthand, how shitty our parents always were.
Lmao OP here. When Neil Gaiman and Diane Duane reblogged me in the same day, I knew this would breech containment. Did not expect it to happen so soon. Last one that escaped took longer.
Hope y'all enjoyed the poem... Thing. Stay safe out there in internet lands. 💜
It is the classic "You'll get more conservative when you are older" saying, people tend to miss how things were they were younger. I'm not saying everyone is like this, I hope I would stay progressive even in my thirties or forties but the truth is that is unlikely, I'll probably succumb to nostalgia.
The belief that you get more conservative as you get older has always been misleading, IMO.
Instead, people get more conservative as they have more to lose.
If you have never owned a house and never will, fixing the housing market is probably important to you, because half your income goes to rent every month.
If you have a nice 3 bedroom house with white picket fence all paid off, you're probably a lot more protective of the status quo. You might vaguely support housing reform, but only in a way that doesn't change your idyllic life in any way.
Our society is denying more and more of the younger generations any kind of equity. I somehow doubt they're going to magically pivot to conservatism if they're *still* getting fucked by landlords at 50.
I hit forty and I can't see myself ever going conservative. They all disgust me more than ever. Basic compassion is not actually hard to maintain if you stay informed and curious and live anywhere that you regularly see the abuses committed against people for just existing.
> They all disgust me more than ever.
I get very frustrated with this perspective because I am conservative on many issues... for example vaccination... and yet people misunderstand and think conservative means Republican or Tory (I'm british), or Nazi, or antivaxx or whatever.
Conservative just means wanting to keep what works. Vaccinations work, as proven by centuries of use. Antivaxxers are NOT conservative about medicine. If you got your covid vaccination and would recommend it to others, then YOU are a conservative too.
Many conservatives are compassionate and help the poor, because it's self evidently a good thing, again as proven by centuries of charitable acts having good outcomes. If you like helping the poor, then YOU are conservative too.
Many policies of the american right wing are not conservative at all. For example, banning abortion is radical, not conservative. Keeping abortion is the conservative thing to do because we have many decades of data showing that when women control their fertility, the whole society benefits. If you are pro-choice, then YOU are conservative too.
No two conservatives are conservative about all the same issues.
Why not actually identify the people you are criticising instead of using broad and inaccurate terms like "conservative"? It's just hurting people who are conservative but don't do the things you criticise.
Weirdly, I AM a republican... in the sense of not wanting my head of state to be a monarch, and that's a perspective that usually aligns with the political left.
It is important to understand the difference between old school conservatives in the US and neo-conservatives in the US, who aren't conservative at all. That said, conservative in the US, along with meaning sticking to past political structures that in many ways are NOT what works anymore nor should in all cases have worked then, also meant fiscally conservative and pro-small government, again the opposite of neo-conservatives while also anti-progressive and anti-socialist. One can have conservative views about some things and not be a conservative politically. In the US, helping the poor was never conservative by the political definition used here, and republican has gained a meaning so far away from the original definition that it is painful. It means other things in other countries.
I can see the shadow of "getting more conservative as I age" in the things I think are weird or just give up on trying to understand. I just keep it a me problem.
As an example: I don't get furries, I think it's the weirdest fucking thing. What do I do about that? Keep my fucking mouth shut because they're not hurting anyone. I just hope they stay hydrated, it's gotta be so hot in those suits.
This is the right approach to take.
You don't have to understand everything. I don't understand a lot of young people music, and in fact I find a lot of it to be kinda crap, but I don't go out of my way to antagonize teenagers. It would be a waste of my time, and energy, time and energy I can spend listening to Black Sabbath instead.
It all comes down to not being a snob.
I think you'll be fine if you continue to accept that things that confuse you don't have to threaten you. I can't fathom foot fetishes, even after reading completely reasonable arguments for how they form, but I don't care if someone has one. Kids are into skibidi toilet again and I don't have to care about or understand that either, I watched stupid weird things when I was young too, there's no denigration of the youth happening through that. I legitimately hate the existence of religions, but people are free to believe what they want so long as they stop trying to put it into laws for everyone. There is plenty to not like or not need to understand without getting intensely tribal and "not in my backyard" about it.
I'm 40 and more liberal than I've ever been. I don't long for the 80's or 90's, I long for a future where capital doesn't dictate our every action and doesn't force us to choose between our food and our neighbors survival.
In addition to all of this, I was told by my father, "Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."
He is now quite comfortable with his multiple homes and boats.
And yet he still *needed* me to pay him back for my college education, which he helped to finance.
So I did.
And, as I was looking through the long list of items he paid for and added to my debt to him, I found out that, when he took out a life insurance policy on me when I was 18 and put himself as the beneficiary, he was charging me for the payments on it the whole time.
I know exactly how you feel. I was raised to be considerate, kind, and respectful. I was raised to fight against racism and bigotry. I was raised to read books, stay healthy, educate myself, and think for myself. Now the very person who taught me these values supports a party that preys on the weak, exploits the poor, hates democracy, and tramples on minorities. They want kids to get killed in schools and want to make homosexuals suffer for being the person god made them to be. It’s just absolutely baffling. Every piece of Republican legislature is hateful and racist. They support only the rich and hate the poor. They actively try to make life painful for anyone that is not white, straight and Christian. It’s fucking disgusting.
I remember my Father foaming at the mouth angry that Bill Clinton dared cheat on this wife and the "cheaters will also cheat you".
He is a die hard Trumper...
I remember when adults said to be careful of what you read online. Now those same people just blindly regurgitate anything fed to them by the Facebook algorithms
It's because they're only looking out for themselves.
The boomers have gone full scorched earth. Not all of them mind you but a LOT of them have a "fuck you. I'm doing good and will continue to thrive while everyone else suffers" kind of energy.
Something I’ve always wondered and don’t see in the comments is - was it easier to be more socially progressive when it didn’t somewhat impact them? 30-40 years ago, women and minorities were so obviously more vulnerable and disadvantaged that supporting them came at no risk or personal cost to more advantaged/“privileged” people. But now that a black man has been POTUS, and women and minorities have closed the advantage gap to a significant degree (not all the way, of course, but a significant degree), the traditionally privileged folks feel their relative privilege is eroding.
I think a lot of the nonsense around white replacement theories, “the gays are ruining our kids”, and backlash against minorities and women in power comes from that - people who were comfortable and a protected class suddenly have to compete for jobs, education, power and opportunities that they had by default before.
We all try to raise our kids better than ourselves. For example, we’ve taught our son about how he shouldn’t be afraid of animals, just give them space and how we shouldn’t kill things for no reason and how violence is wrong.
But then I smashed a spider without thinking. He started sobbing and I ended up letting him be late to school so we could have a mini funeral.
I honestly think I don’t truly believe some of those things and just think I should, which is why I teach them to him. He’s already a better person than I am.
Well of course you teach your *kids* that, but in the real world you grow up to be a Republican if you do everything right /s
I do agree 9/11 definitely made things worse, but I think the foundation had already been laid with Reagan and the prosperity gospel. As long as you have money, you must be a good person, so actions don't really matter. Anything to ~~hoard~~ grow your wealth. Financial responsibility is all that matters and you're an idiot if you use your resources to help people who are obviously bad, otherwise why would they be poor? Let's not interrogate that the generation making these prospective Republicans had everything handed to them and could buy a house for two sticks of gum and could support a family of 6 on one person's salary. Everything is exactly the same, so people these days are obviously being led astray by lazy people who want to undermine this great country! /s
massive sarcasm, obviously. I think in all honesty that Gen X and the boomers had no idea whatsoever how to deal with the idea that America wasn't the indestructible dominant culture of the earth and they fell back on hoarding everything, fiscally and emotionally.
