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this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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Mildly Interesting
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My mother is pre-Boomer (born soon after the U.S. entered the war) and has been incredibly progressive her entire life. She has never voted for a Republican. She marched for civil rights. She wanted me to know that women and men are equal and that color and religion and ethnicity should not make you dislike someone. She taught me about sex (appropriately) when I asked about it at 3 or 4 years old rather than shielding me from it. My brother and I both have (had in my case, but that's another story) gay best friends who were also best man at both of our weddings. She always welcomed them even though my brother and his friend became friends in the mid-1980s. I remember asking my mother what she would do if I was gay and she said she would love me no matter what I was. I don't specifically know her politics, but my dad, born even earlier (1931) was mostly the same way. He definitely had his prejudices- although he would deny it- and he was a lot more sexist than he thought he was, but he was also an outspoken socialist until the dementia got too bad for him to be outspoken about it. One of the last things I was able to tell him before he was too far gone to understand was that Bernie was running for president.
I have certainly had a lot of issues with Boomers and people older than them, but it is far from universal, but I am really proud of my parents for always being progressive.
I hate the burst your bubble, but they weren't being progressive, they were being 80's liberals. Today's progressives are a different thing.
(BTW, your comment was a good read.)
Again, my father was a socialist. He wrote a his dissertation on Shaw and the socialist aspects of one of his plays. He was British and said he was never more proud of his homeland then when he helped it usher in the National Health Service with his vote. When I moved here to Terre Haute, Indiana, he made sure to get me to take him to the Eugene V. Debs museum because of how much he admired debs. How does that make him an 80s liberal? Do please explain.
I was speaking of the word used as an identifier/label, 'progressive', vs 'liberal', and not the content of what was being said, at all. No disrespect was meant towards the comment, just a tongue-and-cheeck attempt at discussing the labels. As I mentioned before, concerning the content of your comment ...
When it comes to my comment discussing labels, today's 'liberal' is considered a 'centrist' by today's younger generations (which pisses me off to no end, but that's another discussion for another time), and what they think of as liberal they call progressive, hence my comment.
And for the record (not trying to measure dicks here, but only because you quoted your dads history) I'm a Gen-Xer who was born/raised in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles in the 70's/80's, a perverbial "Valley Dude", and lived 'in the capital of Liberalism' the vast majority of my life. Liberalism of that day is not what Progressivism is today. I feel that I could be considered a 'subject expert' in a court case when it came to Liberals and Liberalism of that time.
I'm what world is this kind of pedantry useful?
In what world is this kind of verbal policing useful?
No need to be hostile.
Concerning your question, at the very least, my world. But I suspect most people can recognize a conversation comment about how different generations see things and identify them, for its own sake. You know, Lemmy is about conversations about subjects.