Do you blame all "boomers," whether captains of
industry or mere consumers, for not doing more to avert the present situation?
I think most blame should go to the captains of industry back in the day using advertising and PR to push propaganda that was soley for advanceing corporate interests at the expense of human health (tobacco, Fossil Fuels, unsafe cars, cancer-causing chemicals, etc.). Its can be easy to place blame on all boomers, but we have to remember that we are living in an unprecedented age of information access. My parents were early boomers, and at that time knowledge of the world came from very few sources. You could listen to the radio, watch one of three channels on TV, read the newspaper, go to the library, talk to someone face to face or on the phone, or write them a letter. (If you were really fancy you had a World Book Encyclopedia set at home, so your kids wouldn’t have to keep going to the library all the time for school projects.)
Half of these sources of information were heavily dominated by corporations through advertising revenue, and for a while, direct sponsorship of programing like “Chevron Hall of Stars”, “General Electric Theater” (hosted by Actor Ronald Reagan none the less) or “DuPont Show of the Month”. It was more than just product placement, stars and actors would have to talk directly to the camera at commercial breaks and shill products like cigarettes or tout the scientific frontiers that chemical companies were exploring to make “life easier and the future brighter”.
I think some boomers didn’t “care to know” but
the majority just weren’t informed of the environmental toll that their way of
life was taking on the earth, due to direct misinformation campaigns designed to
protect profits, and by the time people started questioning the narrative it
was too ingrained in society. And its not
like propaganda and purposeful misinformation ever went away, corporations do
these same things every day, but it’s up to our generation to not fall for the well-oiled
corporate propaganda machine.
10/29 this post
10/29 comment on Levi’s “Soma: Ignorance is Bliss... Right?”
10/29 comment on Tanner’s “Is Kim Stanley Robinson right
this time, about inevitability?”
Weekly total 5
Grand total 50?
I had a conversation with my brother last night and we talked about something very similar to this. He made a claim staking that to some degree you simply just have to change with the times as you get older. Granted throughout their younger baby boomer lives they were fed propoganda to help push the envelopes of big corporations but to be at a certain age where technology and computers are so vital and still not being able to use a computer we think is somewhat unacceptable. I hope that when our generation gets older we will have the knowhow to change with the times and be able to operate future technologies and not have to rely on the youth to explain these technologies to us. We ended our conversation talking about the famous quote from Batman The Dark Knight. "You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain". We gave this quote context to our father, a baby boomer, whose struggling to change with the times and by detaching radical words such as die, and villain and making them less severe it made a lot of sense in a lot of different contexts. Some of these contexts being boomer humor, political values, innovative thinking, etc. all of these things that my dad was good at in his younger life i.e hero, have so drastically changed in the modern era, leaving him behind, not able to catch up.
ReplyDeleteI had a conversation with my brother last night and we talked about something very similar to this. He made a claim staking that to some degree you simply just have to change with the times as you get older. Granted throughout their younger baby boomer lives they were fed propoganda to help push the envelopes of big corporations but to be at a certain age where technology and computers are so vital and still not being able to use a computer we think is somewhat unacceptable. I hope that when our generation gets older we will have the knowhow to change with the times and be able to operate future technologies and not have to rely on the youth to explain these technologies to us. We ended our conversation talking about the famous quote from Batman The Dark Knight. "You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain". We gave this quote context to our father, a baby boomer, whose struggling to change with the times and by detaching radical words such as die, and villain and making them less severe it made a lot of sense in a lot of different contexts. Some of these contexts being boomer humor, political values, innovative thinking, etc. all of these things that my dad was good at in his younger life i.e hero, have so drastically changed in the modern era, leaving him behind, not able to catch up.
ReplyDeleteThe post-WWII era was definitely naive about corporate lies and manipulation, and it's true that information was not on tap as it is now, in the 3-channel pre-Internet age. On the other hand, people who tuned in to Walter or Huntley-Brinkley, who read the Saturday Evening Post and the New Yorker and the Times and Time, and who actually read books as a preferred leisure activity, were much less liable to being misled by fake sources. In some ways the present media environment is less informative, except for those who really work at being accurately informed. Each generation has its row to hoe... and adapting to change probably becomes progressively harder, later in life, for everyone. You'll see.
ReplyDeleteAlso: I remember the age of cigarette advertizing on television, vividly. "It's not how long you make it..."
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