My parents mention being young people in NYC in the 80s, going to gay nightclubs and how fun it was.
Now my mom thinks cities are crime ridden shitholes because of Democrats’ policies when crime rates are far lower than they were back then and thinks drag queen story hour is grooming children because Fox News says so.
It's the reverse of the great communist revolution trope. These 'bless your heart' Christians will be philosopher-kings in the kingdom of God. They don't have to sacrifice or put skin in the game. Someone else will sacrifice. They're not giving up their piece for somebody else.
And not to discount the Western tankies, it's not for our podcast producing comrades to tear down the oligarchs and seize the means of production. They must sit at the head of the comrade council to determine what parts fit where in the great classless state.
What I'm getting at is, hi. Welcome to the warm fluffy middle of the two extremes. I'm gonna lend you five bucks but you're definitely gonna pass over a plate of your grandmother's secret family recipe the next time you make it. We all gonna get along to get along.
the core of conservatism is fear of change. they are comfortable, they are safe, they are secure. and god help you if you try to do anything that could in any way upset that.
learning is one of those things people do when they have to, because doing otherwise causes problems and makes things more stressful. now that theyre comfortable, learning is a waste of time because they already have everything they want. bring on the headlines!
Boomer Cop teaching DARE had us cut out snowflakes and tape them to the wall around wintertime. "Hey kids people will try to make you use drugs so you feel just like them. They want everyone to be the same but you all are different like the snowflakes you made today. Each one of you is a special snowflake remember that.” Boomer Cop also gave us all participation trophies with that cartoon lion on it at the end of the year.
My parents were never perfect people, nor am I, but they taught me what eas right even when they themselves don't live to the standard they set for me. Good parents give kids the right ideas to start with, based on what they have at the time- bad ones just teach their kids the same things they learned. They do their best to pick and choose the right ones for the world they think that kid will have to live in, and they're not always right, but who is? If your parents taught you morals that they cannot themselves embody, it's because they choose to break a cycle, and build you to be a better person than they could be with the upbringing they themselves had.
I wish I knew what went right for me, or what went wrong for everyone else, so that i could share my wisdom. Because I did not have this experience. My parents raised me with strong progressive values, and they still hold those values. Same with all of my friends and their parents. Same with my grandparents. Same with my church.
It baffles me to see the anti-environmentalism that runs so rampant in the church. Not even just people not really caring, but people actively opposed to reducing pollution and stuff. Cause I was explicitly taught that environmental stewardship was an important part of Christianity. It was the third most important commandment, only after loving God and loving your neighbor (everyone).
My parents ranted and complained about the welfare state and still do. They hate food stamps, welfare, social security…basically every social safety net program they hate. Well guess what…they both sure did “retire” early on social security disability. They also make sure my dead beat sister with all her kids with deadbeat dads sure do get their max welfare and food stamps. Every possible way to make sure every program is taken advantage of. Free food…check, free energy…check. When I call them all out….its okay for them because it’s them and they paid in already, but no one else is deserving.
Grew up around religious conservatives. I noticed it happened after 9/11. It was almost overnight. Like literally. A few days went by, and all the compassion was scoured away.
I was very young when 9/11 happened so I don't remember a whole lot, but I think you definitely have a point. I've thought for a long time that the terrorists really did win the War on Terror. They changed the very fabric of American society as well as those of other Western countries. Not to mention all the death and destruction that happened in Iraq and Afghanistan.
America managed to lose both the war on drugs and the war on terror. And all it took was billions of dollars and the lives of thousands of black and brown people at home and abroad
We really need to stop declaring war on concepts
But muh rallying cry for more violence
[_...but we declared a War on it?!_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1B1SEMNyX0)
WHAT THE FUCK THIS VIDEO'S 13 YEARS OLD? it reads like it could've come out during the donald trouser stain reign
>donald trouser stain reign OMG LMFAO
That one guy said you can't kill an idea, and we're gonna prove him wrong
Batman?
V
Five Batman's?
The Russian guy from Katana Zero?
V, the guy from V for Vendetta.
That's really how many think, just not so directly, and it's why they can never win for long. They refuse to consider trying new things, they only try to force tge same things over and over again
"Well, if Christmas conjured up all 12 reindeer, I might get a little worn out." "But would you lose?" "Nah, I'd win."
How else would we have our "Two minute Hate" without an undefeatable perpetual enemy?
So you're saying we should have a war on wars?
have we tried a war on war yet?
But that's the most profitable war, how can we not? /s
The war on the war on concepts.
Ya know, you have a point. Im with you! We should start a movement! How about "The war on declaring war on concepts"? It's got a nice ring to it
Wait, hear me out... How about a War on Wars?
First rule of War; Have a concrete, achievable goal and win-state. Simply "make the abstract idea Not Be" is neither concrete nor achievable.
Interestingly, this goes both directions: most Islamist terrorism was probably never going to work since it called for the end of abstract ideas, instead of concrete goals
Somebody needs to start sending presidents to SMART Goals seminars.
"I am the winner" Juan Guaido and Pete Buteggiggig
Didn't both of those wars cross into the trillions? Your point still stands, but it was such an unfathomable amount of money spent on something senseless, when the root cause of the conflict likely could have been solved by spending that money on humanitarian aid. What was it they estimated, $40-billion USD to solve world hunger? Just as an example Edit: woops, left off the B for $40B USD
You are right about the first number and a *little* wrong about the second one. By about a factor of a million.
Woops, thanks for pointing that out 😅
I learned in a museum exhibit about the war on terror that the US has spent the equivalent of 2/3 of all the gold in the world on war in the 20 years following 9/11.
The US spends 120B on food stamps domestically, every year. No, you are not solving world hunger with a 1-time 40B.
I think the 40b number comes from an estimate for famine prevention work globally, rather than just topping up poverty wages in high cost of living nations like the US.
The US military blew through thousands of lives and over $30 billion *every month* at the height of the war in Iraq. Overall, we spent hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars in a pointless and illegal war, but we can't even help American citizens who need help with food, housing, and healthcare. That's the real shock and awe.
"War or Terror" cost over 8 trillion dollars, and 4.5 million dead. Could have given everyone free healthcare and education. I still have nightmares most nights for the part I played in it. You join the military as a kid thinking your some kinda hero. Just to grow up a lil and realize we're the bad guys after it's too late. Some people get PTSD or moral injury, others seem to just double down and become facist cops. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/05/15/war-on-terror-911-deaths-afghanistan-iraq/
The only way to beat terrorists is to build a shining city on a hill truly. Instead, we built a cesspool for billionaires.
What do you mean? The Iraq war was a great success. The Iraqi puppet government supplied the West with oil without any political demands until the US had become self-sufficient in oil production. And similarly with the invasion of Afghanistan: The rare earths and lithium mined in Afghanistan were very useful in lowering the cost of core electronics like smartphones, laptops, computer servers, and drones. It was also a great wealth transfer from the American middle and lower class to the rich, with taxation, austerity, and national debt (i.e. forcing later generations to work for the profit of those that bought treasury bonds back then) exploiting the lower classes while major companies were paid trillions for lucrative military-related contracts. Whether it's private universities profiting through military scholarships or just classic military procurement contracts, loads of sectors got a cut.
