I feel like a Jew in Weimar Germany

[mrpleasant]

My goodness, it's been a long time. I dip in and out of these forums occasionally these days, but practically lived on here in from the mid to late noughties as Gordon's 'economic miracle' brought the economy to the brink of disaster. Now I need some sane words. I know I'll find them here, just like I did ten years and more ago.

Firstly, I'm a boomer and I voted for Brexit. If you are offended and immediately know who I am, what my values are, who I will vote for on the 12th, etc. etc. then please leave now because you have nothing of value to say to me. I'm already judged.

If you are still reading this, let me begin...

I was born in Wallasey in 1959. Boomer credentials established. My father was in the merchant navy and hardly ever home. I don't think I even recognised him as my father until I was about five. My mother was mainly at home apart from a brief spell at a Cadbury's factory where she worked on the conveyor belt and one day had a meltdown so they sent her home and she never went back. I played outside with the neighbourhood kids, learnt to ride a bike (someone else's), thought catapults were the coolest things in the world (though the word 'cool' was unknown to me then). My mother wouldn't ever let me have one. I did have a Man From Uncle cap gun though. I  liked and had access to a few books and enjoyed reading when I learned how to (we didn't have a TV). The only car in the neighbourhood was owned by the local taxi driver. I think I was happy. I wasn't aware of my father's drinking and the arguing. That came later.

When I was eight my mother broke the news to me that we were 'moving' (?) to Gravesend in Kent. I was very excited until they explained 'moving' meant a new school. When we eventually got down there the kids laughed at my Scouse accent (the word 'bear' caused particular mirth) and I didn't know what to say when someone shouted 'Watcha' at me. These became the affluent times. My father was obviously earning good money as the skipper of a Fyffes banana boat, but it was still some time before we owned a car (a Hillman Imp) and I was becoming aware of the rows and the smell of booze on him. I recall doing homework by candlelight around this time because of the power cuts, but don't remember if my mother was ranting about the Labour Party at the time. If she did it went in one ear and out the other. It all fell apart when the oil crisis came and my father lost his job. My mother cut her losses and she took us (I have a younger sister) to Falmouth where she bought a guest house so she had her financial independence. The bank wouldn't lend her any money so she had to keep the place open all year round. In the winter I could sleep in the small room at the top of the house, but she had to let it in the summer so my sister and I lived in a caravan in the back garden. Any vestige of a Scouse accent had gone and I hadn't really acquired Estuary but the local kids thought I was American and that I must be posh, even though most of them were better dressed than I was. There was no room for a desk in the caravan so studying and writing essays was a bit of a challenge. I did stay on for the sixth form, but didn't do well at all.

By the time I left school I hadn't seen my father for years, nor did I hear from him. I didn't give it a second thought. I didn't entertain the notion that I could go to university or college either. I got a Work Experience Programme job in a furniture shop in town. I earned £18 a week. I gave half to my mother in rent and used the rest for driving lessons, even though I had as much chance of buying a car as I did building a rocket and flying to the moon. The job was so boring my body began shutting down and I thought I had diabetes. I could barely climb the stairs in the morning. Fortunately a kindly admin lady realised what the problem was and told me hospital wasn't necessary. I then embarked on four years of casual work: waitering, cooking in a chip shop, cutting down Christmas trees, digging up spuds. I even did two weeks street sweeping for the council. The bin lorry guys had it made! Good money, finished by lunch time, riding in the lorry. Brilliant. I envied them. I had absolutely no direction, no plan, no motivation, no clue. One day, not long after my 21st birthday, I left a waitering job in Hampshire and was cycling to a station to head back to Falmouth for another summer in the chip shop and it dawned on me that everything I possessed was in panniers on the back of the bike. I had no passport, had never been on a plane. I didn't even have a bank account.

