Dealing with Boomer Parents and Unemployment

Hello, I’m a burger, I’ve been living with my parents for sometime now and I’ve been searching for work for sometime since October of last year when I got layed off of my mortgage processing job that I was at for about 2 and a half years at best.

My parents are typical baby boomer FOX news watching republicans and they both came from lower class upbringings, mostly from the rural areas. My Father especially is anti-union, blaming them for his father not having enough money to feed him and his 9 brothers in mid-1940’s rural Arkansas.

Not to mention they keep on telling me to find a job even though I’ve been trying my hardest to find a decent job, but they don’t seem to understand the world has changed from the 1950’s-1970’s.

What can I do to make them understand my situation and to get this belief they have about The “Evils of Socialism” and thinking college kids are “Marxists” or is it simply too late for them and I shouldn’t even bother?

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They grew up in the red scare. Water down the word socialism until it means pension checks and post offices - you need to get them to accept the word before they'll ever accept the message.
Anyways, the reason you can't find a job is nepotism. You can't find a job where i live either - that's why so many people are on welfare of some kind and do heroin or meth for fun, because there's nothing around here to do.
It's all over rural usa, you know. I say try to gain some skills, live on welfare if you can (unless you can find a job, at which point try to help unions in some way), have some fun (but don't do hard drugs), try to move out, and prepare for economic recession.
Look for some parties in your area. What kind of music do you like? Google "X music festival near Y town" and go to one or two. You'll have a reason to get out of the house and away from your boomer parents.

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Ship of Theseus user. You can't.
They'd have to dismantle their entire worldview and rebuild it from scratch.

Socialism is when there's no burgers.

I have parents who are saying they will enforce a rent and kick me out of the house if I don't pay it. Given how petty bourg they are they probably will jack up the price when I find a good job or some shitty excuse.

...

Ah, yes. Sex is no longer about the children. Let's capitalize their brains.

I'm familiar with your situation. Here's the thing. Facts won't matter to them. You can show boomers all the statistics, trends, analyses you want pertaining to your situation it won't change jack shit, since they hold their beliefs because they are broken people. They were systematically broken by the cold war era regime. They internalized authoritarianism as the only panacea against the fear that was spread around intentionally from kindergarten onward: the system emulated a threat for them and offered a solution – itself – to them. Then their better judgment was finally bribed by an economic system that was forced to share the spoils with the workers due to an alternative growing overseas.

Whenever you tell them that something is out there causing legitimate concern (climate change, an economy irreversibly shitting itself, etc.) their only reaction will be more authoritarianism, because that's how they got conditioned.

The problem is capitalism not “authoritarianism” or whatever that means.

I would say forget it. I really don't blame them, they grew up in America, the most anti-communist country during the cold war. They're pretty fucked up. Best thing you could do is "redpill" them in some important issues, not mentioning the word socialism or anything like that. Maybe some Tucker Carlson speech against corporations or something like that, it's a good starting point

I never said that the problem wasn't capitalism. Nice reading comprehension, tho.

In your post you act like “authoritarianism” is some problem in America, when it really isn’t. “Authoritarianism” is just some vague thing that isn’t bad on it’s own. It’s only bad when combined with capitalism.

It's not really a material analysis, but while all old people suck, boomer is not a synonym for old. The boomers as a generation are between 74 and, say, 60, and they have this unique sense of self centeredness which is really amazingly conducive to reactionary politics. One reason there’s absolutely no urgency on climate change, even from the people who ostensibly believe it’s real, is that it won't truly skullfuck the world until most of them are dead. They are a many-faceted gem and every facet is infuriating, with the cherry on top being their unique combination of slavish political devotion and complete mental torpidity.

Also between the Great Depression and World War II, boomers' parents had to have untreated PTSD and other disorders all over the fucking place, and they grew up huffing lead fumes for their entire childhoods. So boomers are trash but we shouldn't give a pass to the people who created them.

This may come across a bit bigoted, and I honestly don’t mean it that way, but you might have an easier time if your parents aren’t WASP type white people.
I’m kind of in the same situation, and live with my mother who is Hispanic. The minute I connected class to race for her, it clicked immediately. White people dont normally have the same experience if they don’t at least know poverty. I honestly don’t know how you would ever convince middle class white person that capitalism isn’t working for them, and credit to those who do. To sum it up, if you can’t connect socialism to something they care about, it might be pointless.

Not authoritarianism, authoritarian personality types.
These people are ideal for military service, middle management in huge sprawling conglomerates, and writing enterprise Java applications.

They would fit poorly into socialist society.

That's the oddest thing, they were pretty much lower-class for their childhoods, my dad kept regaling stories of them swallowing a single piece of bacon then their parents getting the piece of back out of their mouth to give to their brothers.