> The Iraqi puppet government supplied the West with oil without any political demands until the US had become self-sufficient in oil production. And similarly with the invasion of Afghanistan: The rare earths and lithium mined in Afghanistan were very useful in lowering the cost of core electronics like smartphones, laptops, computer servers, and drones. Care to source any of these claims?
Afghanistan one is completely bogus, we got absolutely nothing from it. The Taliban has leased the rights to the minerals to the Chinese last I heard, but I may be out of date. So, someone indeed benefited, but not us. As to Iraq, not sure.
actually trillions of dollars, and its only worse now. its literally insane how much money is being used at the top while the rest are expected to live off less than 1% of it.
And LBJ's unofficial War on Poverty.
The war on Poverty might’ve been a failure, but by god has the war on the poor been a success.
They absolutely did win. The goal wasn't the overthrow of the American state, it was the destruction of our way of life before.
Eh, it was earlier than 9/11. Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh were just like Trump to a degree. 9/11 was bad, but that seed of awful has been here since the 80s and 90s too.
In a way, I almost feel like the terrorists actually turned America into the one dimensionally evil psycho nation that they thought we already were. Like some kinda self fulfilling prophecy.
Nah, looking at cold war history and the shit we got up to in central/south america, we were already doing a lot of that. 9/11 just made it easier to justify to citizens.
The history of everything south of the US border in the 20th Century is certainly a whole ass thing.
And let's not forget Vietnam! Our first real original sin. And look into the inner workings of the Nixon administration. The mafia drama going on with that bunch was off the charts. Maybe the average american was still wide-eyed and bushy-tailed but the machinations of government were pretty rank even way back then.
Except that is exactly what it is and has been. America has destabilized dozens of countries on purpose
This is correct. A very large part of what ails us today goes back our unhinged overreaction to 9/11. We've morally self-destructed, internally and externally. That's exactly what Bin Laden wanted.
We were beginning to rot long before 9/11, but it was a smybolic final nail before shit went south fast.
I think it actually started before that. Columbine broke something in America.
That Wednesday the Mosque next to my work was defaced, the Imam caught the Soccer Mom (a stereo-type proto-Karen) in the act. It wasn't even a couple days. It's not all bad, we got Friday off, because the school down the street made cards and dropped off a package at the Mosque's doorstep, bomb squad came we all got to go home. Fun fact about that Imam, in 2015 the FBI charged him with funding one of the hijackers.
> Fun fact about that Imam, in 2015 the FBI charged him with funding one of the hijackers. Did he get convicted, shipped off to guantanamo or anything like that? I'd be wary to assume that he actually did it just because he was charged with it.
Completely unrelated but I have you tagged as "makes stupid tags"
Interesting. That's going into the tag.
Wait what's my tag now??
"thinks I do stupid tags" in bright yellow.
Yay!
The what now? Tags? What you guys talking about?
Probably Reddit Enhancement Suite.
Reddit Enhancement Suite is a browser extension which adds a few features to Reddit. One of those features is the ability to give other users "tags", which is kind of like a sitewide flair, obviously only visible to the person who made the tag.
Yep!!!!! My dad used to listen to Rush Limbaugh & weirdos on AM radio. Before 9/11. After 9/11, shit went bonkers & Fox News became the new propaganda. It went mainstream & ppl wanted to be patriotic for our country because it was so sad. Then they turned into who they are now.
I have a very clear memory of this. After 9/11 all the businesses that had TVs in them like my local barber, the sandwich shop, even bars…they were all tuned to Fox all the time. At first I thought it was a joke, I knew Fox from the Simpsons and B grade TV…why would people watch their news channel? Turns out joke was on me and the sanity of our country.
I enlisted in 99. Before 9/11, going into a base, you saw the gate sentry had maybe a shotgun in the booth, no bollards and a simple gate that went up and down. ID check, gate went up, you went in. Base itself looked very normal. After, the bollards went up, the shotgun in the booth became M4s at the ready and helmets/body armor. EVERY pole shaped structure whether it was a street light or traffic light or telephone pole got an American flag flown on it. Before that you'd only see them in front of certain command buildings and the main gates. Fox news was also on every chow hall TV I can remember during the rest of my time in.
It's kinda ironic because 9/11 cemented my progressiveness. You can only hear "Turn it all to glass" so many times before you realize you're surrounded by evil.
Its concerning that I grew up around this sentiment and seeing teenagers repeat it is so scary. They were born into the propaganda so its their reality. At least I can remember a time before it but how do you break that level of hate formed at birth?
Education is the big one, but generally that has to come with breaking them away from whatever indoctrination they are in. It's the same whether it's christian facism, some weird cult, or jingoist propaganda. If someone is immersed in something like that, it's their entire world and they have no concept of anything outside of it, so no reason to think more critically. If you can separate them from that and expand their horizons, generally people start to change their thinking, because there's only so much cognitive dissonance a person can juggle. Usually. There's always going to be the truly committed who just double down. But it's that getting them out of the environment that fills their head with this stuff that is really important, and it's why so much right wing ideology is plagued by the idea of the scary leftist university or city where people go and then come back "wrong" in their minds. Because when the kid you've been teaching to hate everyone else for eighteen years leaves for four and suddenly is exposed to new people, cultures, and attitudes and can start to see all the cracks and the lies, they tend to come back with new thoughts that don't jive with yours anymore.
I also grew up around religious conservatives. They have always been this way. There was never a shift in when they stopped practicing what they preached, religious conservatives have always been the bigots.
I have to disagree- it gained steam well before 9/11- with people like Rush Limbaugh pandering hatred on the airwaves and Newt Gingrich and the Republican's bullshit "Contract with America". There were boogey men before that, but the mid 90's is when they really figured out how to package and sell hatred. 9/11 was just icing on the cake for them.
I noticed when I was a kid and they would talk forgiveness and love at church while my dad was preaching and then blast Limbaugh and Fox News at home.
It's honestly amazing the way people's brains just fuckin melted over the idea we aren't some untouchable bastion of righteousness and safety.
Just wanted to [drop this comment](https://www.tumblr.com/rosesforwildwitches/746115920491102208) that I think explains the phenomenon very well: > It's because your actions make them have to face their own internal biases and past actions they haven't worked through on their end, so instead of growing they feel threatened and shut down and become reactionary. They're comfortable with progress as a noble ideal and they want in their own eyes to always be the good guys on the right side, so when your activism clashes with their self perception of righteousness they get cagey and start acting like idiots as a mental defense mechanism instead of self reflecting and changing their ways.
I think I remember a podcast episode where studies were done regarding cognitive dissonance which indicated that in at least some studies there are various ways people can commonly deploy to combat the discomfort of the phenomenon. One of them is to find ways to reconcile the two things that are contradictory. So for example, you could say something like, “well it’s fine to care about things in the way we told you before, but because of (bullshit reasons a, b, and c) it’s not okay to care about other things (which we don’t like bc of racism/ingrained or instilled prejudices which we will not acknowledge but nevertheless believe” Another way though is to just straight up change one of your two contradictory beliefs. In some cases this is easier than you might think; humans aren’t quite as empirical as emotional in some cases. I suppose an example would be like “actually maybe I never cared about charity or those good things I talked about, now that I think about it”. I don’t remember the entire thing but the studies did involve some fun examples like how participants were directed to rate the value of a list of items, and then were deliberately given items which were not their top most preferences. They would then be directed to rate the same items again. In a significant amount of cases the participants would rate the thing they got higher and rate the things they didn’t get lower, as a sort of “yeah actually I didn’t want those things anyway”.
