"THINGS THEY DO SEEM AWFUL COLD" - so therefore ...(you fill in the rest)

BOOMERS BASHED AGAIN – NOW BY YOUNG GEN

In a SMH article (27/6/19) on the Aged Care Royal Commission, writer Julie Power – can’t get past the second paragraph without running the usual type of cliché about the supposed self-indulgent Baby Boomers. She says they think they’ll “never get old” – but they’ll soon “flood” aged care. However, is it actually right that Boomers will require such high level care at the traditional plus 50 “aging” time of life. Is 70 the new 60 and can many people expect to live longer than 80 in good health ?

The lyric quoted above is from The Who’s “My Generation” 1960's hit song (by Peter Townsend)– where the line after that is constantly taken out of its context. So when that line goes “I hope I dei before get old” its really saying that the parents/elders of his (War Baby) generation were really nasty to him as a teenager – so he doesn’t want to become like them. Teenagers then were a minority - like older people also usually were. That all changed when the Baby Boomers hit their 20's in the 1970's and were the MAJORITY. 

Those same, now older Boomers are now suffering from a World they changed to emphasis the rights of young people. Now we need to campion older peoples rights - since we are now making THAT a majority of the population. It is a reasonable ambition to stay thinking quite young and maintaining strong mental and physical functioning ? The parents of the Boomers seem to have problems with the idea that the next generation would likely live as long as they have been doing. On the other hand, those parents of Boomers (born before WW) were living often decades longer than their own parents.

Politicians have been quick to point out that the 60 year Age Pension level was based on people usually not living long past that age. Boomer grandparents didn’t usually make it into their 70’s. Therefore, the Age Pension was raised to 65 - only decades ago and now it’s up to 67. 


The newly re-elected Coalition government had balked at raising the Age Pension to 70 – perhaps fearing that could lose it the 2019 Federal Election, using the excuse that up-skilling of the Boomer generation for further employment - was not yet being catered for in the obsessively youth-oriented Education system. 

We have documenting that brutal age discrimination against mature-age students for a number of years in our own journal – with specific examples. Not all countries are writing off its population’s contributions – once they became even just 50 years old. The Boomers aren’t so unfamiliar with deiing though, apart from often losing their grandparents in their 60’s – there was also the Vietnam war draft in Oz and the US.  Young guys, still in their teens – were sent to Asia against their will by a much hated Draft.  Many didn’t come back or where scarred for life  - including mentally. 

The younger generation can be more blasé about it – because they’re usually never had to face their mortality so personally. Boomers were the last generation from the 20^th Century that still felt another World war could happen once again – and they could end up in it. That could have been a Nuke one too. Boomers mostly already understand that they can dei – yet they’re now being unfairly branded by younger generations as being unaware of mortality. In fact, the Boomer fuelled huge anti-war movement that stopped not only the Vietnam War but another conventional World War happening.

This has now changed how politics operates in the world -especially since the rise of the internet.  People now want more say in how things are run now – but the commercial forces that profit from things not improving, are still hard for true democratic decision-making to counter Big Money. A 1960's movie with Peter Cook and other Brit satirists called "The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer" predicted how participatory democracy would finally rise one day. Sadly that wonderful movie seems impossible to buy these days. 

Like with the true history of the alternative culture in Australia - circa late 1960's and 1970's organisations like our are struggling to preserve and circulate shorter movies and docos we've made about it, Where's the funding and support for that ? NOTE: We hope readers will excuse our deliberately misspelling of the key word in this article - otherwise known as the Big Chille. Older people are understandably more sensitive about such words - as Boomers were when they faced losing their lives because of the then Coalition Govt wanting to go All The Way with the USA. 

We now ask younger generations to THINK about what they saying to their elders on "age care" issues - and remember, we still have most of the votes (just think Trump and Brexit). Baby Boomers still have the electoral power to help protect them from cruel ageist policies that are now circulating. Excluding older people from the workplace - is one major barrier to them that WILL CHANGE.