Later that year I was walking home from a shift at the chip shop and a car pulled up. It was one of my old teachers. He wanted to know what the hell I was doing. He instructed me to get UCAS forms, pick a university and turn up at his house. I did as I was told and he took out his cheque book and gave me the entry fee. I didn't get in. Of course not, my A levels (2 grade Es) were crap. But later that year a younger friend said she had a spare set of forms for a little teacher training college in Cheltenham. I filled them in and, bloody hell, I got in! The first morning in my little student accommodation room I got up and sat at the desk. It was 7.00am and I realised for the first time in years I knew where I was going to be and there was a purpose to my existence. I could hardly believe my luck. A friend visited and I gave him money and asked if he would buy me a dictionary in town. When he got back I put it on the bookshelf and amazed myself at how important it made me feel. I still have that dictionary.

After graduation I got a teaching job at an awful school in Eastbourne. It was only for a year to cover the RE teacher's absence as she was on sabbatical. (A couple of decades later it was in the news because a Maths teacher there ran off to France with s student.) It had bars on the ground floor windows to deter vandals. On my first day, the Deputy Head collected me from my bedsit and said all he asked was that I kept the kids contained for the duration of the lesson. I could have put the work in beforehand and got a better first school, but I knew teaching wasn't for me and I wasn't self-aware enough to have the sense. I did it for five more years elsewhere and in that time married my college girlfriend. She had got her second teaching job in Cardiff and, because she had a dog and didn't think anyone would let her rent, she borrowed £300 off an elderly aunt and used it as a deposit on a tiny two bed house on an estate. When we married she moved to where I was living (North Wales). She had no job to come to at first, but we were able to buy a run-down 1930s semi on my salary which we proceeded to decorate during holidays. We bought a second hand VW Polo which was the bees knees. If anyone had told me I was 'doing well under the Tories' I'd have stared at them in disbelief.

Around 1990 I embarked on a distance learning course in computer programming and got a trainee programmer job in the South East. My wife managed to get a teaching job just in time so we could get a mortgage on a boxy little 3 bed house on a large development. It was a filthy dirty hovel. The estate agent had no key to the back door so when the dog needed a sh*t I lowered him out of the window and leaned out to pick him up when he'd finished until we had the money to fit a patio door. When my wife was pregnant with our second we move a couple of miles away to a larger 3 bed house in a nice cul-de-sac. It was a total wreck with a condemned boiler so any spare cash went on making the place habitable. I spent many a sleepless night worrying what would happen if I lost my job. (I did get made redundant twice on my journey, but always survived in the end.)

Sometime in 2005 my wife commented that people on a forum she had stumbled across were saying a massive house price crash was coming. It sounded plausible because prices seemed crazy. In 2006 the first redundancy came. We got a good price for our place, but then we'd transformed it and built an extension. We hadn't had any foreign holidays and never ate out unless you count the occasional Burger King, but the kids didn't go without where it mattered. My wife had always wanted to go back to Cardiff (increasingly elderly and infirm parents) and our eldest had only just started secondary school. It was a now or never moment and the redundancy made it easier so we did it. I got a job in the IT department of a car parts factory. We were renting, looking at property on the market and arguing about whether the crash would ever come when one day I bought a paper which had 'Credit Crunch!' as a headline. It was August 2007. You know the rest. We eventually bought in 2012 because we were paying out a fortune in rent and it was depressing. The house was in an awful state and had been on the market on and off for years but was a nice size and in a quiet area. We've got it looking decent now, but the kids, now grown up, never did get to Disneyland. One day I hope they'll forgive us.

All the while this was going on the EEC was transforming from a bunch of people shaking hands and agreeing on a free trade deal into the EU, a vast, strangely sinister organisation of huge unaudited wealth and power. One that can tell its member states what the minimum percentage of meat they should put in their sausages and which can suffocate entire economies in Southern Europe from the labyrinth of offices it maintains grandly in Brussels. I'd been living in Falmouth in '73 and remembered the men who lost their livelihoods in fishing almost overnight. I didn't much like the slow erosion of control membership entailed and when Cameron came back empty handed from an attempt at negotiating a few months before the referendum my distrust began to turn into anger. I voted, with some reluctance and unease, to leave when the time came. Whether it will turn out to be a good idea in the end I have absolutely no clue, but I guess there'll be winners and losers just like when we joined. I don't think of it, and never have, as a friendly institution that represents the breaking down of borders and the building of trust between nations. I heard about an elderly Greek dentist who took his own life rather than rummage in bins for food in his old age and the thought of the EU impassively turning its face away from that situation and the vast numbers of under 24s without hope of employment in those poorer member states left a bad taste.