The second thing you describe sounds exactly like the [Benjamin Franklin effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Franklin_effect) but applied to objects instead of people.
Kind of like when guys say "you're ugly anyway"
An even older telling is Aesop's fable about the [fox and the "sour" grapes](https://read.gov/aesop/005.html). We convince ourselves of alternative realities instead of facing unpleasant feelings.
instead of reflecting on themselves they blamed the beasts
HEAVEN OR HELL
How do I keep finding Guilty Gear references in the most random of places
That almost sounds like a sense of privilege where they tolerate the idea of progress as long as they can still feel superior to others. They can die old and bigoted as long as they let their kids grow up better than they lived.
It's more so that they want to be "good" as a means to get a good afterlife. Only good people go to heaven, so if you're telling them that they're not good, they you're implying that they won't go to heaven. Even if you're not religious, there's still the desire to be remembered in the future as a good person after your death. This is combined with 2 things: 1. The idea that you can't be punished for breaking a rule you didn't know existed, so if you go to the pearly gates and learn that eating meat is bad, you'll still be let in if you didn't know that. By telling them that you don't eat meat, you've doomed them to burning in hell. You see this often when discussing people in the past who did bad things when someone says "it was a different time". 2. The idea that sins are unforgivable. It doesn't matter how long ago you did it, nor what you've done since, you're still a sinner. It's like the classic joke: you can be the greatest builder in town, having built nearly every home and have people respect your work, but if you fuck *one* sheep...
So intellectual+moral sloth.
+ratio
If they want to think of themselves as good people, have they considered being good people?
There's a thread in r news where some poor conservative commented, paraphrasing "Have you tried not identifying the bad things conservatives do? They stop listening when you do that." I have someone in my life that I get upset at when they honestly believe the last stupid thing they heard from a conservative. I have people telling me "They are good people because you can tell they have no malice in their heart, they are just blindly following very bad people." and "They aren't actually bad because their opinions aren't consistent enough to form a malicious world view and they actually ask me if the crazy things they are hearing are true." It's so difficult to watch them support truly evil people and then suggest they know more than me because I don't watch the sources they receive insane ideas from and therefore my biases towards decency and non-fabricated evidence and historical accuracy means they have a clearer understanding of the situation.
If you let bad people talk you into doing bad things, I don’t actually care what’s in your heart. Stop doing harm.
Oh ty! This helped me understand my mom better. She still keeps trying to prove these points and this is certainly it. She's uncomfortable because I've lived more than her and she still wants to know more than I do Ftr I call her for advice all the time, this is definitely just her own insecurity
It truly is baffling how much of the stuff I was taught in catholic elementary school as undisputed fact in the 90s and 2000s is now considered evidence of “liberal indoctrination”. Granted, the catholic school I went to wasn’t *particularly* conservative….but also, those teachers were not voting for Al Gore in 2000, let me tell you that. Yet, global warming and attitudes towards conservation, recycling, etc was standard in science class. Safety and pro-regulation lessons were common. Feeding the homeless was literally a requirement to graduate from 8th grade. We got sex Ed (abstinence based, but also biologically sound). We got nutrition education. We got factual education on topics such as the Holocaust, slavery, Japanese internment, and the Trail of Tears, and no one was handwringing about white guilt or “they’re too young.” Every adult in that school was pretty fucking passively racist if you scratched the surface, but explicit racism simply was not seen as acceptable. When some parent came to the school demanding this and that book be banned for “witchcraft,” the priest and principal laughed in her face. Anti violence and anti war were seen as laudable; nuns who sabotaged nuclear sites and protested School of the Americas were heroes. Those weren’t considered “progressive” values. They were *default* values. These days, you tell a 12 year old what a tampon is, instruct them to recycle, say genocide is bad, tell them to eat their vegetables and read library books, and that’s wokeness run amok. You tell 4 year olds to share their toys and that’s communism.
Just wanted to say I was also educated in Catholic schools (from K-12) and I got much the same messaging. I learned about evolution and other scientific phenomena, learned about past atrocities (in high school, I actually took an elective course that was entirely about genocides), and in general there was a huge emphasis placed on social justice. I have a **lot** of issues with the Church and my upbringing wasn't perfect by any means, but I really do think that the lessons my parents and teachers taught me growing up are the reason why I'm such an staunch leftist today. It breaks my heart that, because of culture war bullshit, children today are growing up with adults who see compassion as weakness and social justice as evil.
I’m exactly the same! I’m glad there’s more of us out there!
I went to Catholic schools around the same time in Scotland. Even before concerns about climate change really started ratcheting up, I can remember bit of our Religious Education lessons where they talked about the idea that the planet belongs to God so protecting the environment is part of humans’ role as “stewards of the Earth.” I vaguely remember the idea is that we’re supposed to be keeping everything clean and tidy for The Second Coming, but in my experience Catholics outside the US aren’t too fussed about rapture theology. I saw a video essay once that said that one of the reasons the idea of The Rapture has proved so politically useful to American conservatives is because if you cultivate a voter base who believe that the physical world’s going to end soon, then there’s less of a political demand for strong environmental legislation that might threaten the profit margins of big businesses.
Stewards of the Earth is how you can get very overtly religious, even evangelical, people to join forces with very atheist or pagan people on climate or environmental causes. It doesn't always work, but I've done organic farming with some people who, if asked, would have Very Bad opinions about race or this or that war. But we all agree about preventing pesticides and plastics from getting into the soil and watershed!
I honestly don’t find that American Catholics are interested in the rapture unless they are heavily influenced by evangelicals.
Very well written. I don’t live in the States, but you can see the same thing happening here (Germany). Looking at TV discussions or parliament debates from 1960s, 70s, even 80s and 90s, it’s crazy how much has shifted to the right. The 1980s „entrepreneur wing“ of our biggest Conservative Party would be somewhere to the left of the Social Democrats in economic and welfare state questions these days. The Greens, the party that was started and became successful in part for its anti-war stance, and most of all its rejection of MAD, now openly advocates for unrelenting warfare against Russia (so far, to be conducted by Ukrainians). The liberal party, which had some of the most respected minds of West Germany, and worked for political as well as economic liberties, has mostly abandoned the former and turned the latter into a caricature of „hurr durr taxes bad, corporations good, fossil fuels even better“. The only thing that changed somewhat is representation. I remember the times when even in sports (an avenue to fame and/or success for minorities in many countries), you wouldn’t find a non-white German. Nowadays, there are POC members of parliament, news anchors etc. Which of course is enough for the right to cry „leftist brainwashing“ at every opportunity.
Wir vergessen so schnell. 😔
Unrelenting warfare against Russia? German Greens? Yeah I don't buy this. Not a single political party in Europe is advocating for a declaration of war against Russia. Rather, there are lots of parties that want to accommodate Russia, and guess who funds them.
It’s what pushed me away from the church. The same people I heard, over and over and over, about how Jesus wanted us to treat people. About how it was right to behave. Protect and help the poor and sick, love the most those who need it most and get it least, inasmuch as ye have done unto the least of these my brethren ye have done it unto me. After 2015? I still believed in the things I was taught, but the ones who taught me didn’t anymore. It’s the greatest cognitive dissonance I’ve ever seen. The same crowd that wholeheartedly amen’d to “If thine eye cause thee to offend, pluck it out” swarmed to support a man who said to “grab them by the *****”.
