Quote From: PennyLane78Sorry, I think that generation is one of the most vile and hideous. History for that generation has become romanticized and white washed, but we are talking about a generation of people who embraced racism, sexism and homophobia. I don't care how hard they worked. Also, every person from that generation that I know has a very disgusting attitude about sexual abuse....I have no respect for that generation as a whole.
yes, they did learn racism from their parents and society as a whole, but you also have to remember that societies were very isolated at that time and didn't interact much with other cultures. I think people naturally do this and it has to be overcome. and I'm not sure sure that racism is that much down from then. people now don't admit it because they know it's wrong but I think it's still there, alive and kicking from all sides of the equation. we have to understand why to overcome that. definitely. life is better now for minorities (and women in somes ways) but we're not as successful at overcoming racism (or sexism) as we think we are. In fact for women, in many ways or treatment has gone downhill. we've allowed ourselves to be used more than ever before and in many ways we're respected less than ever before. just use and toss like everything else (and no, I'm not one of those so I don't have issues :) ). but as for the quality of the generations, I suspect if you look at the incarceration rates of that generation compared to our's, fathers (and mothers) who stuck around then to raise their children compared to our's, the number of people who learned real marketable skills to support themelves as compared to our's, then you'd have to say that the generation that raised our grandparents were much more successful. even though the experts today disagree because according to them they did everything wrong, results count and I think we have to relook at what we believe. I also think that the people who are most opposed to spanking are the ones who's parents were the most extreme. the rest of us don't see a big deal in it. and I'm not opposed to learning new and better methods of discipline, bring it on, we can learn. so long as it works. If it doesn't we may have to resort to more tried and true methods. At least as a last resort. I just think it should be an available tool. people don't need to be so extreme against it. it shouldn't be all or nothing. some kids won't respond to anything else and some kids respond better to other methods. people seem to be like that. they have to believe one extreme or the other, no middle ground for us.
it's not really a fair statement to say about the sexism. women have been considered second class for a millenia before WWII. since then things have slowly improved. but we're going backwards now, and mostly that's women's fault for not demanding more from men. if we allow them to use us, they will. if something catastrophic were to happen today, we'd be right back where we started from in a heartbeat. we have to be very, very careful with the gains we made not to lose them.
Homophobia - we didn't really understand it then. again, that took place over a millenia. we thought (wrongly) it was a choice. it's only slowly changing now, very slowly. so the sixties did encourage a lot of good changes. but we threw out the good from the previous generations along with the bad. big mistake.