So suddenly I'm 60 and just discovered that people around me at work, who have never heard my story, have already judged me. I'm a boomer, I 'did well under the Tories'. I don't care about the poor and homeless because I've 'pulled the ladder up'. In all likelihood I'm probably a racist because I voted to leave (and don't want the immigrants from coming' over 'ere and takin' our jobs). From my experience, the caring, sharing Labour Party in the end crash the economy and that helps no one, but I should overlook this because if I don't vote for Corbyn I'm effectively saying I'm happy to watch homeless people dying the streets. I honestly had no idea I was this guy! So I'm asking you, am I? Is that who I am and I've been fooling myself all along?

I'm a boomer and I voted for Brexit. Sorry.

[bear.getting.old]

No need to apologise. Interesting story thanks for that. At least you STR'd at the right time and bought again in an ok time.

Can you not vote for the Brexit party in your area? This election is a bit like 1984 Tories vs Kinnock

[mrpleasant]

Was that the 'Last person to leave turn the lights out' Sun headline year? It certainly feels extremely polarised, but I'm struggling to find faith strong enough in any of them to focus my mind. I've never not voted, but it's going to be tough to go out in the dark this time around.

[Lurkerbelow]

3 minutes ago, mrpleasant said:

My goodness, it's been a long time. I dip in and out of these forums occasionally these days, but practically lived on here in from the mid to late noughties as Gordon's 'economic miracle' brought the economy to the brink of disaster. Now I need some sane words. I know I'll find them here, just like I did ten years and more ago.

Firstly, I'm a boomer and I voted for Brexit. If you are offended and immediately know who I am, what my values are, who I will vote for on the 12th, etc. etc. then please leave now because you have nothing of value to say to me. I'm already judged.

If you are still reading this, let me begin...

I was born in Wallasey in 1959. Boomer credentials established. My father was in the merchant navy and hardly ever home. I don't think I even recognised him as my father until I was about five. My mother was mainly at home apart from a brief spell at a Cadbury's factory where she worked on the conveyor belt and one day had a meltdown so they sent her home and she never went back. I played outside with the neighbourhood kids, learnt to ride a bike (someone else's), thought catapults were the coolest things in the world (though the word 'cool' was unknown to me then). My mother wouldn't ever let me have one. I did have a Man From Uncle cap gun though. I  liked and had access to a few books and enjoyed reading when I learned how to (we didn't have a TV). The only car in the neighbourhood was owned by the local taxi driver. I think I was happy. I wasn't aware of my father's drinking and the arguing. That came later.

When I was eight my mother broke the news to me that we were 'moving' (?) to Gravesend in Kent. I was very excited until they explained 'moving' meant a new school. When we eventually got down there the kids laughed at my Scouse accent (the word 'bear' caused particular mirth) and I didn't know what to say when someone shouted 'Watcha' at me. These became the affluent times. My father was obviously earning good money as the skipper of a Fyffes banana boat, but it was still some time before we owned a car (a Hillman Imp) and I was becoming aware of the rows and the smell of booze on him. I recall doing homework by candlelight around this time because of the power cuts, but don't remember if my mother was ranting about the Labour Party at the time. If she did it went in one ear and out the other. It all fell apart when the oil crisis came and my father lost his job. My mother cut her losses and she took us (I have a younger sister) to Falmouth where she bought a guest house so she had her financial independence. The bank wouldn't lend her any money so she had to keep the place open all year round. In the winter I could sleep in the small room at the top of the house, but she had to let it in the summer so my sister and I lived in a caravan in the back garden. Any vestige of a Scouse accent had gone and I hadn't really acquired Estuary but the local kids thought I was American and that I must be posh, even though most of them were better dressed than I was. There was no room for a desk in the caravan so studying and writing essays was a bit of a challenge. I did stay on for the sixth form, but didn't do well at all.