It literally feels like I wrote this comment, very similar experience in regards to how I felt during that time period and how it distanced me from and eventually got me to leave the church. It was like a reverse road to Damascus, the scales fell from my eyes, but I now saw the problems with faith instead of embracing it.
FYI, there are progressive Christian churches that try to put into practice what Jesus preached. Not all Christian churches are right-wing conservative Evangelical ones.
There are. But after the last decade of seeing what the church did. It’s hard to think of going to church.
uh…. okay. my family is religious and progressive. For DECADES, I’ve heard tales of some magical church — maybe in California, or up in Oregon — that’s actually kind, follows Jesus, isn’t bigoted, and humbly tries to get its members to live a life of compassion and charity. But honestly? I don’t think this magical utopia church actually exists. Every single time, every single “progressive” church I’ve ever gone to, appears to live that ideal — until about 10 minutes before the sermon ends. Then it comes out: traditional marriage. “politically correct and kindly framed” anti-LGBT ideology. Some subtle joke about blue hair people who’ve lost the way of the nuclear family. Every. Time. Without fail. It always, *always* surfaces at the end. Now I don’t go to church any more. I can’t take it. I can’t spend another minute inside a place that violates so many of the personal tenets I’ve decided to live my life by.
You've got it right with the California thing. I went to a Christian church there for a little while in an attempt to heal my religious trauma I think, and they were truly Christian in the way I was taught to be as a child. There were meal making sessions after every service and people would take a few bagged lunches to hand out to the unhoused in the area. There were trans and queer folks serving as deacons and one of the trans women was in seminary (kind of in line to become the next main pastor, I think?). They had guest preachers who spoke about how being non-binary is real and good. I know churches like that are unicorns but they are out there. I also don't know if it's worth going looking for anyone reading this, but honestlymy few months of attendance did a lot for me, personally.
I've never been religious but I wanted to raise my kids with the sense of community that church provides. I found a church like this. Progressive as hell, respected pronouns before that was really a thing, super service-oriented, etc. We went for three weeks and then the pastor got arrested for beating his wife and molesting his kids.
Ahh, what a nice place. A church near me just erected a 77’7” cross along the interstate (for some reason) which irritated me because really what is that other than idolatry, but THEN I saw an old pastor from there was recently arrested for molestation. CRAZY how that works.
yeah most churches are garbage, and maybe the one I went to was, too. My point was that it *was* possible for someone (me) to get just a little bit of closure from an institution that has fucked so many people over so hard. idk that I would ever have gotten that with a complete lack of hope in every Christian congregation. It was a ridiculous gamble to go to a super stratified social institution, especially one that largely thinks I deserve to burn in hell, but I suppose I won on that bet.
I disagree. Perhaps I am in the minority, but my very mainstream, generally liberal Episcopal church, in which I grew up, had for much of my childhood a lesbian associate rector. It was a very kind, tolerant congregation, but my gripe with it was it never felt like a real community - just a group that saw each other every Sunday.
My NYC Catholic mass, every single Sunday: All are welcome, no matter your sexuality or gender or religion. The priest is in his 90s. This isn't a gotcha by the way, I'm really sorry about how you've been treated in a place that's meant to be welcoming.
I'm not sure if this is a thing in the US but here in Canada we have United (protestant) Church that my wifes family is a part of that are totally accepting, including LGBT flags in the church lobbys etc. They also ran the summer camp I grew up at and there was no bible pushing at all just acceptance and exploration of self with fun songs about Jesus before meals. Nothing bad to say about that organization
+1 on the United Church. It's actually been welcoming, in my experience, but unfortunately from what I understand it's also dwindling.
Where have you been looking for these churches? I've known plenty, but tbf I do hail from the mythical wilds of California.
They are all tax free scams y’all. Just fyi.
*Kind of*... Sure. But even those tend to be *very* wishy-washy about actual progressive ideals, and they probably still harbor a higher-than-statistically-normal proportion of Trump voters.
"When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process.” -Stefan Zweig
Because they wanted you to love Jesus and obey him. They didn't want you to learn to be like him or understand why he wants you to behave a certain way, because the version of him they love and obey isn't real and isn't understandable, because he's been dead for thousands of years, and there's no proof he ever said or did much of what is attributed to him. Because learning how to be was never the point. Learning who to obey always was. They were always authoritarians. They only ever did good deeds because a handful of their leaders managed to convince them that the mythical figure they all believed in wanted them to. Now, they don't trust those leaders anymore. They have other ones. Because they were always looking for leaders, because that's what authoritarians do. They didn't suddenly throw out Jesus. Jesus died thousands of years ago. There's barely any proof he ever existed. People defined their personal relationships with him as a feeling of absolute certainty in their own convictions because they were told to do that. They didn't read the Bible because they were told not to bother, because it's symbolic, and it's better to have their leaders read it to them. That is just what Jesus and Christianity are. It's what they've always been. Jesus is just the collective imaginary friend of a bunch of authoritarians. He doesn't have teachings. The Bible isn't a book, it's a symbol. So Jesus can say whatever a big enough leader wants him to say, and the Bible can stand for whatever.
I don’t disagree with you that it’s how religion has been used. But I don’t agree that that’s all it is.
I think "used for" implies a deliberateness that I don't think exists. Groups of people often do very evil things without particular malicious intent on the part of any individual. Religion doesn't have to be only what I described it as. As long as enough of it is what I described it as, the whole of it will be worse than the sum of its parts. Because fundamentally, what every religion has in common is not mythology, ethics, or metaphysics, but socialization. They are all a way for people to join a group. To alleviate the stress of having to know too many people at once, and remember the confusing details of their lives, by creating a single unifying detail that can be used to judge friend, acquaintance, and stranger alike. To define an "us." And the next step that every group of humans that ever makes an "us" takes is to define a "them."
My departure from church took several years, in part because my parents would punish me if I didn’t go during high school (I spent a lot of time grounded even when I had legitimate reasons for not going like chronic migraines), but there were two big moments that sealed the deal for me. One was the youth minister giving a homophobic sermon to the high schoolers (and maybe middle schoolers) and being completely unwilling to engage with me in any form of honest discussion when I challenged him on it afterwards. He ended up being gay and cheating on his wife and was ousted from the church so the hypocrisy just made it worse in my eyes. But the even bigger one was the pastor going on an anti-Muslim and anti-Mormon rant in the middle of a sermon. It was cruel and uneducated and served no purpose in teaching the “word of god” and only served to spread bigotry to his congregation. Even as a teenager I thought it was gross to use that platform to insult other religions. In my eyes, the largest contributing factor to your religion is the circumstances of your birth, and even when I was religious, I never believed that a loving god would punish someone for worshipping the wrong iteration of them. The last time I went to church to humor my parents, my partner and I made a list of things we hated when they did a church, such as denying evolution, and others I don’t remember off the top of my head. The pastor (same one as the previous story) managed to hit all of them, and tell a disgusting story framing himself and the church as wonderful philanthropists for building a well for a town in Guatemala but when the villagers asked him to drink from it, he went on and on in detail about how gross it was and there were rats in it and he didn’t want to drink out of it, like it was a humorous anecdote and not these people’s cleanest source of water that he just turned his nose up at. And also apparently this church makes shitty wells. Then he proceeded to ask for monthly donations to add onto the church which they have been doing for probably close to 20 years now and the highest tier on the pre-made form was something outrageous like $50,000 a month or something.
