Divide & Conquer, Part 2: Boomers v. The Youngs

What was then called the Generation Gap was a feature of my own youth. Was it driven by mainstream media? Hard to say for certain, but we experienced it viscerally as a culture gap with our WW2 or Korean war veteran fathers and our housewife mothers. The draft that condemned 58,000 young men to die and thousands more to suffer a lifetime of moral injury over terrorizing and slaughtering millions in Vietnam drove the disconnect between our generation and theirs. This spilled over into negative attitudes toward "the Establishment" in general and the government in particular (which attitudes, incidentally, eliminated the viability of the draft in the U.S.).

Today's Boomer v. Zoomer, or Millennial, or Gen X, is a different divide. Mostly, it's economic.

For example, a poverty draft is what replaced the "universal" draft, and the desire to pay for a college education is a very common reason young people give for enlisting in the military today.

 

The boomers who tuned in, turned on, and dropped out often did so cushioned by family money. I'll always be grateful to an artist friend who heard my millennial teenager say he wanted to live like the artists who moved to the country and spent all day in their studios. Friend to my son: "We had trust funds."

Other boomers invented the derivatives they used to get rich while crashing the housing market in 2008. Some become obscenely wealthy investing in information technology that drove the boom that preceded the bust. 

Boomers got college educations with loans we could easily pay off, we bought houses with incomes from full time jobs with lavish perks and benefits, and younger generations got the crumbs of that. They are often disparaged by oldsters because they evince no loyalty to the corporations who exploit them and toss them aside. Retiring after decades of service with a comfortable pension is rare nowadays outside the upper echelons of management.

Most working families today have two full time jobs, astronomic child care costs, and a rent or mortgage payment that is staggering. Add health care that is unaffordably out of reach for many youngs, plus a climate emergency rampaging out of control, and its easy to see why respecting their elders is not in the cards for young people today.

Today, boomers are generally considered to be more racist, more selfish, and ruder than everyone else. 

Some of this is undoubtedly true, while some of it is perception. I remember a family dinner where the millennials were unpacking #MeToo and one of the males opined that it was payback for boomers being dicks and proud of it. His wife responded, "You think I've never been sexually harrassed by someone our age?"

How much generational conflict is driven by mass media in 2022? Quite a lot. Type in the search term "boomers v." and get 15 million hits.

The oligarchs who own and operate corporate media would far rather have young people resenting the boomers as a group than eating the specifically rich ones. 

Did I mention that slogans like "eat the rich," and images like guillotines, are common in spaces where younger people congregate?

A very interesting generational divide has been the steady movement away from binary gender identification. My grandmother bemoaned the fact that hippy long hairs made it so her generation couldn't tell the boys from the girls (really? I could). Now, boomers crack jokes like the one above. But younger generations are on to something: the need to reject the mind control of false dichotomies that begin at birth with gender assignment.

Ultimately, the U.S. war of generations reflects the absurd situation families are in: it takes a village to raise a child, and the nuclear family is no substitute. After covid took an ax to already inadequate child care structures, working mothers especially are struggling.

Who can blame them if many don't want to have children at all?

Boomers, that's who.

We're Still Bombing Afghans = The War Is Not Over

Imagine for a moment that you're a person who loves a little child who was killed by aerial bombing, burnt to a crisp, by the U.S. military. It could be 1945, 1950, 1969, 1995, or pretty much any year in the 21st century.

"Malika Ahmadi, two, died in a U.S. drone strike on Kabul today, her family says. Has the war of 20 years cost us the ability to care?" Source: David Swanson, Pressenza

Now imagine that it just happened yesterday. And that the U.S. corporate press is proclaiming that the war they've been waging for decades on your country is "over."

That the U.S. corporate press lies for a living -- right out in the open -- makes no difference to you in your grief.

It mostly makes a difference to the taxpayers and voters of the country thousands of miles away where citizen are sold horseshit like, "We've got to fight terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them over here."

