Telescope is backwards
Seems to be a heavy focus on Boomers this week. Presumably there's an agenda behind this focus, which will show up in due time. What catches my attention: most of the explanations and discussions are valid points, but two are backwards.

Specifically:

(1) Boomers are the first generation to complete high school and expect college routinely. This is given as an advantage, but I'm pretty sure it's the other way around. Why? Because our public schools gave us a negative preparation for life. We received endless and useless repetitions of unrelated facts, but we never learned any of the skills we would need in life. Cooking, budgeting, exercise, organizing work. (I think girls received some of this in Home Ec, but boys got nothing.)

Exercise? At least for me, it was all negative. Gym class was 10 years of pure raw unmitigated hell, and I swore never to do another calisthenic. I always did plenty of walking and biking, and still do plenty of walking, because those activities were not polluted by gym class.

Diet? Once a year we gathered in the auditorium and heard a lecture from The Carrot Lady, who had a peculiar theory about eating things with lots of colors. She was basically right, but she was so weird that we couldn't absorb what she was saying. Even the teachers snickered at her. [We also got an annual lecture from The Shakespeare Lady, a similar obsessive eccentric who ruined literature for us in the same way that The Carrot Lady ruined vegetables.]

Home maintenance? Boys got woodwork class, which was disconnected from anything relevant. We learned how to make a cutting board, but didn't learn how to replace a faucet washer, how to desqueak a floor, how to protect pipes from freezing, how to prevent an ice dam, or how to recognize a termite infestation.

Previous generations typically left school between 4th and 10th grade, and began learning useful skills much earlier than we did. Their brains weren't jammed with false ratshit during the time of greatest neural flexibility.

(2) Boomers are the first generation that expected health insurance in the workplace. It began in WW2, but didn't become a typical and expectable part of work until the '60s. This is usually given as an advantage, but I'm pretty sure it's the other way around. All you need is one fact: 200,000 deaths each year from medical errors. Four times the auto accident death toll, and equal to the smoking death toll. Clearly our addiction to "free" medicine is our deadliest habit.
  ¶ 5:36 AM