By the time I left school I hadn't seen my father for years, nor did I hear from him. I didn't give it a second thought. I didn't entertain the notion that I could go to university or college either. I got a Work Experience Programme job in a furniture shop in town. I earned £18 a week. I gave half to my mother in rent and used the rest for driving lessons, even though I had as much chance of buying a car as I did building a rocket and flying to the moon. The job was so boring my body began shutting down and I thought I had diabetes. I could barely climb the stairs in the morning. Fortunately a kindly admin lady realised what the problem was and told me hospital wasn't necessary. I then embarked on four years of casual work: waitering, cooking in a chip shop, cutting down Christmas trees, digging up spuds. I even did two weeks street sweeping for the council. The bin lorry guys had it made! Good money, finished by lunch time, riding in the lorry. Brilliant. I envied them. I had absolutely no direction, no plan, no motivation, no clue. One day, not long after my 21st birthday, I left a waitering job in Hampshire and was cycling to a station to head back to Falmouth for another summer in the chip shop and it dawned on me that everything I possessed was in panniers on the back of the bike. I had no passport, had never been on a plane. I didn't even have a bank account.

Later that year I was walking home from a shift at the chip shop and a car pulled up. It was one of my old teachers. He wanted to know what the hell I was doing. He instructed me to get UCAS forms, pick a university and turn up at his house. I did as I was told and he took out his cheque book and gave me the entry fee. I didn't get in. Of course not, my A levels (2 grade Es) were crap. But later that year a younger friend said she had a spare set of forms for a little teacher training college in Cheltenham. I filled them in and, bloody hell, I got in! The first morning in my little student accommodation room I got up and sat at the desk. It was 7.00am and I realised for the first time in years I knew where I was going to be and there was a purpose to my existence. I could hardly believe my luck. A friend visited and I gave him money and asked if he would buy me a dictionary in town. When he got back I put it on the bookshelf and amazed myself at how important it made me feel. I still have that dictionary.

After graduation I got a teaching job at an awful school in Eastbourne. It was only for a year to cover the RE teacher's absence as she was on sabbatical. (A couple of decades later it was in the news because a Maths teacher there ran off to France with s student.) It had bars on the ground floor windows to deter vandals. On my first day, the Deputy Head collected me from my bedsit and said all he asked was that I kept the kids contained for the duration of the lesson. I could have put the work in beforehand and got a better first school, but I knew teaching wasn't for me and I wasn't self-aware enough to have the sense. I did it for five more years elsewhere and in that time married my college girlfriend. She had got her second teaching job in Cardiff and, because she had a dog and didn't think anyone would let her rent, she borrowed £300 off an elderly aunt and used it as a deposit on a tiny two bed house on an estate. When we married she moved to where I was living (North Wales). She had no job to come to at first, but we were able to buy a run-down 1930s semi on my salary which we proceeded to decorate during holidays. We bought a second hand VW Polo which was the bees knees. If anyone had told me I was 'doing well under the Tories' I'd have stared at them in disbelief.

Around 1990 I embarked on a distance learning course in computer programming and got a trainee programmer job in the South East. My wife managed to get a teaching job just in time so we could get a mortgage on a boxy little 3 bed house on a large development. It was a filthy dirty hovel. The estate agent had no key to the back door so when the dog needed a sh*t I lowered him out of the window and leaned out to pick him up when he'd finished until we had the money to fit a patio door. When my wife was pregnant with our second we move a couple of miles away to a larger 3 bed house in a nice cul-de-sac. It was a total wreck with a condemned boiler so any spare cash went on making the place habitable. I spent many a sleepless night worrying what would happen if I lost my job. (I did get made redundant twice on my journey, but always survived in the end.)

