politics

I wish I could feel sympathy, but I don't.

My grandparents would already be homeless if they weren't borrowing money from me on occasion. Why? Because their social security doesn't cover their rent, their food, and their medical issues, despite them working hard their whole lives. Who cares what year they were born in? They weren't Reagan voters. Not that this should be the metric. They're proletarian. They're lesbians They're women. Therefore they're oppressed in a threefold manner, along class, gender, and sexuality lines. They're liberals, but I view that as a result of indoctrination by the bourgeois society. They're products of their environment. Indoctrination, as much as we hate to admit it, is another form in which the proletariat is oppressed, because they are mesmerized into fighting themselves by an anti-materialist and undialectical mode of analysis pushed by the bourgeoisie.

The Reagan generation did this to themselves, and the rest of us have to suffer with them.

Yeah. I'm paying money out of my pocket to stop my grandparents from becoming homeless while also paying to raise my child. I would be in much more dire straits if I weren't lucky enough to have stable employment in what is in fact a terribly unstable economic situation, further complicated by hyperinflation.

In any case I don't think the question of whether you feel sympathy or not for the "reagan generation" really matters and that this is a misfocused way of looking at it in the first place. It's actually very similar to how liberals draw lines between "red state" proletarians (who they insist deserve their suffering) and "blue state" proletarians (who they insist do not). Assuming you do not own means of production, assuming you do not employ others, assuming you do not accumulate the significant part of your income through financial assets like stock investments or mutual funds, you are a proletarian. Your class position is proletarian. Your parents and grandparents, assuming they weren't small business owners driven from the market, were probably proletarian. When we become old, I hope the revolutionary consciousness is more developed among the younger generations than it was among us, but if that is the case, expect some of them to say that we deserve death for not fixing the problems sooner, and be prepared to accept that as a consequence of being born when you were.