The lies that sell wars and buy elected officials use bogus concepts and slogans like "The war on terror" to incite fear and make compliance much easier than opposition.

A few people will go on social media platforms that are heavily censored in favor of corporate rule to express the truth laced with dark humor.

Well I think we can probably call it now and say that Terror has won the War on Terror.

— LouJo 🇬🇧 (@LouJoSays) August 29, 2021

https://twitter.com/LouJoSays/status/1432056340101439495

The U.S. has bombed little children to death under alternating Democratic and Republican administrations my entire life. 

It began bombing Afghan children following the unfortunate events of 9/11 in 2001 after a speech by then President George W. Bush proclaimed that "their harbors" would no longer be safe. (Note: Afghanistan is a land-locked country with no harbors.)

The current Democratic administration has announced that it will continue using flying killer robots to bomb Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. (It's also drone bombing Somalia, and plenty of other places, at will.) 

“Enough is enough,” Edward Ahmed Mitchell, national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said in a statement. “For more than ten years, our government’s drone strikes have killed thousands of innocent people in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and elsewhere in the Muslim world—destroying family homes, wedding parties, and even funeral processions. The civilian casualties in Kabul are simply the latest victims of this misused technology.”

Source: https://scheerpost.com/2021/08/30/demand-for-moratorium-on-drone-warfare-follows-latest-u-s-killing-of-afghan-civilians

Besides the warped views about war sold constantly over corporate airwaves, why is there a steady supply of men and women willing to remotely bomb children in Afghanistan?

Because after young people turned against the military draft for the war on Vietnam, U.S. corporate interests have made damn sure that the poverty draft continues blowing a steady gale force.

With no money for college and no money for dental care and no money for rent, food, and car expenses many young people in the U.S. feel they have no choice but to enlist. The poorer the state -- like my home, Maine -- the harder the poverty draft blows.

But some folks prospered during the 20 year war that's still not over.

(Feel like finding out how much war profiteers donated to the campaign coffers of your elected officials that refuse to actually end the war on terror? You can look it up here on OpenSecrets.org).

We Fight Each Other With The Pieces Of Our Broken Hearts (I Will Survive)

Photo: Ben McCanna, Portland Press Herald

Austerity in the form of homelessness is a particularly ugly manifestation of capitalism and especially neoliberal economic policies. 

The U.S. is a wealthy nation that lacks universal health care, affordable housing, tuition free education through college, child care, public transportation to get to said job in most areas, and a guaranteed minimum income -- all things other wealthy nations offer in exchange for taxes. It's no surprise that, without these social safety nets, a lot of people end up homeless. Some of them are addicts, and some suffer from mental illness -- and neither of those health conditions is adequately addressed by federal, state or local governments.

Many homeless men and women are veterans of U.S, imperial wars, who joined out of economic distress in an attempt to get a college education afterwards. Or maybe just a pickup truck.

So when NIMBY motivated residents in, say, Los Angeles, pitch a fit about locating temporary emergency homeless shelters in their neighborhood, they look callous and uncaring.

But the reality is that a homeless shelter can turn a neighborhood into something a homeless veteran described as worse than anything she had ever seen in the many other countries she had visited. As explained by social workers, it's the predators who move in to exploit vulnerable people who do the most to erode living conditions in the blocks around a homeless shelter or soup kitchen.

Photo: Ben McCanna, Portland Press Herald

No one who has heroin addicts congregating in their apartment's laundry room to shoot up can be blamed for objecting.

Those of us fortunate enough to own our (mortgaged) homes watch with dismay as the value of our property falls away when a homeless shelter is introduced to the area. 

These structural problems with the U.S. economy are not accidental.

When homeless people and working class homeowners are pitted against each other, the wealthy can sit back and watch the show.

