Monday, January 5, 2015

Red State/Blue State Boomers : modern wonder bread boomers vs postmodern brown bread boomers ?

After the relatively few babies born during the depths of the Great Depression, an uptick in births began in 1941 in much of the world.

That birthrate did not return to the dismal levels of the Depression years until 1966 and so ending the famous twenty five year long global 'Baby Boom'.

From 1956 era little rock 'n' rollers to 1960s protest marchers to 1970s back-to-the-landers, the early years of the massive Boomer generation seem dominated by those one might call postmodern or Blue State boomers.

But from the 1980s onward, it is the other half that is in the drivers' seat : the 'greed is good' 'its all about me', the limit-denying modern cum Red State boomers.

These Red State boomers are repeatedly elected to run our world.

Mostly because their Blue State companions are in total ideological disarray, unable to successfully confront the conservative intellectual rollback.

Now, in general, the Red State boomers are more subtle with their methods in opposing claims of human-created harmful climate change than were their angry old white guy elders.

But because they actually run the world (and are not merely shouting in frustration from the sidelines of retirement) the Red State boomers are actually the main barrier we face in opposing rapid action to slow and reverse the global rise in atmospheric CO2.

Now, frankly, much of what I have just said is just the commonplace comments of the general consensus around the nature of the sharply and bitterly divided boomer generation.

But since the boomer cohort was supposed to be united by experiencing a shared set of events together - if it indeed was to be a true cohort - what went so terribly wrong ?

I think the answer lies in the fact that their common set of shared experiences were themselves sharply divided from the start , so that from the boomer children's earliest years they had a choice between two very different ways of dealing with our physical world.

As a sort of intellectual shorthand, I tend to think of those two warring ways as being a case of the Red Staters' 1945 Manhattan nuclear Project vs the Blue Staters' Manhattan penicillin Project....

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