but what I was exposed to culturally was quite different. I never saw much on TV that exposed me to the harsh realities others lived through — although as one of six children living on LI I didn’t have a wonderful or sheltered childhood.

I was referring mostly to the exposure we had culturally and media wise not the harsh realities of personal lives.

and thanks. You said it better than this fellow boomer could. It’s recently becoming fashionable to characterize all boomers in a negative way.

Growing up in the 50′s and 60′s was no picnic and certainly not a lazy TV-fest. In fact, the majority of us had only 1 TV in the house, no cable, and limited time that we could even watch it.

My parents, like many, made us go outside and play with other actual human kids– on weekends it was from sun up to sunset. We drank from the outside water hose and and only came inside to use the bathroom.

We were required to visit all our relatives and help out where needed. Good lessons and because of that, many of us today have been caregivers for our parents and relatives and witnessed their last days.

Our reality came from the real world and not 250 channel cable, video games, the internet, twitter subscribers, or facebook friend counts.

I think the youngins pushed this Marxist into the position of Liar in Chief. The one thing I don’t agree with is that being shielded as a young boomer has anything to do with affluence. I grew up in small town America, we were poor, and I was shielded from all of the horrors in life, as much as possible.

To say that the boomers are still so soft and sappy as they may have been in the 50′s-60′s misses the fact that we now have enough years, life’s experiences and have all been to the school of hard knocks enough to know a bad sales job when we see one.

If anything, the generation before us are the newely supportive Democrats, as they are all counting on the Government to return their investments in SS and Medicare. They know the Democrats are always willing to supersize the entitlement programs. They don’t understand that the current Liar in Chief will in fact throw them under the bus.

with Jaded. Sure, the boomer generalizations don’t apply to everyone, but she does make a good point about the Democrat’s love of trotting out worst-case scenarios on TV to shame everyone into supporting their policy agendas. It is very reminiscent of the telethons and charity infomercials that started in the 60s.

that many boomers watched the Jerry Lewis telethon. My parents might have. I heard about it but don’t remember ever watching it…. probably was boring too me at the time.

So the premise that the Jerry Lewis telethon and like events might have affected the boomer psyche doesn’t click with me. Leave it to Beaver, Lost in Space, Star Trek and Wide World of Sports did more to rot my brain.

that we were isolated from technology and we weren’t exposed to death, dying and violence like children are today.

That the telethon was a once a year event that fostered sympathy in kids who otherwise were riding bikes and playing outside.

And that Barry works pity in us the same way Jerry did…dragging out the hard cases in order to stir up support.

My life wasn’t easy I was the eldest of 6 children…but I did not spend 6 hours a day watching people get blown up on TV. So once a year when we saw truly sick children that were less fortunate than us it stirred up sympathy.

who became the leftist elites of this time (I’m thinking they are the early ones), I believe the majority of them came out of childhoods centered around a strong work ethic, motivation to achieve and education was everything.

Though also from a broken home and multiple foster homes and schools, the society surrounding me was still well grounded in those values. I also remember the concept that “one had to stand on their own two feet” and people not taking “charity” was a matter of pride. I believe my grandparents generation were certainly representative of that.

The problem we have faced in raising our children today, has been the impact of society at large on loosening standards, lack of personal responsibility-haven’t we been handing everything over to the government-and the fast pace of the technological world, exposing kids to so much, more so much sooner.

What the leftist elitists and statists do not understand is that making things “easy” does not make things better. Maybe in the short term, but ultimately you breed complacency and yes, laziness. Obama needs to keep his pity party. We all know people who may be considered a “poor soul” and I bet any one of us would assist as possible. That is the nature of the American people. But forcing us to and destroying the inner drive of the individual and eventually the nation, will only cause failure all around. Perhaps that is their true goal.

You are so nice!

meant for Penguin2, 10:00am post

Even if your situation is such that you can homeschool, you’re going to have the educrats and the lesbian social workers looking over your shoulder constantly. If your kid goes to public school, you lose them the minute they walk in the schoolhouse door.

Using prevention of child abuse as their fig leaf, the teachers essentially teach kids that all adults are abusive and stupid and the schools systematically undermine respect for parents, especially male parents. You do know that all males are just itching to have sex with their daughter and beat their son, right? If the little brat makes any sort of complaint about parents to a teacher, the kid nazis are at your door and you get to spend quality time with lesbian social workers and, often as not, the cops as well.

There are lots of kids that only a mother could love, but my youngest stepson was a kid that only a mother could even stand for some years there. We always tried to have dinner at the dining table and everybody had to sit through it and at least fake being human. The youngest took the opportunity to do his best imitation of John Belusi in “Animal House” by filling his mouth with food, slapping his cheeks, and spraying food all over everything and every one. I threw him out and made him stay in his room the rest of the evening. None of my stepkids ever ate breakfast; morning was always a frenzied, screaming mess as nobody would get up until screamed out of bed, nobody could find anything, and nobody ever had time to eat. Anyway, somehow in the course of the day, he complained to teacher that he was hungry and that his mean old stepdad had not let him eat either dinner the night before or breakfast that morning and nobody gave him either a lunch or lunch money – his forgotten lunch was in the fridge at home. The Kid Nazis brought everything but the helicopter gunships, including the cops with their blue lights flashing, when they pulled up at my house.

The cops figured it all out real quick and left but the whole neighborhood saw cops with lights flashing in front of my house and a conspicuously marked DHSS vehicle with them. I’m pretty well known, so there was plenty of buzz. Anyway, I know the government game and I know their boss, so I got the lesbian social workers off my back pretty quickly. But, they do that sort of stuff to everybody and not everybody knows how to call their boss and get them to go away, in fact few do and they just get run over by the government.

Moe has a Red Hot up over the corelation of single mother homes to dysfunction and crime and I agree wholeheartedly. That said, if one of my friends told me he was getting serious with a divorced woman with kids, I’d tell him to sleep with her one more time for old times’ sake and run like Hell from her. I love my wife and we made it through more or less getting them out on their own but we had lots of fights and a couple of separations over kid issues. Frankly, I wouldn’t wish being a parent and especially a step parent on ANYONE these days.

Your statement above “the majority of Americans had a basic value system that included the work ethic,” etc… and then “eroded away and has been supplanted by government regulation and laws mandating”…why those are the very Reasons we are Conservatives. Great thinking, LibRick, I hope janis comes along and sees this.

BTW, thank you.

…need more coffee. Post meant for or Achance.

were stolen by the organizations that were collecting them. Was it Unicef who always used skinny starving little black faces, and said that pennies a day would feed this child in Africa. The US has given billions to Africa for “aid”, and yet those starving faces are still in existence today, and have probably multiplied. Remember Biafra- That was the pity ploy of the 60′s. I remember my grandmother telling me that I must eat everything on my plate because there were children starving in Africa. I wanted to ship my food to Africa.

were stolen by the organizations that were collecting them. Was it Unicef who always used skinny starving little black faces, and said that pennies a day would feed this child in Africa. The US has given billions to Africa for “aid”, and yet those starving faces are still in existence today, and have probably multiplied. Remember Biafra- That was the pity ploy of the 60′s. I remember my grandmother telling me that I must eat everything on my plate because there were children starving in Africa. I wanted to ship my food to Africa.