Being held responsible!

There is a post going around on Facebook urging the 18-25s to vote because otherwise the over-65s will decide the future for them. Elsewhere I heard someone saying that the over-65s should not have been allowed to vote in the EU referendum as the outcome does not affect our future. Personally I am heartily sick of being put into a box, an old-fogey-who-cannot-be-trusted box!

While I agree that we should go all out to get as many young people to vote as possible, I do resent being held responsible for all the current ills of the world.

Baby boomers get the blame in the USA as well. Someone called Bruce Cannon Gibney has written a book called "A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America". Jane Smiley, reviewing the book, said this:

"His essential point is that by refusing to make the most basic (and fairly minimal) sacrifices to manage infrastructure, address climate change and provide decent education and healthcare, the boomers have bequeathed their children a mess of daunting proportions. Through such government programmes as social security and other entitlements, they have run up huge debts that the US government cannot pay except by, eventually, soaking the young.

The boomers have made sure that they themselves will live long and prosper, but only at the expense of their offspring. That we are skating on thin ice is no solace: “Because the problems Boomers created, from entitlements on, grow not so much in linear as exponential terms, the crisis that feels distant today will, when it comes, seem to have arrived overnight.” "

Like me, she feels that she personally has not contributed to all this. But then she goes on:

"As one who has been raging against the American right since the election of Ronald Reagan, as someone with plenty of boomer friends who have done the same, I would like to let myself off the hook, but Gibney points out that while “not all Boomers directly participated, almost all benefited; they are, as the law would have it, jointly and severally liable”. "

So maybe I cannot excuse myself after all, but should just accept that we are the fortunate generation who had free university education, even grants to help us pay our living expenses, practically guaranteed jobs when we came out of university, the chance to buy a home without needing a leg-up from our parents and now a decent pension to live on. In case you are interested in what else Jane Smiley had to say, here is a link to her review article.

However, and despite all her arguments, I still maintain that most of us simply got on with our lives, paid our contributions towards our pensions, paid our National Insurance contributions (and in my case, apart from having a couple of babies, didn't demand a lot back from the health service) and did not go in for tax evasion. It really isn't our fault that rich people have been allowed to get richer and richer.

Having said all of that, I am aware that quite a lot of my generation seem to have bought in to the myth that we should trust Theresa May to look after us. This might change after her latest plans for funding social care for the elderly, or rather plans for the elderly to fund their own social care.

On the other side if the Atlantic, there are rumblings that Donald Trump might be impeachable after all. If that were to happen, I wonder how his supporters would react. Those who say that he is misrepresented by the media, who are, claim these people, all rampant left-wingers, and believe he is doing a wonderful job, would no doubt claim him as some kind of martyr. Saint Donald, here we come!

Oddly enough, I can see a kind of similarity between Donald Trump (now that Republicans in Congress are shouting put against him) and Jeremy Corbyn. Both have an enormous following among the people but have their political party members, especially in Parliament and Congress, railing against them.

 How odd!

What interesting times we do live in!