The assumption that old people are inherently right wing and young people are inherently left wing is just wrong. Correlating age with political beliefs is a fucking pseudoscience, and so is the whole concept of generations like boomers and zoomers. Their marketing terms, the baby boom was a uniquely United States thing and to apply that term to 20 odd years of people from across the world is just factually wrong. We got to stop self identifying with these terms because they are ageist and they divide us and they allow for shitty excuses like “it’s just their generation” to excuse shitty behavior.
What’s the point of this? Stop dunking on old people. Old people aren’t inherently reactionary.
Fred Hampton was a boomer
Boomers were born 46-64, Hampton was born in 48. So he’s at the very very far end of Boomer to the point you could argue he was culturally more silent generation. Most major counter cultural figures of the 60-70s were. Boomers today are 80s Reagan kids who miss the late-80s treat parade and are generally about as left as Clinton at best.
Boomers are the generation born right after WW2 in the US. That’s exactly what Chairman Hampton was.
The diagram of the airplane above is the classic image of survivorship bias. The Br*tish were trying to figure out how to make their bombers slightly less deadly to their crews, so they analyzed the bombers that came back and found they’d been shot in the places you see red dots. The insight was realizing that the bombers that didn’t come back had been shot in the places you don’t see red dots. The dataset (bombers that had seen action over Europe) was biased by only including the bombers that had survived and come back.
Similarly, if you only look at the boomers who made it to the present day, you will get a biased and inaccurate picture of the generation. The best and most revolutionary boomers were murdered by the US government through its cops and FBI (And also with AIDS).
Fred Hampton is a perfect example of the kind of boomer that i was thinking of when i posted the pic. if he and probably millions of other boomers weren't murdered before we were even born, boomers wouldn't seem so reactionary now. but they were.
The pic is about suviorvorship bias, so Fred Hampton being a boomer is exactly what they are trying to say. Many of the good died young