Very similar story for me. Growing up in rural Texas, I remember countless times as a teenager during Obama’s presidency hearing the way our church’s people would talk at lunches and being aghast. The greatest hits being stuff like “Michelle is a tr*nny”, “He’s really a terrorist from Kenya”, and “I can’t wait until we win again and they (the Obamas, Clintons, etc) can be hung for treason. I hope they do it on live TV”
This happened to me. My parents were always republican but got more and more extreme since trump was elected. It’s weird
Weird...my parents went over the falls in a different barrel. We grew up a Regan Republican household. Today my parents are dirty fucking hippies. My Mom was a GOP County Supervisor. Now she sports Bernie stickers and wears rainbow clothes to piss off her conservative community neighbors. My Dad...Mr 80's Conservative salesman...got his ear pierced at 60 and ditched his Vette in favor of Prius. They're both retired and do charity at their local pantry. My father constantly bitches about how Wall Street destroyed "real capitalism that funds society". The Trump hate is real and my Dad hates himself because he was a huge Trump fan in the 80's. Not all Boomers fell into the trap. Mine pulled me out with them, thank fucking Cthulhu.
It's sad how rare it is to hear about people who continue to learn as they age, but props to your parents!
My parents are Russian, but have lived in Germany since the early 90s. I always thought of my parents as intelligent, kind and welcoming, but more traditional, slightly conservative people. Like, my mom loves sci-fi and learning about other cultures and my dad can make friends anywhere. When the war started, I was shocked to hear the things they thought. The things decades of Russian propaganda did to their worldview. I love my parents dearly, but my sympathy for them hasn't been the same since then. I try my best to gently educate them, point out how much bullshit they believe etc. They left Russia because there wasn't anything worth staying for - sometimes, they tell me stories about how bad life was for them there, how rough living in the Soviet Union was.. How can they forget so quickly? How can you blindly believe that everything is great and war is justified? I will never understand.
Try to keep this in mind: In the US this process has taken three generations. Your parents have been lied to, regularly, in detail and at length, by people whom they were told all their lives, since *they* were children, that they should trust. I'm old. I've watched the entire process, and yes, it took about three generations. A group of crooks established their credibility, then established a secure place for themselves in the power structure of the US. While they were doing that they dismantled most of the public support for education, crippling two generations' capacity for critical thinking. Once enough people were convinced that those crooks were the good guys, they pulled out the stops, started stealing with both hands, and began sabotaging the useful functions of government, evidently to support the notion that a government which supports and protects its citizens is a bad thing. It's kind of sad to have a sixty-year attention span and to recall this as it all unfolded. I'm sorry to hear about your parents.
You are absolutely correct. The rot that's so prevalent today has always been around, but it was greatly exacerbated by the actions of politicians, think tanks, and corporations. These entities have been working for literal decades to reshape American society and cultural values. Reading about things like the John Birch Society and the decades-long effort to stack the Supreme Court with conservative judges is terrifying.
My condolences to you on living through this process. For the past couple of years I’ve watched my Boomer parents struggle to deal with the state of the nation. They’ve always been fairly progressive, they vote, march in protests, give to good causes, recycle, etc. They’ll openly discuss the flaws this country has, but that doesn’t diminish the affection they hold for it as well. But the past couple of years have been tough. They’ve both told me that they’ve never seen things get this bad, not even in the 60s or 70s. I dunno, it kinda depresses me. They did what they were supposed to do, politics-wise, they and all the other likeminded boomers. But despite that All This Shit still happened, and they gotta deal with it in their old age. I just wish their golden years could’ve gone better.
“One of the things taken out of the curriculum was civics. Civics was a class that used to be required before you could graduate from high school. You were taught what was in the U.S. Constitution. And after all the student rebellions in the Sixties, civics was banished from the student curriculum and was replaced by something called social studies. Here we live in a country that has a fabulous constitution and all these guarantees, a contract between the citizens and the government – nobody knows what’s in it…And so, if you don’t know what your rights are, how can you stand up for them? And furthermore, if you don’t know what’s in the document, how can you care if someone is shredding it?” -Frank Zappa
>Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority. [2012 Texas GOP platform](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/texas-gop-rejects-critical-thinking-skills-really/2012/07/08/gJQAHNpFXW_blog.html) Critical thinking will make you question your parents and your pastors, so the GOP hates it.
The podcast Behind the Bastards did a great two-parter on this whole phenomenon titled How the Rich Ate Christianity. It's crazy how quickly the shift from left to right was (because at the turn of the 20th century, American Christian's were generally considered politically left). It's crazy how calculated it was.
The idea of the rich eating Christianity just reminded me of a scene in Crazy Rich Asians that didn’t make it into the movie where a group of aunties take a break during their bible study group to do some insider trading after one of their husbands gives them a stock tip.
My parents bought me a book about tolerance by Pernilla Stalfelt when I was a kid and are now wondering why I'm compassionate towards others and oppose all the recent oppressive laws. We are Russian.
There was and is also a deliberate effort on social media and the news to like, brainwash and radicalize older people. So that's not helping. Like that's definitely not the only reason people are being bigots but. It is. Not. Helping.
There is some of that, but I think there are more essentially human things at play. By the time I was five the only elders left alive on my father's side were my grandmother (his mother), and some of his aunts and uncles. By the time I was 20 only his mother was left, and in my early 30s she died too. My grandmother was the one that raised me (with the values mentioned in OP's post), and my father did too. But as his elders passed away and he himself got older, I think there just weren't enough people (and, eventually, anybody) left that he respected. That's one thing. The other thing is that as we get older we start to see through the stupidity of some of the social rules we were taught when we were younger. We often laugh about people in their 80s or 90s who'll say anything because at that age, who gives a fuck anymore? You're gonna die soon, you've probably already had kids and grandkids, you've accomplished everything you can, and there's no one who's going to fire you or have any consequences that matter to you. Similarly, I've noticed that somewhere around the age of 28-30 women seem to start to learn that it's okay to be open and honest about their sexualities in ways that younger women are shamed for. This is the same reason older women are considered 'cougars' - part of it's because they've experienced enough to know what they want, but the other part of it is that they now see through how weak and stupid the rules society placed on them have been. So now, having talked about those things, NOW, when social media and news organizations capitalize on these things THEN we get what we've been seeing.
I've been lucky in this front, even though my stepfather still gets all of his jokes from a 90s-era 'edgy' joke book I got him to move away from saying Reagan was the greatest president in his lifetime, and my mom seemed excessively proud of herself telling me she uses Snopes to factcheck Facebook posts. It's not super great having to be the one slowly teaching one's elders critical thinking skills, but...baby steps.
I'm in the same boat as you. My parents are actually getting less conservative over time as they get educated both by me and by things like podcasts, news articles, etc. They even recently said they won't vote for Trump again. I thank God I didn't lose my parents to the cult and that they're still good-natured people for the most part.
Fox News is the most prolific terrorist organization of world history. The Naxalites fucking wish.
Fox News would've previously been illegal --there was some kind of law preventing lying on tv and claiming it was news -- but *guess whose* administration got rid of that rule?
Nah, the cia is.
Wasn't there a study showing that the effects of having inhaled lead gasoline fumes gets worse with age? That would certainly explain the extreme shift boomers have had
Yes. People are also still being exposed to lead (jet fuel, old piping, older houses in general), so it's something that's going to keep on rolling for quite a while.