I'm reminded at times like these of the Occupy Oakland revision of Gloria Gaynor's old disco hit: I Will Survive...Capitalism. The line "we fight each other with the pieces of our broken hearts" has stayed with me since I first heard it during the heady days of 2011's Occupy Wall St. movement.





While the demagogue with bad hair initiates trade wars with friend and foe alike, austerity like nothing we've seen in decades is waiting in the wings. Military spending gallops along, and state lawmakers fall all over themselves offering tax giveaways to weapons manufacturers.

Image: Suzanna Lasker

Will we make common cause and support each other, or fight it out while the wealthy continue to hoard housing, health care and higher education for their families?

My husband asked me recently what form of education I thought could possibly equip children to face the world of climate collapse and food shortages looming on their horizon. He's a grandparent but not an educator, and he's asking me because I'm a teacher struggling with the unmet needs of my high poverty school.

Learn to be flexible problem solvers and, above all, learn to cooperate and collaborate with other people.

Those are the main skills I can think of passing on for survival in the cruel new world we're passing on to the children. Who know what tomorrow will bring? Our love and intelligence are the only things we can really count on.

Why Do We Put Up With Endless War? #MLKDay

Every once in a while I stumble across another lamentation about how the people don’t want war but it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along...wait, I am quoting Nazi propagandist Hermann Goering.

How the people get dragged along is the subject of this terrific comic The Good War examining 1990's Hollywood propaganda about WWII. You know, when the U.S. virtuously beat the Nazis after hanging back long enough to let the Holocaust happen. A genocide effected with IBM technology for monitoring and slaughtering Jews. And no Nuremberg trials for the rocket scientists who were whisked away to join the U.S. military-industrial complex.

Source: The Good War by Mike Dawson and Chris Hayes on thenib.com

Maybe dragged is not such a good word here because of the feel-good quality of all those Hollywood movies glorifying WWII as the U.S. lolled in the boom economic cycle of the 1990's.

Dragged is what leaders need to do when the populace looks more like this fellow sleeping under newspapers on a park bench.



Or like this unfortunate woman, obviously traumatized, who was dumped on the street in freezing weather by security[sic] guards for a Baltimore hospital last week. 



Ok, so now we're getting dragged.

An international Conference on U.S. Foreign Military Bases (also in Baltimore) this weekend examined the 800 or so military bases the U.S. has established in 80 other countries. I say "or so" because they multiply so quickly, and there are so many of them popping up all over Africa and Eurasia at the moment, that it's nearly impossible to keep an accurate count.

The Nib comic explains why people put up with (and pay up for) this. In a nutshell: Terror! Goering again: "All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."

Conveniently, the people of Hawaii were terrorized this week by a false report of incoming ballistic missiles (presumably from Russia? maybe from China?) sent via text to all their cell phones. Thirty-eight minutes later the governor of Hawaii announced that it was a human error, that somebody had pushed "the wrong button." This is in the same month that the demagogue with bad hair tweeted from the White House that his nuclear attack button is bigger than the leader of North Korea's nuclear attack button. What a coincidence!

Much of the manufactured consent of U.S. taxpayers for endless war is accomplished, like most everything else these days, by robots. Whittling down the number of "boots on the ground" and turning away from conscription in favor of the poverty draft model ensures that there aren't many families concerned about their loved ones in harms way. And the families that do worry about their son or daughter are for the most part low income and disenfranchised, with few ways to make their voices heard amid the din of glorified militarism.

Mothers who have suffered the loss of a child are a potent force for change.

Mothers who continue to pay taxes supporting the neo-Nazis of Ukraine while being kept ignorant of this fact by corporate media hyping the Russian threat are not a potent force.

I think the corporate state is waiting patiently for us baby boomers to die. We're the last generation to rise up against a war, mostly because we were pursued by the draft and died in droves in the jungles of Vietnam. 



As most warfare today is conducted via the weaponized flying robots most people call drones, it's wicked expensive but seldom results in death for our soldiers. Instead, they quietly suffer the PTSD they get from sitting in front of screens killing people thousands of miles away.