Sometime in 2005 my wife commented that people on a forum she had stumbled across were saying a massive house price crash was coming. It sounded plausible because prices seemed crazy. In 2006 the first redundancy came. We got a good price for our place, but then we'd transformed it and built an extension. We hadn't had any foreign holidays and never ate out unless you count the occasional Burger King, but the kids didn't go without where it mattered. My wife had always wanted to go back to Cardiff (increasingly elderly and infirm parents) and our eldest had only just started secondary school. It was a now or never moment and the redundancy made it easier so we did it. I got a job in the IT department of a car parts factory. We were renting, looking at property on the market and arguing about whether the crash would ever come when one day I bought a paper which had 'Credit Crunch!' as a headline. It was August 2007. You know the rest. We eventually bought in 2012 because we were paying out a fortune in rent and it was depressing. The house was in an awful state and had been on the market on and off for years but was a nice size and in a quiet area. We've got it looking decent now, but the kids, now grown up, never did get to Disneyland. One day I hope they'll forgive us.

All the while this was going on the EEC was transforming from a bunch of people shaking hands and agreeing on a free trade deal into the EU, a vast, strangely sinister organisation of huge unaudited wealth and power. One that can tell its member states what the minimum percentage of meat they should put in their sausages and which can suffocate entire economies in Southern Europe from the labyrinth of offices it maintains grandly in Brussels. I'd been living in Falmouth in '73 and remembered the men who lost their livelihoods in fishing almost overnight. I didn't much like the slow erosion of control membership entailed and when Cameron came back empty handed from an attempt at negotiating a few months before the referendum my distrust began to turn into anger. I voted, with some reluctance and unease, to leave when the time came. Whether it will turn out to be a good idea in the end I have absolutely no clue, but I guess there'll be winners and losers just like when we joined. I don't think of it, and never have, as a friendly institution that represents the breaking down of borders and the building of trust between nations. I heard about an elderly Greek dentist who took his own life rather than rummage in bins for food in his old age and the thought of the EU impassively turning its face away from that situation and the vast numbers of under 24s without hope of employment in those poorer member states left a bad taste.

So suddenly I'm 60 and just discovered that people around me at work, who have never heard my story, have already judged me. I'm a boomer, I 'did well under the Tories'. I don't care about the poor and homeless because I've 'pulled the ladder up'. In all likelihood I'm probably a racist because I voted to leave (and don't want the immigrants from coming' over 'ere and takin' our jobs). From my experience, the caring, sharing Labour Party in the end crash the economy and that helps no one, but I should overlook this because if I don't vote for Corbyn I'm effectively saying I'm happy to watch homeless people dying the streets. I honestly had no idea I was this guy! So I'm asking you, am I? Is that who I am and I've been fooling myself all along?

I'm a boomer and I voted for Brexit. Sorry.

It doesn't matter what your past was.  It matters what you will do now.   I've seen a lot of boomers use the past as an excuse for their actions now.   I had it bad x years ago, and so its perfectly OK for me to pull the ladder up now.  You might not like this but it is a fact that that is what has happened, and people your age are refusing to make the sort of systemic personal sacrifices needed to rectify these imbalances, and boomers as a cohort will have to make them if things are to be rebalanced.   The Tories as a political party are the political representation of that stance.   To keep the economic status quo pretty much as it is.  Now I don't know where you personally fit into this but to some extent you probably have gained at the young's expense.

As to how brexit fits into this.  The cost will fall primarily on the young with very little of the pain falling on old, and I think we can now say without a doubt that it isn't a good idea.   The supposed benefits have pretty much all vanished and all we are left with are the costs.  I don't even see brexiteers talking about the positives anymore but simply stating that we must get it done because of the vote x years ago, as if that's a good justification for doing something damaging and stupid.

Now I can't tell you who to vote for but this at least is how I see things.

[MARTINX9]

Still not clear how you feel like a Jew  in Weimar Germany. From about 1924 until 1929 that wasn’t all bad but then we had a global banking and financial crash and things went very bad quite quickly.

I hardly see this analogy relates to being old voting for Brexit. Boomers didn’t cause massive house price rises since the 1970s - failed government policies and bankers did.

Edited November 28, 2019 by MARTINX9

[dances with sheeple]

56 minutes ago, Lurkerbelow said:

It doesn't matter what your past was.  It matters what you will do now.   I've seen a lot of boomers use the past as an excuse for their actions now.   I had it bad x years ago, and so its perfectly OK for me to pull the ladder up now.  You might not like this but it is a fact that that is what has happened, and people your age are refusing to make the sort of systemic personal sacrifices needed to rectify these imbalances, and boomers as a cohort will have to make them if things are to be rebalanced.   The Tories as a political party are the political representation of that stance.   To keep the economic status quo pretty much as it is.  Now I don't know where you personally fit into this but to some extent you probably have gained at the young's expense.

