Just got off the phone with my mom and literally could not drag her from talking about the CHINESE (in that Trump way) or how the world's actually getting cooler if you listen to this one group's (funded by oil and gas) findings. The last year and half have turned my mom, who used to be the most progressive boomer I know, into a right wing shit heel.
This is something I always wanted to figure out about why people that start out progressive all of a sudden go conservative when they get older. It seems to be a trend with a lot of people I know.
I ain't a sociologist, so I can't really do any legit study, but I think part of it is unfamiliarity, leading to fear. The progressive ideals they had as kids or young adults are very different then the progressive ideas of today, so they feel lost and scared that the bubble they have become comfortable in will be shattered.
I don't claim to understand why my son loves YouTube stars more then watching movies, or why teens these days say words like "yeeting" or shit. I am not going to understand all the myriad changes of life all the time. I still think memes are weird, and I still would rather post on message boards like here rather then spend five minutes on social media. That's just how I am.
However, I understand that as an aging person the world is going to change, whether I want it to or not, because that is how society has always worked. If it didn't, we would still be in caves beating each other with sticks for the best hunting spots. Change isn't a bad thing, as long as we keep pushing towards a better world, rather then get so scared of change that we revert to an oppressive, broken world, trying to hold onto that status quo.
I mean, hell, my parents lived through the Civil Rights movement and were supporters (even though they leaned fiscal conservative), but now my mother hates BLM and says that "Obama brought back racism." It's not even that I disagree with that last statement, but where she thinks Obama made black people too entitled and rude to white people for "no other reason then being white.", I know that Obama becoming president toppled the "white men in power" dynamic that has been the norm for over 200 years, and that all those racists simmering in the shadows started boiling over all of us like a tide. As for my own parents, I don't think the fact they started watching nothing but Fox News starting in the late 90s was a coincidence either.
We probably ain't going to get out of this till enough people die that we can move forward, but then who knows how much of people our own age will start fighting the next big progressive march. Only time will tell.
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