The psyops that is really powerful is the designation of impoverished nations hollowed out by colonialism as "shit hole countries."



The first step in any genocide or war is dehumanizing the targeted people. This is why leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. are so galvanizing: he was a brilliant, articulate member of the most dehumanized group in the U.S., the descendants of enslaved Africans. Can't dehumanize that? Assassination is the obvious next step.

---

REVISED 1/15 at 1:25pm: Number of U.S. military bases and number of countries they are found in updated on the basis of info shared at the recent Conference on U.S. Foreign Military Bases.

Corporate Media Does Heavy Lifting For Perpetual War

The news that the Pentagon plans to send women into combat dominated two consecutive front pages of my local newspaper the Waterville Morning Sentinel. The Sentinel is one of a group of papers bought last year by the billionaire husband of Rep. Chellie Pingree, who "serves" on the House Armed Services Committee. The group includes the paper of record in our state capital (Kennebec Journal) and of Maine's largest city (Portland Press Herald).

Day #1, above the fold:

Day #2, above the fold, three related headlines:

As if lifted straight from a Pentagon press release, further along in this article are the rocks of unexamined assumption upon which empires are built -- and eventually run aground:

The necessities of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, however, propelled women into jobs as medics, military police and intelligence officers that were sometimes attached -- but not formally assigned -- to battalions. So while a woman couldn't be assigned as an infantryman in a battalion going out on patrol, she could fly the helicopter supporting the unit, or move in to provide medical aid if troops were injured. 

And these conflicts, where battlefield lines are blurred and insurgents can lurk around every corner, have made it almost impossible to keep women clear of combat.

In the second story, the only veterans interviewed by the Sentinel's reporter were all in favor of the idea.

In the story that ran side by side with the one about veterans, the newspaper couldn't find one single college student who didn't think this was a good idea -- really?

The poverty draft is a big factor in the lives of young people in the areas served by these newspapers. Maine has the highest per capita deaths in Afghanistan of any state, because even kids that trained to be welders or dieticians are out of work, along with those that graduated from U Maine with 4.0 GPAs and cannot get a call back from chain restaurants where they put in job applications.

Lucinda Marshall writing in Common Dreams reported on how the poverty draft disproportionately affects women in Why Serving in Combat Does Not Serve Women (Or Anyone Else) Well:

The take away here should be that we need to take a good hard look at the ways in which we are failing these women in regard to job training and job availability in the civilian world because as it stands now, we are effectively asking the most disenfranchised among us to fight our wars, and this move only makes it more dangerous for them, regardless of rank and benefits. (Emphasis mine.)

Ms. Marshall was among the few journalists who connected the (rather obvious) dots between this story and the other leading story about women in combat these days: the epidemic of rape in the military.

It is also hugely ironic that Panetta’s announcement came the same day that Congress was holding yet another hearing on the intractable problem of sexual assault in the military.  The truth is that women are more likely to be attacked by other members of our military than by any enemy. The New York Times’ Gail Collins makes the unfortunate suggestion that having more women rise in the ranks might,

make things better because it will mean more women at the top of the military, and that, inevitably, will mean more attention to women’s issues.

Sexual assault in the military is not a woman’s issue.  It is an epidemic and a national disgrace that is a direct result of the misguided notion of militarism that posits that strength comes from asserting power over others.  (Emphasis the author's.)

And in fact the New York Times and the head of the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff were marching to the same drummer on this one. As reported by Hayes Brown in ThinkProgress:

Instead of taking the stance of some commentators that adding women to combat units would diminish their effectiveness or “humiliate” the men serving alongside them, Dempsey rightly focused on the risk of assault that women in the armed services face. Approximately one in three military women have been sexually assaulted, about double the rate of those in civilian life.