As to how brexit fits into this.  The cost will fall primarily on the young with very little of the pain falling on old, and I think we can now say without a doubt that it isn't a good idea.   The supposed benefits have pretty much all vanished and all we are left with are the costs.  I don't even see brexiteers talking about the positives anymore but simply stating that we must get it done because of the vote x years ago, as if that's a good justification for doing something damaging and stupid.

Now I can't tell you who to vote for but this at least is how I see things.

? Not sure how you know all this? We have not left yet and we can`t tell what the future will be like after Brexit. IMO the EU needs some short sharp shocks to make it shape up and go through necessary change, Brexit is the start of this process, whether the rest of the EU countries will want to stick around the Great Project is another future unknowable, but IMO some will want to go their own way again at some point.

[dances with sheeple]

1 hour ago, mrpleasant said:

Was that the 'Last person to leave turn the lights out' Sun headline year? It certainly feels extremely polarised, but I'm struggling to find faith strong enough in any of them to focus my mind. I've never not voted, but it's going to be tough to go out in the dark this time around.

People go out in the dark all the time, not sure how voting suddenly becomes a chore just because it is December, about 9 degrees warm and a bit dark (more having a pop at the MSM than you) people still need to go to work, shop etc. putting a cross on a bit of paper is easy, it is the who to vote for bit that is hard at the moment.

[zugzwang]

6 minutes ago, MARTINX9 said:

Still not clear how you feel like a Jew  in Weimar Germany. From about 1924 until 1929 that wasn’t all bad but then we had a global banking and financial crash and things went very bad quite quickly.

I hardly see this analogy relates to being old voting for Brexit. Boomers didn’t cause massive house price rises since the 1970s - failed government policies and bankers did.

+1

The comparison is obscene.

Even Greece, the country most adversely impacted by the crisis, is now recovering at a brisk canter.

https://www.benzinga.com/news/19/11/14892986/this-country-sees-the-biggest-stock-market-growth-in-2019

Quote

Greece is headed to set the largest stock market growth in the world for the financial year 2019, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.

The country, which is still reeling from the debt crisis spurred by the financial crisis of 2007-2008, has seen its Athens Stock Exchange Index grow by 45% thus far in 2019, according to Bloomberg data.

This is the Index’s largest annual growth in two decades since 1999, Bloomberg data shows.

Greece’s debt-to-GDP ratio at the end of 2018 stood at 181.2% according to data from Eurostat. But market analysts are suggesting that the economy is recovering.

George Lagarias, Chief Economist at Mazars Financial Planning, told Bloomberg that the newly elected government’s tax cut measures and other pro-business policies helped the growth of the stock market.

 

[Dorkins]

7 hours ago, mrpleasant said:

I'm a boomer, I 'did well

Compared to today's younger income percentile-matched equivalent, it sounds like you did do well. Despite a pretty modest CV as you describe it above it sounds like you were a homeowner in your late 20s, bought a reasonable sized 3 bed house in SE England at some point in your 30s and raised some children. It may not have been a life of fast cars, haute cuisine and 5 star hotels but when has it ever been for people on average incomes? Sounds like you spent a lot of money on home improvement though, that is consumption.

As a 1959 baby you do fall into the Boomer years but only just, if you had been born 10 years earlier you probably would have had an easier time of it.

Edited November 29, 2019 by Dorkins

[Crashley Banjo]

Thx for the post gems like this make this forum worth visiting.

[“Nasty Piece of work”]

8 hours ago, mrpleasant said:

I'm a boomer and I voted for Brexit.

Me too, by 4 days depending on your definition.  I gave up scanning your post.  I am sure it is relevant to you, not Jews in Weimar, or most readers of this forum.  You have no need to apologise how you voted.

