brian wrote:Gotcha. I was legit curious so I looked and it was 23 senators pre-Baby Boom and about 55 or so Baby Boomers, but your point about it being the oldest Congress is understood (and still very much relevant to my point). Would be nice if voters would finally start electing someone else for a change (on both sides).
I really kind of think there's something secretly dark and monstrous about the Baby Boom generation. And something self-hating in me that I still think someone like Joe Biden might be the answer in 2020.
Ok, you gotta hang in there with me for a minute, because this is going to go around a couple of bends here...
Baby Boomer births start around 1946, the end of WW2 and go up through the mid-60s (Korean War vets.) I've heard/read that one of the things that was massively under-reported or even understood was how many soldiers came back from those wars with PTSD. Hell, it wasn't even a thing back then. You were supposed to just grit your teeth, suck it up, go to work and deal with it.
I fully buy into the notion that those guys were VERY fucked up and they transferred a lot of that to their kids. And unlike in the 70s onward, where fucked up dads would pretty much just split, back in the 50s and 60s, the culture was to just stick together as a family, even if dad was a blackout drunk, abusing everyone in the house with impunity. Or not even to that extreme, if he was just walking around with a 1000 yard stare and found it impossible to love anything or connect in any meaningful way... Lot's of ways to fuck up your kids.
You can lead a horse to fish, but you can't fish out a horse.