You'd hope so, but then what the **** happened with boomers? Their parents saved the world from Hitler, begrudgingly passed civil rights laws (which is more than anyone before them ever did), and carved out strong labor protections and a solid middle class. In response these boomer dip****s gave us, like, Reagan and neoliberalism and foreign adventures all over the Middle East. Clearly, things can go wrong for a generation.

Point taken. Perhaps my optimism is unwarranted. Still, progress has been made since WWII, and even in the 80's. We'll see what the future brings, but I gotta imagine it'll be better than the past, unless Trump destroys us all in nuclear holocaust.

It's not unwarranted. There's been a ton of progress during that period.

Tipping points don't happen just because of an event, they happen because there's been enough underlying change over a long period of time to erode support for the the prevailing paradigms. Then events that would once have been brushed off are liable to cause seismic change.

A lot of the change is the introduction of the internet which is one of the profoundest changes in human history but it's not everything.

rara has by far the highest ratio of jagsfan.gif responses to his posts. but then I think hes proly just a bot that spits out random right wing derps in which case the coherence is pretty amazing.

He's actually just a leaving, breathing common garden-variety right wing derp parrot.

If they had tanks in the school this would have never happened. Citizens need fully automatic rifles, grenade launchers, rocket launchers and surface to air missiles to protect themselves. More firepower equals fewer deaths.

I'm optimistic. I think there will be a lot of progress made on policy.

What I'm pessimistic about is the "changing the system" part. Things like switching to ranked choice voting or overhauling the electoral college or getting money out of politics or whatever. Some of those changes are desperately needed but I have a hard time seeing how they happen. And some systemic issues (like clustering) are poised to get much worse.

But those young + bad politicians have been elected in large part because the lol olds are still around. A young + good politician doesn't have enough of a constituency yet. So I don't think looking at the current young politicians is a good indicator of what's to come.

The problem is that as most generations age a lot of them seem to catch a bit of the tard.

Two of the kids, Hogg being 1 of them, were on Real Time tonight. Pretty good interview even though it was light on policy.

Silent generation fought in WW2 largely because they had to, and brought in civil rights for the same reason (brought to national attention partly through the actions of student baby boomer demonstrators).

Baby boomers when young in the 60s fought hard and publicly for more rights and freedom for themselves, ie the poorest. When they became middle aged and turned from being net recipients of the tax system to net contributors they started voting for Reagan and Thatcher, hoping to hang onto more of their wealth.

Groups of people respond and adapt to changes in society and form trends, usually driven by self interest unfortunately, and I don't think there's much of a difference between the generations that can't be explained by this. If my generation of anti-materialist boomers were transplanted 30 years later they'd be just as Twitter and selfie-obsessed as millennials are.

Humans are quite despicable when viewed en masse, but fortunately are often wonderful individually when not subsumed by the herd.

Columbine was 19 years ago so I am not optimistic that things will change when people that were impacted get to voting age and remember. I hope I am wrong but I expect that if they don't get results soon then nothing will happen.

20 years ago there was no social media for them to share their experience with their peers and get organized. We've seen more pushback to the NRA in the last month than we have our entire lives and it's because of these kids. They are already successful.

I think most of us look back on previous generations through rose-colored lenses. We like to imagine the boomers were all hippies and civil rights activists, but the reality is that those were just subcultures. There were a whole lot of boomers who were against coloreds moving into their school and those people grew up to become the deplorables of today. And frankly there's more of them than pop culture tends to admit.

Okay, I now agree with most of the above posters (which goes along with my initial inclination), and that goofy was a bit wrong, or perhaps just overly pessimistic in retrospect.

So yes, Boomers WOAT, but not really, they were in many ways better than the previous generation. That fits with my own experiences, where my grandparents and their generation are much more racist and deplorable than my parents and their generation.

The "Greatest Generation" saved our ass in WW2 though, because of them I'm not forced to have pictures of Hitler on my wall.

Meh, they got the job done but they're starting to make it sound like no other generation could have done it, which I find dubious.

Who's gonna save us now?

Ouch, and that's a moot point. The duty fell on their shoulders and they came through in the clutch. They saved us from Nazism, well, temporarily at least.

Exactly. They accomplished some great things, but I like to think that almost any generation would have responded that way. As much as we **** on the boomers, do we really think that they never would have fought back against Hitler?

And if you've ever talked to some Greatest Generation members, on average, they're pretty darn deplorable.

In fact, a case can be made that people who fight in wars, become more deplorable, not less.

I've never heard of the Soviet Army circa 1943 being referred to as the "Greatest Generation," but whatever.

It's not a moot point though. The context of this discussion, is, will Gen X-ers in power be better than Boomers, and will Millenials be better than Gen X-ers and Boomers?

Greatest generation or silent generation vs Boomers was simply brought up as a reference point, as far as, do future generations usually take steps forward, or do they sometimes regress?

In that context, we are talking about overall mentality and deplorableness vs progressiveness, and are they likely to enact change for the better or not. Not, how did one generation respond in one (or two) instance(s) of war.

Jesus wept.

After being attacked by Japan AND Germany declared war on the US they didn‘t have much of a choice. The massive sacrifices of the other nations that have been fighting for up to 2 years to keep Hitler at bay shouldn‘t be forgotten either.

The majority of persons who fought for the US in WWII were drafted.

https://www.quora.com/What-percentag...ge-volunteered

The "Greatest Generation" had to be compelled to fight. The American populace had no appetite for war at that time.

I didn't.