[jiltedjen]

I feel like this has been written by someone who hates boomers, who in their right mind compares themselves to Jews in Germany? Unless they are just trying to stir up more boomer hate? 

i struggle to see any boomer being that self entitled and reckless. surely this can’t be real? 

if it were real then I can 100% see what they are the hated generation, voting in their narrow self interest, the ‘me me me’ generation. 

OK BOOMER! 

[jiltedjen]

2 hours ago, Dorkins said:

Compared to today's younger income percentile-matched equivalent, it sounds like you did do well. Despite a pretty modest CV as you describe it above it sounds like you were a homeowner in your late 20s, bought a reasonable sized 3 bed house in SE England at some point in your 30s and raised some children. It may not have been a life of fast cars, haute cuisine and 5 star hotels but when has it ever been for people on average incomes? Sounds like you spent a lot of money on home improvement though, that is consumption.

As a 1959 baby you do fall into the Boomer years but only just, if you had been born 10 years earlier you probably would have had an easier time of it.

Imagine a millennial now trying to follow the same route in life.

the doors and locked and bolted. 
moaning about a decent life that others can’t ever have to hope. 

I still can’t see this as being real. 

[Si1]

Tldr

Ok boomer

[mallish]

2 hours ago, Crashley Banjo said:

Thx for the post gems like this make this forum worth visiting.

+1

[Freki]

3 minutes ago, mallish said:

No it will not - all studies confirm that the Millennials are the weakest generation (to which I belong) if someone calls them a name they cry and need a safe space and counselling or self harm 

Show me just one please

[mallish]

10 hours ago, mrpleasant said:

So suddenly I'm 60 and just discovered that people around me at work, who have never heard my story, have already judged me. I'm a boomer, I 'did well under the Tories'. I don't care about the poor and homeless because I've 'pulled the ladder up'. In all likelihood I'm probably a racist because I voted to leave (and don't want the immigrants from coming' over 'ere and takin' our jobs). From my experience, the caring, sharing Labour Party in the end crash the economy and that helps no one,

Mr Pleasant - why worry about what people who do not know you think? The only people who matter are those who you love and who love you. If some one who does not know you does not like you why bother with them.

Get on and enjoy your life - see family and mates - have  a beer and a meal  with family and matesand -enjoy life.  They are not important to you - if they want to be angry and bitter and twisted let them get on with it it affects them not the people who their ire is directed against.  

[Locke]

19 minutes ago, mallish said:

No it will not - all studies confirm that the Millennials are the weakest generation (to which I belong) if someone calls them a name they cry and need a safe space and counselling or self harm 

Ok Happyguy.

What is your point here? Boomres are depending upon millenials to be tax cattle. That is simply not going to happen.

[mallish]

 

13 minutes ago, Freki said:

Show me just one please

 

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/gaming/fortnite-aimbot-cheat-life-ban-jarvis-kaye-faze-clan-a9183891.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_space

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/millennial-depression-on-the-rise

https://nypost.com/2017/09/04/family-blames-online-trolls-for-driving-young-mom-to-suicide/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2246896/Jessica-Laney-16-committed-suicide-internet-trolls-taunted-told-kill-herself.html

None of my buddies needed  a SAFE SPACE -we were not offended by someone calling us a name if someone pd us off we dealt with it in the time honoured  manner - shook hands after and forgot it 

the incidence of suicide among st millennial who have been trolled on social media is an epidemic according to many heath workers 

[mallish]

3 minutes ago, Locke said:

Ok Happyguy.

What is your point here? Boomres are depending upon millenials to be tax cattle. That is simply not going to happen.

I asked what sacrifices he expected his parents who I assume are boomers to make - it is simple enough question I would have thought.

My point is that they are not violent they cry when they are called a name - self harm and go into the depths of  despair
When you are old you will not work and will still get a state pension. I suggest that you also make your own private provision.
As for me I put £500 a month into a private pension and own my own home - I will not need the younger generation to look after me - I was taught to look after myself.
Sorry I cannot s[it here all day here going back and forth I have a demanding job to get on with which is why I earn good money. 

[Locke]

5 minutes ago, mallish said:

I will not need the younger generation to look after me - I was taught to look after myself.

