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Thursday, May 17, 2012

Here's the real reason for the Republican war on women
Posted by Jill | 5:49 AM
Too bad they haven't figured out that if you make abortion and birth control illegal, the black and Hispanic women they hate so much are also going to have more babies. But this is the real reason they want to consign women to breeding status; it's the only shot they have at retaining their precious "white majority". NYT:
After years of speculation, estimates and projections, the Census Bureau has made it official: White births are no longer a majority in the United States.

Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 percent of all births in the 12-month period that ended last July, according to Census Bureau data made public on Thursday, while minorities — including Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of mixed race — reached 50.4 percent, representing a majority for the first time in the country’s history.

Such a turn has been long expected, but no one was certain when the moment would arrive — signaling a milestone for a nation whose government was founded by white Europeans and has wrestled mightily with issues of race, from the days of slavery, through a civil war, bitter civil rights battles and, most recently, highly charged debates over efforts to restrict immigration.

While over all, whites will remain a majority for some time, the fact that a younger generation is being born in which minorities are the majority has broad implications for the country’s economy, its political life and its identity. “This is an important tipping point,” said William H. Frey, the senior demographer at the Brookings Institution, describing the shift as a “transformation from a mostly white baby boomer culture to the more globalized multiethnic country that we are becoming.”

Signs that the country is evolving this way start with the Oval Office, and have swept hundreds of counties in recent years, with 348 in which whites are no longer in the majority. That number doubles when it comes to the toddler population, Mr. Frey said. Whites are no longer the majority in four states and the District of Columbia, and have slipped below half in many major metro areas, including New York, Las Vegas and Memphis.

A more diverse young population forms the basis of a generational divide with the country’s elderly, a group that is largely white and grew up in a world that was too.

The contrast raises important policy questions. The United States has a spotty record educating minority youth; will older Americans balk at paying to educate a younger generation that looks less like themselves? And while the increasingly diverse young population is a potential engine of growth, will it become a burden if it is not properly educated?

“The question is, how do we reimagine the social contract when the generations don’t look like one another?” said Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, co-director of Immigration studies at New York University.
The first thing that jumps out at me is how once again, sociologists and other pundits are painting the entire post-World War II generation with a broad brush. In the 1960's (and even today), we were painted as an entire generation of hedonistic, pot-smoking dirty fucking hippies, despite the fact that there were plenty of baby boomers who wore Lacoste shirts and plaid pants and had Nixon/Agnew bumper stickers on their 3-ring binders. Today, the entire generation is painted as a bunch of Hoverround-riding Tea Party activists. This is of course what makes people like Chris Ryan over at Americablog, one of Blogtopia's (™ Skippy) lead boomer-haters, decide that the entire party is a bunch of people who got high at Woodstock and now want a "handout" from Social Security.

The baby boom generation is as polyglot as any other. Some of Tom Brokaw's "Greatest Generation" were Beats and Communists and some were William F. Buckley conservatives. Some baby boomers were hippies and some were members of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF).

Some Millennials are Occupy Wall Streeters and some are James O'Keefe.

There's this perception that today's baby boomer conservatives were yesterday's hedonistic hippies. It's a convenient way of painting a picture that's easy to hate -- people who had all the fun and consumed everything and left nothing for anyone else. But there are plenty of us out here who may have sold out to multinational corporations to earn a living but have been out here fighting for social justice and civil rights for the last forty years, just as there are plenty who are Wall Street bankers and Republican politicians who are only out to amass as much as they can and screw over everyone else. I'll fill you on a secret about the latter, though: They were always like that. Most Americans of all ages will be just fine with a more diverse America. It's just that we don't make as good a media story.

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Anonymous Anonymous said...
Join the club. I've had this fight with X'ers and Millenials before. Many of them think us Boomers scarfed up all the gravy while things were good, voted for Reagan, and screwed them for life: "It's all your fault there aren't pensions anymore!," for example.

I've had to point out to them that not all Boomers went from hippies to yuppies and voted for Reagan. And not all Boomers are going to have a fat pension, either.

This is one Boomer whom the Repubs lost at Watergate, who simply couldn't believe that a political freak like Reagan could actually be elected President(I sure as hell didn't vote for him), who ain't getting no pension--and who found out the hard way, like a lot of folks in 2008, what a scam the 401k is.....
5/17/12, 3:56 PM  
Blogger Jill said...
Anon: I would go so far as to say that MOST boomers don't have pensions. One of my colleagues just retired at 62 with a pension but I would guess that no one born after 1950 has one.

The Repubs never had me. My parents were staunch liberals, and so am I. You gotta love all these people who think that THEY will be successful at stock market investing and let into the Big Club.
5/17/12, 7:29 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
Jill,
Do not ever do the "no one" bit. It'll bite you every time.

I'm 67, born in 1945. I have [had!?] numerous colleagues and friends retire recently -- last 2 years -- at 55 [earliest most pension plans will kick in. All were born after 1950! 2 were with the Government, 3 were with IBM since "forever", 2 were with major pharma companies [not the same one, nor with yours!], one was with my current company [a major defense contractor]. All still had real defined benefit pensions "grandfathered" from their employment many, many years ago. Whether they can actually live on the income is a concern for all of them!

Admittedly, they are rare. It is rare these days to find anyone still employed with their "original" company after 10 years, much less after 20 or 30 [or in one of my friend's cases, 38 -- he started right out of high school, went to college on the company's dime (don't see that any more, either); even got his MBA] years, but it does happen. And most of them are now getting to retirement age, and getting out while they still can...
5/17/12, 8:29 PM  
Anonymous newbroom said...
I've always thought that our generation held the potential to make progressive change via the cash register and the ballot box. Too bad we're such consumptive hedonists today that we are still too (fill in this ) to do so. b.1948
5/18/12, 6:04 AM  
Blogger Jill said...
Speak for yourself.
5/18/12, 7:25 AM  
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