the most entitled generation isn't Millennials

[BeyGon]

I guess it's too late to push them back in.

[Hugh R]

CP,

My first job out of college with a degree in Environmental Engineering was in SoCal and the best that I could get was as a water treatment technician working for a company that then served Lockheed in Burbank, CA, now dead and gone. I serviced cooling towers and sometimes had to reline those wooden cooling towers when they were drained. That involved going in to the bottom of the cooling towers and mucking them out while wood worms fell on my face. I'd go in for an hour with my head turned left or right, because I couldn't turn my head around inside the bottom of the cooling tower due to the low clearance. Then we'd reline the bottom of the cooling towers with fiberglass and tar. Yeah, with a BS in Environmental Engineering.

Yeah, I'm entitled, to every fuking penny I've earned over the last 35 years.

[Hugh R]

How about when I "graduated" to being an air pollution source testing technician and we had a job at Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah to source test an experimental nerve gas destruction incinerator. Two of us had to drive a few miles out in the desert to a General Atomics experimental facility where they would take nerve gas shells from the Korean and Viet Nam war immerse then remotely in liquid N2 to freeze them and then cleave them with a hydraulic knife and scoop out a nerve gas "slushie" which would be dropped into a fluidized bed incinerator. We went out in Level A pressurized suits . They said when you feel a sharp twinge and convulsions, take this Atropine injection and jam it into your thigh. I said what's this "When Schit"? $25,000/year IIRC.

[HardDrive]

This.

Originally Posted by Jeff Higgins

I think it is clear that we, the "boomers", have indeed failed the "millenials" in many different ways. Just not the ways in which this article claims.

I see our biggest failures all relating to an across the board softening of standards of achievement, coupled with a way too accessible "safety net" for those who somehow still manage to fail. We are witnessing the fruits of the first adult generation where everyone got an award just for showing up, where there are no winners because there cannot be losers, where even answers to simple math problems in the lower grades are whatever the fragile young ego would like them to be, where if spelling and grammar are just too hard, well then, don't worry about it.

[wdfifteen]

Originally Posted by pavulon

my father is a boomers and die-hard republican who watches Fox news religiously while living on social security and food stamps while now looking into subsidized housing after gambling away a small fortune after having retired at the age of 43. I don't know that he is entirely representative of boomers but is the very definition of someone who oozes entitlement.

Yeah, we're pretty much all like that.

[SamC.]

Originally Posted by Seahawk

When my daughter graduated from college a year ago the owners of the privately held company that she had interned for her last two years in school wanted to meet my wife and I.

They had offered her a full time position, so, you know, they had that going for them.

All they wanted to do was thank us and ask us how we had managed to raise someone who just got things done, never whined, turned to and finished what she said she was going to do.

I of course, made sure they knew exactly where my young Jeddi Princess got her skills...

Her mother.

Having had the privilege of meeting the good CAPT. Seahawk, Mrs. Seahawk, CADET Seahawk and the Jeddi Princess, I can readily attest to this being a fine family and the result of Mrs. Seahawk's hard work.... Ok, CAPT Seahawk may have had some input along the way By the way, it would appear that the young Seahawk is also well on his way to successful endeavours.

[Tobra]

Hugh, you are killing me here. Did you have a look at the gauge of that needle on the atropine deal. I had one when I was formulating insecticides, I bet I could have punched that needle through the hood of my VW bug.

[GH85Carrera]

I have never received ANY form of government assistance. I have never had any form of subsidy, food stamps, unemployment, help with utilities, rent, or any of the other many government programs. I have never received any form of charity from any organization.

The only time I see a government payment is a refund of my income taxes when I have overpaid. That overpayment is not because I found some great deductions. With no mortgage, no kids, nothing but the standard rates to pay I just pay and pay.

I have never been arrested and I have never even been handcuffed.

I have not had a sick day from work in many years except for when I had my hip replacement surgery. I usually come in early and leave late.

[BE911SC]

Boomers, simply by their sheer number, have steered American life since the 1950s. The cultural and civil upheaval of the sixties could not have happened without such a large demographic all moving in basically the same direction. Whenever that many people move the rest of the system tends to move with it. Left of center politically in the '60s, right of center politically ever since. The big gorilla. They (we since I am a boomer as well) aren't going to go quietly. We have been screaming at the top of our lungs ("There, there dear, I'll pour you more milk.") and up-ending the Monopoly game board for sixty years and we're not going to let some new snot-nosed demographic push us aside. We'll take all we want and eff you if you don't like it. "We paid for it already." (Try not to laugh too hard at us.) If we're really lucky some millennial will discover the fountain of youth (hint, it's not Viagra nor is it legal pot) and save us from our miserable old-age decline that we will scream and yell about--demanding our Medicare and Social Security benefits in full. Then we'll upend the game board one final time in a flourish of ME! ME! ME! acting-out before we go not-so-silently into that good night.

[wdfifteen]

The irony here is that the author complains that people see his generation as "narcissistic brats" and then goes on to write an article that could only have been written by a narcissistic brat.

If it weren't written with such whiny, "poor me" attitude I would agree with some of it. Boomers did have the opportunity and duty to strengthen social security and didn't. To our shame, it was members of our generation who started a war of choice in Iraq, wasting a trillion dollars in the process. On the other hand, without technological advances wrought primarily by boomers, like his internet or his smart phone - he would be writing his sob story on an IBM Selectric and sticking in on light posts hoping someone would read it. A little thanks for that would have been in order. He complains the boomers didn't raise the age of eligibility for Social Security, but given his crappy, peevish attitude, if we HAD raised it, he would be griping that we "selfishly" raised the retirement age on him. Dismissed.