It's so sad
this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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In the past few years my parents, one a tail-end boomer and the other an early Gen-X’er, have become increasingly more and more difficult to have conversations with. They spout this FoxNews rhetoric every chance they get and my step-mom foams at the mouth blaming literally anything and everything on Biden (open a pack of chips and the bag splits on the side and it’s “Biden is ruining this country.”)
They’re irrational and exhausting. If they ever talk to my children about politics or even life in general, I’m sure I’ll see this post shared in our family group chat along with the other fucking stupidity they share.
Idk what happened or when, they were normal. Now, they’re banging on the walls of the looney bin waiting for a bed to free up
I feel like in 30 years (if we're all still alive by then) we're gonna talk about like FoxNews and Facebook like cigarettes or amphetamines. This is an observable phenomenon. Certain age and wealth groups have taken to the whole internet reactionary ideology like catnip. I don't know how else to describe it. If you're 55+, white, a homeowner, and you regularly wear polo shirts with khakis for fun it's like your whole brain got scooped out and replaced with conservative dipshit madness spinkled with minion memes. It's so common it should be a statistically noticeable blip.
They've become so heightened, so hair-trigger, they really do froth at the mouth once any of their activation words are said. They're often deep into Qanon, they concoct elaborate conspiracy theories that get more confusing every year, and they can't tear themselves away from Facebook. Is the problem they weren't weaned onto the internet like younger people? Like when I was growing up the internet as it is now was being constructed, I watched it grow and learned how to parse information presented to me. Older folk slammed face first onto the internet in like 2015, without the decades of acclimating to it.
Stories like yours and mine are so common I'm surprised there isn't yet an industry of family counseling specifically about de-programming reactionary parents/grandparents (there probably is already and that makes me sad)
I sure hope so. It's exhausting pushing back against the "it's just entertainment; entertainment has no effect on me" mantras of those consuming it. No one is immune to propaganda, least of all those who believe that they are immune to it.
I don't even know what to call the conservative propaganda tools at this point. They're like dopamine buttons for the most susceptible people. The only thing I know to compare it to are the people I knew who got addicted to WoW in like 2008 and would play for 30 hours straight.
I've seen it offline and in person: they are hooked. Some Reddit-style pedantic may get upset if I use the term addicted but as an external observer it does look like actual addiction. Fox News (or OAN or the like) has to be on a big screen and it has to be blasting at high volume or they seem visibly uneasy and shaken and if someone so much as asks for the volume to go down they get actually genuinely enraged.
"YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE FACTS, SNOWFLAKE? ARE YOU TRIGGERED?" -said by a 50+ year old man.
Dr. Drew is a chud so fuck him, but a long time ago I used to listen to Love Line. I really liked how Drew would talk about addiction. Someone would ask if something was an addiction or not. He would ask “is it having negative consequences in your life?” If it’s not having negative consequences, then does it really matter if it’s an addiction or not? Likewise if someone isn’t traditionally considered an addiction but it’s having negative consequences, then that’s where the problem is.
Like for me, I know I’m addicted to coffee. But tbh it isn’t really causing any negative effects in my life - I really do enjoy a morning coffee, I feel like it centers me - so I don’t really sweat it. Meanwhile even if someone isn’t “addicted” to Facebook in a conventional sense, if it’s causing negative effects in their life it’s a serious problem.
1,000%. My dad is usually just sitting and watching Fox News/Fox Business half the day. But there are times where for one reason or another, he doesn’t watch it for weeks. There is a marked difference in his demeanor in the two situations. He’s happier, less angry, and more apathetic (in a good way) to politics when he’s not watching. There’s something to the addictive quality of those things.
It's the effects of leaded gasoline and paint.
I'm pretty old, but people that I know that are slightly older than me (Xers) are almost universally indistinguishable from boomer stereotypes. Effectively, they are junior boomers, but instead of a root of post-war abundance-driven selfishness, they had a root of post-Soviet-collapse apathy-driven selfishness.