With a compliant, corporate-controlled press in charge of the information provided to the vast majority of U.S. citizens, this relentless march to a fully militarized society isn't likely to end anytime soon.

Nor is it likely to end well.

Full report coming soon on the Feminist Values discussion I helped organize last Sunday in Augusta as the 19th Changing Maine Gathering. Suffice it to say for now that our collective attempt to sum up what we mean by feminist values in a sentence produced this gem: "Respect for the Earth, and for each other."

Bruce Gagnon at Portland No Tar Sands march Sat. Jan 26, 2013. Full story of the Pentagon's carbon footprint may be found in The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism by Barry Sanders.

Cannon Fodder Knows No Gender In 21st Century Wars

Clay Bennett in Chattanooga Times Free Press

Big post-inaugural announcement by the war machine firmly in control of the purse strings in Congress, the signing pen in the White House, and the leashed judicial "check" function: women will be officially sent into combat. USA Today helped by reporting that the president is all for the idea.

"Today, by moving to open more military positions -- including ground combat units -- to women, our armed forces have taken another historic step toward harnessing the talents and skills of all our citizens," Obama said in a statement Thursday.

Not surprising, since turning mothers into cannon fodder is what passes for equality in the milItarized 21st century reality funded by you and me.

Recruiting ads aimed at women play on their sense of duty toward their families i.e. Be a good daughter and earn money by enlisting. This is in keeping with studies showing that women lie to protect other people, and embezzle to help other people. Also in keeping with twin facts: austerity wears a woman's face, and the poverty draft in the U.S. is in full swing.

Supporters of the plan are willfully ignorant of the fact that the biggest danger faced by women in every branch of the military rape and other violent assault by their "fellow" soldiers. This is well-documented in the film The Invisible War which is up for an Academy Award and is a must-see for anyone paying attention to rape culture.

The president is not paying attention to this culture in the slightest as he uses the bully pulpit to spew b.s. about female cannon fodder:

"Today, every American can be proud that our military will grow even stronger with our mothers, wives, sisters and daughters playing a greater role in protecting this country we love."

Right, I'm sure that his daughters will be first in line to sign up when they graduate high school.

Mother Jones reported yesterday that the U.S. "defense" secretary (always a male) sat straight faced while the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (always a male) claimed sending women into combat was a policy actually designed to reduce the incidence of rape.

Having studied the issue of rampant sexual misconduct in the ranks, Gen. Martin Dempsey... noted that he has concluded that the phenomenon exists partly because women have been subordinated to men in military culture: "It's because we've had separate classes of military personnel." 

No more second class citizens, no more rape --- see how easy that was?

I have become somewhat obsessed with the play "Mother Courage" by Bertholt Brecht. It's an historical play set in a grim Europe theater of perpetual war. The title character makes a living off provisioning the army while trying to save each of her three children from it; in the end, the recruiters get one son, the war profiteers get another, and PTSD due to witnessing atrocities gets her daughter. Only the mother survives, sort of.

Turning the daughter into cannon fodder would only makes sense in a culture so sickened by violence that it calls for arming teachers and sending them to school ready to gun down intruders.

In the 21st Century, we are all Mother Courage -- living by the sword, and dying by the sword.

But women are rising up against the glorification of violence. The 21st century will see women striking, dancing, and overturning the structures that allow violent patriarchy to dominate the airwaves and colonize young minds.

Feminist values are on the side of life, not of dealing death.

Authentic feminist courage was on display yesterday in the blood soaked halls of the U.S. Senate as 19 year old college student and CODEPINK intern Lachelle Roddy called out to warmonger John Kerry:

 “We’re killing thousands of people in the Middle East who are not a threat to us. When is it going to be enough? When are enough people going to be killed? I’m tired of my friends in the Middle East not knowing if they’re going to live to see the next day!”

Here's what greeted her as she emerged from jail (yup, she was arrested for speaking out of turn -- because we are such a free country):

My sentiments, exactly.