Resolved: *Some* young heirs to the past & ongoing battles for Equality don't appreciate [View All]

much less KNOW, the history of what they're enjoying.

I'm well aware that I sound like an old fart complaining about young people, AND that somewhere there is extant a 2,000+ yr old quote from the Greeks complaining about how the latest generation is decadent and ignorant.


Both my parents worked outside the home, but my mother was the driving force, and I came along ten years after my two sisters, so they were already strong individuals, and therefore strong women were natural to me.

The feminist '70s were likewise natural to me, and a couple of the available women candidates received some of my first votes, not because they were women, but because they were Democrats and were the best candidates.


In the workplace, I, a male, supposedly a member of an oppressing group, actually was the one who "knew my place" and "waited my turn." It took me extra time for me to work my way up. And when I did, I hired the first women into the type of job we were doing.

Well, it turned into the late '80s and early '90s, with the renewed or renamed "networking" and the young women I hired soon saw me as a fuddy duddy. They "networked" their ways into my bosses' graces (and sexual affairs), and got on a very fast track.

I hired them because they were intelligent, outspoken or rather forthright (it seemed), and had potential.

Once they became my peers (not through the most diligent of work), they decided that they were forming "the Old Girls' Network" to parallel "the Old Boys' Network" and they somehow saw me as one of the Bad Old Boys, and that they would wield power AGAINST others, specifically some males, from their seeing themselves as feminist PIONEERS and CHAMPIONS (which they were not). Of course I didn't tell them about my mother and sisters and my votes and my own groundbreaking FOR THEM at the workplace. Nor did I tell them the dudes they were fucking at the workplace WERE the Bad Old Boys.



Different minority groups can be plugged into this fable. In 2000 I argued with Hispanic college kids who were parroting the "no difference" line and who voted for you-know-who, oblivious of their Hispanic-Democratic roots.


O.K., why am I going to get flamed over this?!