There’s this who always spends her mornings walking around a local park. She’ll pick up cigarette butts and fish hooks, trim bushes, just whatever needs doing. Apparently an 11 year tradition for her.
Today she stopped me to chat for the first time as I was picking up some fishing line. We had a nice little conversation about how important it is to protect birds and how poorly the city does so. I was just about to describe how much I also care about the local wildlife and how important stewardship is.
Within two minutes she’s pointing at a bike lane and asks me if I support that. I say “Yeah, I commute on it and it’s a lot safer than it used to be”. She launches into a rant about how one bike can cause a 4 mile traffic jam and she wishes they’d tear out all of the bike lanes. We have a visible air pollution layer from car exhaust being trapped by the local topography, making the air so dangerous that her demographic is specifically warned against going outside for most of the summer. Okay.
Next came climate change. When she was a kid in the 40s they taught civics. Now kids are just told what to think. The climate changes cyclically and we’ve found fish fossils in Wyoming. People are so afraid of a perfectly natural cycle. She doesn’t care if they’re liberal, conservative, whatever. They’re taught social studies instead of civics and it makes them believe in stuff like this.
Then vaccines. She was a nurse and couldn’t work in medicine these days with that COVID vaccine shit they’re forcing on young people like me. It doesn’t even work and they fire nurses if they don’t get it. She wishes she could get all the nurses together and collectively bargain because they can’t fire everyone for refusing to get the vaccine. She’s 84.
Sometimes I see a nice old person doing something good for their community and for a brief second I think “that’s probably not a rabid reactionary who wants to spend their last years salting the earth”. Then they speak and I remember that this is the Burger Reich. Death to America.
when i was a little kid, i watched a bunch of TV. all the Adults in the Room told me that watching too much TV would rot my brain.
when i moved out of my parents house in my 20s, i became far more circumspect about my media consumption. cut the cord and shifted to a more deliberate, a la carte consumption strategy. no more “watching whatever is on/channel surfing” and more about finding recommendations, watching discrete amounts of media, and avoiding advertisements and “audience-driven” content.
now that i’m in my 40s, all the adults in the room are like 60s/70s+ and they all watch whatever is on/channel surf all the goddamn time. and their brains are fucking fried with these lead-lined, nuclear crazy takes.
It’s the same thing with the internet. ‘Be careful of what you post online’, ‘Don’t believe everything you read’ were told to me repeatedly by my father and I took it seriously. Now I know that it was only because of a vague distrust of the internet that eased with time, rather than an actual understanding and respect for infosec, as now he puts his whole life on Facebook and guzzles from the insane right wing propaganda hoze he and all his boomer buddies hooked themselves up to.
My mom spends all day watching Newsmax and right wing freaks on YouTube.
Help.
i am surprised that there isn’t an extension (maybe there is?) that young people can install on their parents’ browsers to block right wing / crank content. that’s the type of thing that, if stealth enough, could have a massive demand and lead to some kind of Uno Reversed Parental Control software solution.
parents totally reach a certain age where they don’t understand jack shit about their computer, and its pretty clear the YT algo is driving people to right wing content. not to mention all the scam shit and one click ordering that is tantamount to fraud/elder abuse.
My fucking grandpa had me try to check on the license status of his friend, a Lebanese hair shop owner with two houses, through a government website (later by phone) and was shocked that they needed some kind of ID of hers and ideally herself calling or an official representative of hers. He was making me do this to save her the cost of calling herself from her second home in Lebanon and then got mad at the government agent for following basic privacy protocol.
Fucking hate old conservatives. He was like “just pretend you’re her” to my aunt who was cringing the entire time. Over-entitled, technophobic dipshit. Anything electronic-related and they expect everyone else to do it for them.