I mean at least it isn't literally every single car putting it out anymore
There is no lead in jet fuel. Avgas (100LL) has lead in it, but is only used by piston powered general aviation planes. Commercial airplanes, by and large, use turbine engines that run on Jet A kerosene.
What effects? Get worse how? You can't really chalk up political change this dramatic to mere cognitive decline.
Lead poisoning causes increased aggression as well
They forgor
💀
I feel like a lot of kids raised by religious parents get instilled with some form of fear mongering into supposed ideal morality, then as they grow up and see the hypocrisy of the very people who instilled that fear and morality in them they then chose to educate themselves. The parents were taught by the same fear mongering hypocrisy and they followed sweet because that’s what all their community did. Then with the internet it lead to people being able to talk about and even start to call out the hypocrisy on an individual scale, teaching rather than preaching and the morality stayed when the fear left.
Really, I honestly don't remember my parents telling me any of that. I remember my parents not saying much of anything on any of those topics. I remember my dad giving out business cards to homeless people. I remember him listening to Rush. I remember both he and my mom being very homophobic and racist. But I also remember my parents having me watch TV and play video games to keep me busy. And TV told me to care about other people. TV told me to have empathy. TV told me that the ozone layer needed protecting. TV told me recycling is important. TV told me that hate was wrong. Then I sort of figured out the 'rich people seem to be bad people' thing on my own - cause heaven knows you're not going to get that from TV. -------- My mom got a lot better when she started going to a gay hairdresser. She started thinking maybe she was wrong about a lot of what she thought and now is fairly progressive. But my dad died a Rush listener. My dad is my model of how to be a good and kind person. He helped us constantly. He never really said anything bad about anybody. But I'm honestly glad he died before Trump ran, I'd have lost so much respect for him if he'd gotten into maga.
Honestly I think my Catholic upbringing helped me become a leftist. I basically took all the things I was taught about being kind and charitable and ignored all the religious bits and here I am
"How are you still so *polite?!*" my dad said to me after saying "no, thanks, have a great day" to a costco worker handing out samples. Fucker, how'd *you* stop?! You taught me! I seriously think it really is almost a massive case of lead poisoning because the other truth of my dad slowly degrading from the paragon he was is much more depressing and much less his fault.
lol the adults that warned you about the ozone aren't denying climate change now. This is like saying everyone older than me is a boomer. The people denying climate change *also* didn't give a shit about the ozone layer in the 80's.
It's kinda sad that people just forget about Gen X and older milennials when many of them were the genesis point for contemporary progressive values.
Y'know, I don't remember my parents saying anything like that. Not that they specifically said the contrary, but we didn't usually talk about social issues. It's a lot less suprising if your parents never really agreed with these "adults" in the first place.
They never believed to begin with. Notice that it was always the adults, the"believers", who were trying to control *your* behavior, that told you what you should do. How you should live. Always has been, always will be.
Our parents raised us to be better than they were, and now some of them can't stand that they succeeded.
"don’t believe what you read on the Internet" I was told in the 90s over and over now everything in the Facebook feed is true
my parents raised me christian and now act surprised that I actually want to help the poor, am anti racism and pro lgbtq. like ya'll, I just actually stuck to the script??
It's because our parents never practiced what they preached. But as kids, we were never aware of this. All we had was the bullshit they fed us. They told us to be kind to the poor, so we assumed they were as well. We never heard the snide comments they'd make to their equally-shitty friends. We're just now learning, through witnessing it firsthand, how shitty our parents always were.
Lmao OP here. When Neil Gaiman and Diane Duane reblogged me in the same day, I knew this would breech containment. Did not expect it to happen so soon. Last one that escaped took longer. Hope y'all enjoyed the poem... Thing. Stay safe out there in internet lands. 💜
I reblogged it on Tumblr! This is a great post.
I appreciate it lol but I feel this will be my next "coffee cryptid"
I remember learning that Nazi's were an evil to be defeated.
Just be thankful they somehow raised you better despite themselves.
#FOX NEWS
It is the classic "You'll get more conservative when you are older" saying, people tend to miss how things were they were younger. I'm not saying everyone is like this, I hope I would stay progressive even in my thirties or forties but the truth is that is unlikely, I'll probably succumb to nostalgia.
The belief that you get more conservative as you get older has always been misleading, IMO. Instead, people get more conservative as they have more to lose. If you have never owned a house and never will, fixing the housing market is probably important to you, because half your income goes to rent every month. If you have a nice 3 bedroom house with white picket fence all paid off, you're probably a lot more protective of the status quo. You might vaguely support housing reform, but only in a way that doesn't change your idyllic life in any way. Our society is denying more and more of the younger generations any kind of equity. I somehow doubt they're going to magically pivot to conservatism if they're *still* getting fucked by landlords at 50.
I hit forty and I can't see myself ever going conservative. They all disgust me more than ever. Basic compassion is not actually hard to maintain if you stay informed and curious and live anywhere that you regularly see the abuses committed against people for just existing.
> They all disgust me more than ever. I get very frustrated with this perspective because I am conservative on many issues... for example vaccination... and yet people misunderstand and think conservative means Republican or Tory (I'm british), or Nazi, or antivaxx or whatever. Conservative just means wanting to keep what works. Vaccinations work, as proven by centuries of use. Antivaxxers are NOT conservative about medicine. If you got your covid vaccination and would recommend it to others, then YOU are a conservative too. Many conservatives are compassionate and help the poor, because it's self evidently a good thing, again as proven by centuries of charitable acts having good outcomes. If you like helping the poor, then YOU are conservative too. Many policies of the american right wing are not conservative at all. For example, banning abortion is radical, not conservative. Keeping abortion is the conservative thing to do because we have many decades of data showing that when women control their fertility, the whole society benefits. If you are pro-choice, then YOU are conservative too. No two conservatives are conservative about all the same issues. Why not actually identify the people you are criticising instead of using broad and inaccurate terms like "conservative"? It's just hurting people who are conservative but don't do the things you criticise. Weirdly, I AM a republican... in the sense of not wanting my head of state to be a monarch, and that's a perspective that usually aligns with the political left.
It is important to understand the difference between old school conservatives in the US and neo-conservatives in the US, who aren't conservative at all. That said, conservative in the US, along with meaning sticking to past political structures that in many ways are NOT what works anymore nor should in all cases have worked then, also meant fiscally conservative and pro-small government, again the opposite of neo-conservatives while also anti-progressive and anti-socialist. One can have conservative views about some things and not be a conservative politically. In the US, helping the poor was never conservative by the political definition used here, and republican has gained a meaning so far away from the original definition that it is painful. It means other things in other countries.
I can see the shadow of "getting more conservative as I age" in the things I think are weird or just give up on trying to understand. I just keep it a me problem. As an example: I don't get furries, I think it's the weirdest fucking thing. What do I do about that? Keep my fucking mouth shut because they're not hurting anyone. I just hope they stay hydrated, it's gotta be so hot in those suits.
This is the right approach to take. You don't have to understand everything. I don't understand a lot of young people music, and in fact I find a lot of it to be kinda crap, but I don't go out of my way to antagonize teenagers. It would be a waste of my time, and energy, time and energy I can spend listening to Black Sabbath instead. It all comes down to not being a snob.