Ok boomer

[mallish]

For the record I think it is extremely sad that these people get so upset and depressed over calling them a name to the extent that they self hard or worse. 

5 minutes ago, Locke said:

Ok boomer

Ok snowflake renter - landlord's  best mate 

[Flopsy]

To the original poster,

I'm not critical of your position (we have echoed some of the same thoughts in our home) but I would like to maybe help you to understand why not everyone would agree with how you have come to your decision. 

I'm not hearing anything in your childhood to adult story that seems different to other boomers and my working class nieces and nephews reading this would be seeing that you could buy homes (even if they were not up to your standard), have a dog, have a pregnant wife, get redundant and survive, get opportunities to study and relatives to lend you money for a home and be able to buy a car.

You see the challenges in your life but they would see the opportunities you had and your life would seem charmed / privileged to them in many ways. It may help to consider what you wanted in life and if other poor and working class people have the same opportunities now. 

It seems from reading your life story that the things you wanted were

1. Education (and I am guessing you didn't have to pay for this)

2. A home (and this seemed to happen quite well for you). You could have been stuck in a crap cramped flat on a horrible estate paying rent.

3. Employment (you survived 2 redundancies without going bankrupt and losing everything so guessing there were jobs to go to or you were not reliant on 1 income at that particular time)

4. A dog (which people in rented, uncertain homes can't have)

5. A wife who could get a job and also have a family 

6. Buy a car (and without regard to pollution, excessive debt)

Being made redundant in the past could make you interested in employment laws. My partner was made redundant in appalling circumstances a couple of years ago. Where does this feature in your thinking?

Your remark about the elderly EU dentist committing suicide is because you identify with him I am guessing. Disabled people have committed suicide due to benefit problems in the UK but that's not where your sympathies lie. 

Nurse are using food banks here and I bet that doesn't feel good. 

You have a fear that Labour will wreck the economy but what about a fear Brexit will?

You are coming to the age when the NHS may have to spend a lot of money on you. Who is going to pay for this over the next 25 years?

I suspect that you think your story is somehow relevant to your decision and that once having heard it younger or disadvantaged people will somehow understand.  I doubt that is the case because they will see the chances you had and they want them today. 

Edited November 29, 2019 by Flopsy

[Freki]

1 hour ago, mallish said:

 

 

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/gaming/fortnite-aimbot-cheat-life-ban-jarvis-kaye-faze-clan-a9183891.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_space

https://www.healthline.com/health-news/millennial-depression-on-the-rise

https://nypost.com/2017/09/04/family-blames-online-trolls-for-driving-young-mom-to-suicide/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2246896/Jessica-Laney-16-committed-suicide-internet-trolls-taunted-told-kill-herself.html

None of my buddies needed  a SAFE SPACE -we were not offended by someone calling us a name if someone pd us off we dealt with it in the time honoured  manner - shook hands after and forgot it 

the incidence of suicide among st millennial who have been trolled on social media is an epidemic according to many heath workers 

Those are your "studies" ? Damn go back to the DM comment section, people are uneducated enough over there to think the anecdotes you posted are "studies"

The only study you linked to say that depression is on the rise. The conclusion you draw does not come from your study

Here this one compares something. Better education, less money.https://www.gq.com/story/ok-boomer-broke-millennials

Here is another one:

Quote

The highest rate of suicide was recorded as 21.4 deaths per 100,000 population in 1988. Male suicides have consistently accounted for approximately three-quarters of all suicides in the UK since the mid-1990s. 5,821 people aged 10 and over died by suicide in 2017, a decrease from 5,965 deaths in 2016.

Talk about boomers' resilience! 

And see I quote a stat and not an anecdotal story of a boomer suiciding like this 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7045651/Jeremy-Kyle-suicide-victim-did-NOT-mention-programme-three-notes-left-died.html

Edited November 29, 2019 by Freki

[Bruce Banner]

2 hours ago, mallish said:

For the record I think it is extremely sad that these people get so upset and depressed over calling them a name to the extent that they self hard or worse. 

Ok snowflake renter - landlord's  best mate 

OK happy guy