Reaping

The annoying thing is when faced with this, white boomers default to racism instead of questioning the system.

I've seen white boomers convinced that if they were "Black immigrants" that the government would be giving them their free housing.

I personally know someone who was fucked out of a full-pension retirement about a month before he was eligible for it, and he was credulous and bigoted enough to blame The Mexicans(tm) instead of the suits that decided to fuck him over.
You know how American cities give homeless people one way bus tickets out of the area? I live in one of the more common destinations because we’re the poorest county in the state and we have really extensive welfare infrastructure here. Because homelessness disproportionately affects people of color and the most common white settler ethnicities here are Swedish and Italian, our area becoming more diverse has literally coincided with state programs to bus people of color into the projects here. It’s really hard to talk to white ~~fascists~~ conservatives around here and show them all these facts and have them not see it as proof of the exact worldview you’re talking about. Especially because they think I’m a liberal no matter how much I tell them I’m not.
- Especially because they think I’m a liberal no matter how much I tell them I’m not.
  To the boomer chud, "liberal" is anyone left of Hitler.

I had a roommate that dated a self proclaimed Reaganite that after a few months of being an aggressive alcoholic stopped showing up to his job of 20~ years, he was then very surprised when there was no welfare for him to collect.

I guess when you hear about how it exists (and that's a bad thing) every day, you're gonna think it exists
anyway lol
Astonished anyone actually believes that shit. It's so patently ridiculous that I would figure they only pretend to believe it to justify their depravity.
- The myth is so powerful that my dad has seen me firsthand get denied welfare and yet he still buys into "the blacks" getting it basically upon birth. Cannot make this shit up.

ppl in Orange County who spent 60 years voting against helping ppl and yet they are ENRAGED when they learn there is 0 help for them

They voted for boots stomping on faces thinking they'd get to be the boot and not the face

I can't laugh cause statistically a few of these people don't deserve this. Plus I think even assholes deserve help.
- Yeah, with stories like this I always feel a mix of anger and sadness. Anger that these functioning adults aggressively bought into horrible shit instead of reality, sadness that there is a whole reactionary ecosystem they were never prepared for that sucked them in and spat them out.

Trying to get that "Obama Phone" Fox News told you about?

tbf I've met at least one homeless person who had one of these. idk the deets though I'm sure it was a shitty half measure
- You have to jump through some hoops in my state to get one. I looked into it in rehab. Also you can't get foodstamps if you still live at home, even if your parents can't provide money.
- An Obamaphone is typically an old refurbished android phone. It’s provided by private companies who require you to fill out the paperwork that allows them to qualify for the subsidy to make the phone free. The max income threshold is super low. You get a predetermined number of free calling minutes each month for a year and then you have to recertify.
  As your income rises, it quickly becomes cheaper to spend less than $50 on a Tracfone from Walmart and load the minutes as needed. If you are unemployed, don’t have an phone, are looking for a job, and taking calls from employers is the only thing you’ll use it for, it is indeed free and can be a pretty nice thing.
  But the people who designed the program made damn sure people weren’t gonna be “abusing” the program to make a bunch of personal calls for free. The phones are capable of running WhatsApp and Messenger, though, so I do know people who have them, didn’t recertify, but will bum people’s WiFi to keep in touch with people. I’ve had several people stay at my house overnight because they didn’t have a place to go for the night and on two separate occasions people have booted up my PS4 and installed Messenger on it to talk to people. It’s definitely a thing.

Boomer blaming is stupid

They didn't cause the cost of living crisis, the US government and capitalists did

They just happened to have much better financial conditions because the US needed to compete against the USSR during the Cold War

If anything, they probably have a pretty ok reason for thinking that there is at least some kind of safety net, because in 1975 when they last had to use it there was one.

imagine believing generations are real. claiming to be a materialist and then falling hook line and sinker for bourgeois propaganda meant to divide the working class. lol, lmao

Death to America

You can reinterpret generations materially though.
- if you're going to do that, why not just use material terms like bourgeoisie/proletariat? why let age/generations muddy the waters?
  Death to America
- Yes, but is that necessary when we already have an established framework for class analysis? Age can be a useful intersectional category, but I don't see that it has much use in this case.
From what I understand the thing described here is hard to disengage from generation. Sure you have young people thinking this shit - but pretty much only if they were born reasonably wealthy and as such would never have to fear it happening to them.
This type of scenario sort of requires you to be some sort of working class (or small aristocratic failure) cause otherwise you don't end up with no money barring some "bet it all on crypto" type morons, and they just didn't need until yet so never realized it's not there anymore
People raised in different times and places, in aggregate, believe different things and hold different attitudes because conditions shape people. That doesn't make "generations" as neat categories real, but it supports an idea of generation as a sliding scale corresponding to age within a given location.

This kind of dunking on people finding themselves in positions I would like no human being to find themselves in strikes me as kind of gross. If no one deserves it, they don't deserve it.

Normies when they once again get exactly what they wanted:

not sure it's right to assume all of them voted against social services. and it's not like public housing has ever been on the ballot anyway. I know OC is a hotspot for rich chud assholes but those folks generally aren't the ones becoming homeless, are they?

I work in homeless services. It's incredibly depressing how many people think America has a safety net that it really doesn't.

Yeah, when I was homeless, I was already beginning to turn left and knew that America didn't have much of a safety net. Once I was homeless for a bit, that's when I realized that we don't have a safety net at all, and ended up having to return to the place I was running away from. That experience radicalized me. Yet, I get people, including my own family, telling me about how good homeless people have it, knowing full well that I was homeless and me telling them otherwise. Just angering.

Fuck Boomers, they are like this everywhere not just the US, they think the welfare net they spent 50 years dismantling still exists and as others have mentioned, when they find its gone they blame immigration.

huh I would never assume there's free housing. Maybe at least senior housing with discounted rent, and I have seen those available.

Putting on my “neoliberal boomer” hat: that is the version of America they believe exists while simultaneously voting against a safety net, in part, because they are so brainwashed they think it actually exists (see the [CW:racism] notion of welfare queens)
At the same time they vote against helping people while somehow also possessing an idealized notion of America that includes actually good ideas like “old people should have a guaranteed place to live”.
- hey vote against helping people while somehow also possessing an idealized notion of America that includes actually good ideas like “old people should have a guaranteed place to live”.
  only old people who are REAL AMERICANS (white, cishet, christian, born on the soil) and "worked hard" (owned a small business)