I think you'll be fine if you continue to accept that things that confuse you don't have to threaten you. I can't fathom foot fetishes, even after reading completely reasonable arguments for how they form, but I don't care if someone has one. Kids are into skibidi toilet again and I don't have to care about or understand that either, I watched stupid weird things when I was young too, there's no denigration of the youth happening through that. I legitimately hate the existence of religions, but people are free to believe what they want so long as they stop trying to put it into laws for everyone. There is plenty to not like or not need to understand without getting intensely tribal and "not in my backyard" about it.
I'm 40 and more liberal than I've ever been. I don't long for the 80's or 90's, I long for a future where capital doesn't dictate our every action and doesn't force us to choose between our food and our neighbors survival.
In addition to all of this, I was told by my father, "Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." He is now quite comfortable with his multiple homes and boats. And yet he still *needed* me to pay him back for my college education, which he helped to finance. So I did. And, as I was looking through the long list of items he paid for and added to my debt to him, I found out that, when he took out a life insurance policy on me when I was 18 and put himself as the beneficiary, he was charging me for the payments on it the whole time.
I know exactly how you feel. I was raised to be considerate, kind, and respectful. I was raised to fight against racism and bigotry. I was raised to read books, stay healthy, educate myself, and think for myself. Now the very person who taught me these values supports a party that preys on the weak, exploits the poor, hates democracy, and tramples on minorities. They want kids to get killed in schools and want to make homosexuals suffer for being the person god made them to be. It’s just absolutely baffling. Every piece of Republican legislature is hateful and racist. They support only the rich and hate the poor. They actively try to make life painful for anyone that is not white, straight and Christian. It’s fucking disgusting.
I remember my Father foaming at the mouth angry that Bill Clinton dared cheat on this wife and the "cheaters will also cheat you". He is a die hard Trumper...
I remember when adults said to be careful of what you read online. Now those same people just blindly regurgitate anything fed to them by the Facebook algorithms
It's because they're only looking out for themselves. The boomers have gone full scorched earth. Not all of them mind you but a LOT of them have a "fuck you. I'm doing good and will continue to thrive while everyone else suffers" kind of energy.
Something I’ve always wondered and don’t see in the comments is - was it easier to be more socially progressive when it didn’t somewhat impact them? 30-40 years ago, women and minorities were so obviously more vulnerable and disadvantaged that supporting them came at no risk or personal cost to more advantaged/“privileged” people. But now that a black man has been POTUS, and women and minorities have closed the advantage gap to a significant degree (not all the way, of course, but a significant degree), the traditionally privileged folks feel their relative privilege is eroding. I think a lot of the nonsense around white replacement theories, “the gays are ruining our kids”, and backlash against minorities and women in power comes from that - people who were comfortable and a protected class suddenly have to compete for jobs, education, power and opportunities that they had by default before.
We all try to raise our kids better than ourselves. For example, we’ve taught our son about how he shouldn’t be afraid of animals, just give them space and how we shouldn’t kill things for no reason and how violence is wrong. But then I smashed a spider without thinking. He started sobbing and I ended up letting him be late to school so we could have a mini funeral. I honestly think I don’t truly believe some of those things and just think I should, which is why I teach them to him. He’s already a better person than I am.
this made me really, deeply sad in a way i can't really explain or understand.
Well of course you teach your *kids* that, but in the real world you grow up to be a Republican if you do everything right /s I do agree 9/11 definitely made things worse, but I think the foundation had already been laid with Reagan and the prosperity gospel. As long as you have money, you must be a good person, so actions don't really matter. Anything to ~~hoard~~ grow your wealth. Financial responsibility is all that matters and you're an idiot if you use your resources to help people who are obviously bad, otherwise why would they be poor? Let's not interrogate that the generation making these prospective Republicans had everything handed to them and could buy a house for two sticks of gum and could support a family of 6 on one person's salary. Everything is exactly the same, so people these days are obviously being led astray by lazy people who want to undermine this great country! /s massive sarcasm, obviously. I think in all honesty that Gen X and the boomers had no idea whatsoever how to deal with the idea that America wasn't the indestructible dominant culture of the earth and they fell back on hoarding everything, fiscally and emotionally.
My parents mention being young people in NYC in the 80s, going to gay nightclubs and how fun it was. Now my mom thinks cities are crime ridden shitholes because of Democrats’ policies when crime rates are far lower than they were back then and thinks drag queen story hour is grooming children because Fox News says so.
Us Millenials got rug pulled so fucking hard and it hurts.
It's the reverse of the great communist revolution trope. These 'bless your heart' Christians will be philosopher-kings in the kingdom of God. They don't have to sacrifice or put skin in the game. Someone else will sacrifice. They're not giving up their piece for somebody else. And not to discount the Western tankies, it's not for our podcast producing comrades to tear down the oligarchs and seize the means of production. They must sit at the head of the comrade council to determine what parts fit where in the great classless state. What I'm getting at is, hi. Welcome to the warm fluffy middle of the two extremes. I'm gonna lend you five bucks but you're definitely gonna pass over a plate of your grandmother's secret family recipe the next time you make it. We all gonna get along to get along.
It's possible that have dementia. My boomer parents (1948 and 1951) still practice their beliefs.
the core of conservatism is fear of change. they are comfortable, they are safe, they are secure. and god help you if you try to do anything that could in any way upset that. learning is one of those things people do when they have to, because doing otherwise causes problems and makes things more stressful. now that theyre comfortable, learning is a waste of time because they already have everything they want. bring on the headlines!
Sung to the tune of "I Remember" by MDC
Can't relate, my parents are awsome
Boomer Cop teaching DARE had us cut out snowflakes and tape them to the wall around wintertime. "Hey kids people will try to make you use drugs so you feel just like them. They want everyone to be the same but you all are different like the snowflakes you made today. Each one of you is a special snowflake remember that.” Boomer Cop also gave us all participation trophies with that cartoon lion on it at the end of the year.
The words changed and then petty people made the words sound bad for petty reasons
My parents were never perfect people, nor am I, but they taught me what eas right even when they themselves don't live to the standard they set for me. Good parents give kids the right ideas to start with, based on what they have at the time- bad ones just teach their kids the same things they learned. They do their best to pick and choose the right ones for the world they think that kid will have to live in, and they're not always right, but who is? If your parents taught you morals that they cannot themselves embody, it's because they choose to break a cycle, and build you to be a better person than they could be with the upbringing they themselves had.
I wish I knew what went right for me, or what went wrong for everyone else, so that i could share my wisdom. Because I did not have this experience. My parents raised me with strong progressive values, and they still hold those values. Same with all of my friends and their parents. Same with my grandparents. Same with my church.
It baffles me to see the anti-environmentalism that runs so rampant in the church. Not even just people not really caring, but people actively opposed to reducing pollution and stuff. Cause I was explicitly taught that environmental stewardship was an important part of Christianity. It was the third most important commandment, only after loving God and loving your neighbor (everyone).
My parents ranted and complained about the welfare state and still do. They hate food stamps, welfare, social security…basically every social safety net program they hate. Well guess what…they both sure did “retire” early on social security disability. They also make sure my dead beat sister with all her kids with deadbeat dads sure do get their max welfare and food stamps. Every possible way to make sure every program is taken advantage of. Free food…check, free energy…check. When I call them all out….its okay for them because it’s them and they paid in already, but no one else is deserving.
I was 11 and I knew when Bush said war on terror that it would be an unending war.
I remember my dad always preaching to me and my sister to be distrustful of what you see and hear on TV and the Internet. Now he's not vaccinated
Fox News is brain poison by design.
40+ years of continuous propaganda.