That was disappointing, when you grow up thinking your parents are progressive and then as old age and its symptoms happen their guards drop and you find out that they always had some racist tendencies. I guess credit to them suppressing them for so long.
In my parents' old age they've gotten more progressive. I reject the notion that people naturally trend towards conservativism as they age... I just think there are a fuckton of entitled "I got mine" boomers.
I recently read an article that claims people become more progressive as they age, but society becomes more progressive faster, so it just seems like they become conservative.
i think it was just the case in the past because people tended to have more means and affluency as they grew up in the 70s and 80s, so they naturally gravitated toward people like eisenhower and reagan.
Yep. I saw a fairly recent study talking about this. The short of it is that they found no correlation between age and political leaning for ANY generation, but a strong correlation between political leaning and wealth.
As people begin to benefit more from the system, the more they support pulling the ladder up behind them.
The correlation to age here is that it gets harder to adapt to new information the older we get, so people are more likely to double down rather than change their perspective as society gets more progressive and inclusive. The best weapon against racism is experiences that put people in situations to meet people with different life experiences than them. Get them outside their little white suburban bubbles. This is why conservatives hate college so much. It's often the first time kids are put in a situation where they're both out from under the thumb of their parents and exposed to kids who grew up in different circumstances than their's.
i really must be lucky because my mum and dad are as liberal and accepting as can be. i guess i was just lucky to grow up in massachusetts and attend a pretty liberal methodist church. my pastor growing up even hand wrote me a letter when i came out as trans and apologised for how some of the church needs to change.
How close did you grow up to Boston, or did your parents live in a city for a period of time? The closer you get to a city, the more liberal the population becomes, and there are some pretty backwoods areas of Massachusetts. My dad was conservative until he went to Boston College and worked at the bank collecting loans from the poorer sections of the city. Even Cape Cod had MAGA protesters yelling at the Bourne Bridge about the plan to house immigrants on the Air Force base for all 4 years of Trump's reign of terror, and I could probably still find the Trump 2016 flag that I used to drive by all the time.
i was always outside of worcester actually so i only got to go into boston occasionally i grew up in grafton, northbridge, and millbury and went to church in shrewsbury. :)
That's pretty similar to me, though I grew up just over the bridges on the Cape. I always thought we were in a super liberal area being in Massachusetts (plus we were like halfway between P-Town and Boston), but as I got older, I was shocked by just how conservative it is there. It's like a bastion of snowbirds' summer homes and retirees who all care more about their property taxes than the kids who live there.
I am originally from the south but my mother joined the Air Force and we moved away after she divorced my dad when I was very young. I’m so glad that I was able to experience life outside of that racist bubble. I’m not sure how I would have turned out had I grown up there.
Same with me. It’s weird, during the end of the Mayan calendar my grandparents asked my dad to leave his wife and two kids to go into their bunker to prepare to fight off the minorities that all follow the Antichrist during the end times. The reason we were not invited to their crusade was my mom voted Democrat, and Jesus would not give souls to children who would live to see the end times as that would be to cruel for their god. He told them hell no. And it was weeks before they resurfaced again and pretended nothing ever happened. Could i have been conditioned thus if my dad don’t join the NAVY? Scary thought.
FB got my sweet pre-school teacher who I never, in 30 years, saw be mean to anyone turned into a MAGA who hates people. The programming worked way too well.
I'm the opposite. I don't need to see my Gen Z relatives desperate pleas for attention.
My boomer relatives are relatively liberal and don't feel the need to share more than the vacation they're on, the cocktail they're drinking, or their high score on candy crush.
Edit: I assume the downvotes are from butthurt Gen Zers. I don't mean to generalize, I can't imagine anyone doing that when discussing an entire generation, I'm simply offering my own personal experience. When my cousin is posting photos of himself in a banana hammock and my sister is posting daily cringe videos of her words of "advice", AND IG keeps trying to show me this because the algorithm is trash, this keeps me off social media. Right, I should just not "follow" my relatives. Or, I could just stay away entirely. It's fine.