I guess them becoming petty-bourgeoisie in a sense sort of made them forget what being working-class was like.

Maybe they are just becoming senile, who knows.

"Senile, temporarily embarrassed millionaire boomers, among the rotting remains of their former middleclass lives" Is my band name.

Thanks for sharing that experience.

kek

The "I came from absolute poverty and I worked my ass off to become the person I am now" trope is very popular with them. What they don't get is that many youngsters were twice as long and twice as hard as they did and they'll never live a comfortable life in their pensioner years like them.

just cause you put a lot of emotional investment into reading hundreds of pages of freudian nonsense doesn't mean it's valid. You don't have to ascribe any tendencies you talk about to authoritarian personality. These people's ideological make up is entirely due to their class not some special mental qualities unique to them or deriving from some childhood trauma

prove it

prove the opposite without references to unsubstantiated pseud shit

Don't mind the guy obsessed with rationalwiki-tier "debunking" of freudianism. His specialty is not reading primary sources, copy pasting third hand criticisms that verge on yellow journalism and fallacious argumentation. His entire reduction of The Authoritarian Personality to "freudian pseud shit" is a typical example here. The book is like 90% sociology and data interpretation.

He honestly believes that the humanities are there to destroy STEMtopia and he can't be bothered to reflect on the fact that his obsession mirrors perfectly the alt-right's anti-intellectualism.

I'm pretty sure he has personal stakes in this topic, people otherwise don't tend invest so much bullshit juice into stuff. He's either on medication and sees the criticism from the psychoanalytic side as a threat to his own justification of being a druggie, or he has other mental problems that he firmly believes will magically disappear after the revolution.

You do realize that only around 10% of whites in America are descended from Anglo-Saxons.

you could just get a job bartending or something instead of just "looking" for some job

WASP is more like a mindset and set of values than an ethnicity. My mom is an Italian Irish mutt and my Dad's family are Quebecois but their values are in lockstep with protestant work ethic and bootstraps bullshit. My dad can't accept that he got lucky enough to become a landlord and land a high paying middle management gig.

It is bigoted from the moment that you're forgetting that most of the so called """white""" workers were socialist even in countries like America during the beginning of the XX century

who are you talking about? you know that more than one person sees through that nonsense?
I'm not STEM
great analysis! I remember when I was a teen too, where thought that I could psychologize away any opposition
dubious, self-serving statistics with freudian commentary (what you call "data interpretation")
lmao, how convenient that anybody who opposes you has repressed mental issues. this person your talking about sounds like he got under your skin

If they started poor and became "middle class" they're more likely to be reactionary because they think the system works and if there are problems now it's because it's not like it used to be when they had social mobility.

Nothing. Some people and especially boomers are so deeply trapped in their ideology, it's a waste of time to talk with them.

No it’s all about class user. OP’s parents’ whiteness is only consequential insofar as it means they are statistically more likely to be petty bourgeois or labour aristocrats. However when you find black or Hispanic people of that same class status they tend to be just as reactionary.

That's how I feel about my parents, but instead they are CNN liberals.

this
just suck it up and find some part-time 3-days-per-week at a non-chain restaurant or something and spend the other 4 days job-hunting and/or studying to find your "decent job" to match whatever you had before. at least that way your parents won't complain (as much).

Yeah, that’s weird to me. The WASP’s, and some minorities who reach middle class status, have that whole mindset where they think poverty is your fault or some moral failure. I see my white friends have to deal with that, and I actually feel bad for them.


Wasn’t the middle class smaller at the time though? I was considering class, which was why I mentioned their middle class status.


That’s kind of what I meant, but they have the added detriment of Protestant work ethic mentality. My uncle owns a small business, married a white woman, and Has the same mentality, so I get that it’s not an exclusively race thing.

those people usually live paycheck to paycheck just like poor people

Yes. The labour struggles of the early 20th century prove that class is the decisive factor in whether one’s consciousness is progressive or reactionary. The great irony is that while these stupid boomers go on about muh bootstraps, their grandparents were getting into shootouts with the cops over the right to strike. It’s also ironic that the efforts of the early 20th century labour militants directly created the middle class which swiftly adopted a reactionary attitude to match its new position. Historical materialism in action really.

What does working hard have to do with political values?

The so-called Protestant work ethic is really just a bourgeois consciousness that insists that if you’re poor it’s your fault.

Critical support for neoliberals in their assault on the middle class.

Just want to add, since I see part of the thread devolved around the “authoritarian personality”, that this is very real - and relates to class based child rearing techniques. I also disagree with the Freudian interpretation, but a good anti-Freudian author on the subject is Alice Miller if any are interested.