Ok Boomers and euthenasia

[Backinthecloset123]

I'm in NZ where a bill has just been passed to have a referendum on euthinasia/assisted dying. This will take place next year.

I have always been a firm advocate....until now. As one of the last baby boomers I'm aware that our numbers are starting to peak in elder care and resources, and will continue to peak for quite a few years.

My issue is, will euthenasia be embraced by the woke in a similar way that gender/queer/trans issues have?

Will, or could, many non boomers think of us boomers the same way they think of te*fs? (non rationally). Could it get out of hand as trans ideology has?

I'm blown away how quickly queer Theory entailed rationality went out the window, and can see the same possibly happening in other areas including assisted dying.

Strange times.

I think so Eoin plus it seems to be feature of every young generation to believe they're unique. I don't think it's harmful in itself and (speculating wildly here) may even form some kind of rites of passage. What I find far more troubling is that we now seem to have grown adults and parents - people with power and an audience - believing it too.

Older generations moaning about younger ones is not new, no. But then neither is younger people complaining about older people. That is certainly not new and using 'boomer' as a perjorative doesn't mean we'll all be bundling our parents off to be put to sleep as soon as the law changes. How is it different to writing off an older person as 'grandma/pa','an oldld fogey' or 'OAP'? Don't try to tell me Gen X and Baby Boomers never did that!

Btw Gen X is not getting the heat the Baby Boomers are because when the boomer generation was getting into full world-screwing swing, they were still quite young themselves. Gen X did not cause the recessions, wars, cuts to public funding, institutional corruption or rubbish employment prospects that the Millennial gen grew up with. Of course they failed to fix much of it...

Tocopherol and you think the Millennial generation will be the ones to fix it? I don't. I think this focus on which generation broke the world completely overlooks the issue of class and wealth, and everyone will continue to be screwed over by the richest 5% in each successive generation. The idea that the younger generations who are coming of age now will be the first ones to put aside their own interests and act for the greater good of the whole world is straying into fairy tale territory.

when the boomer generation was getting into full world-screwing swing, they were still quite young themselves. Gen X did not cause the recessions, wars, cuts to public funding, institutional corruption or rubbish

And how much did ordinary, working class people contribute to that?

My boomer parents left school at 14 and went to work in factories.
Mum made lampshades, dad made pyjamas. Blaming them for war or institutional corruption is nonsensical.

Those baby boomers who passed the 11 plus, went to grammar schools and then on to uni with grants at a time when only around 7% if the population did so - I think they have a lot to be thankful for. (And just to be clear, I am one of them and I'm very grateful.) However the vast majority (90-odd percent I believe in some LEAs) went to secondary modern schools and often left without taking any qualifications. Some of them may have done ok initially but the 80s, 90s and the early 21st century have not been too kind to them.

Now I can understand millennials not grasping this but when you get fully grown adults that don't, then it's exasperating and rather troubling.

What is it with the obsession with labelling? What was wrong with being a child of the 30s/40s/50s/60s/70s/80s etc etc? Now these largely meaningless and frequently misused "boomer", gen x, gen y, millenial labels are flung around - usually as value labelled insults rather than descriptors of the era who were born or grew up in.

I don't really see a parallel with the anti-boomer sentiment and trans ideology (except for the label obsession and development of a range of pretty meaningless categories).

Either way I still support the right to choose to end one's life with medical support and/or intervention. Too many people are forced to live lives of misery and pain that they do not wish to live.

I've never lived through a time in my life like this, where I genuinely feel like we have descended into a kind of madness. It's taught me that people can be very easily manipulated, that social contagion is a real and dangerous phenomenon and that most people lack critical thinking skills.

This resonated, and reminds me very much of the Cultural Revolution in China. I agree that people seem to be more easily brain washed than we'd like to think.

It is not very intelligent to blame an age-group of ordinary people for the decisions of governments and supra-national bodies. Even when over three million people marched against the war in Iraq, the powers-that-be didn't take a blind bit of notice.

It is also not very intelligent to talk about war, institutional corruption, spending cuts and recession as if these things didn't exist before the Boomer generation came of age. It only adds to the general impression that you don't really know anything about social and political history or have any awareness of things that happened before you were born.

It’s depressing that the default opinion on younger generations is suspicion. I encounter this when trying to get care and help for my Dad, particularly when it comes to admin. Try applying for Power of Attorney when your parent or grandparent can’t read or write anymore and have become so isolated there is no one who can legitimately witness. It’s an absolute minefield, people who just want to help their parents and stop them from going into debt are assumed to be after money, newspapers love printing articles about this to ramp up the fear.

Many people wish for euthanasia at the end of their lives, when pain has become intolerable. Unfortunately they have no power by then. As a society we ignore this, we are afraid to talk about death. It feels heartless letting people suffer due to our refusal to confront how unbearable death can be for many people.

I would probably be less pro euthanasia if I had more confidence in palliative care. But I've seen its limitations (family members and also a friend) and it's terrifying. I'm guessing research is pitifully under resourced - I imagine most people go into medical research wanting to find cures, not to help people die. And what drug company wants to be associated with death? So you've no idea until it happens to someone close, and eventually to you,

FloIsMe A great book on that topic is The Way We Die Now, by Seamus O'Mahoney. It's a while since I've read it but he is a senior doctor in Cork University Hospital (I believe) and has seen a lot over the years.

It is also not very intelligent to talk about war, institutional corruption, spending cuts and recession as if these things didn't exist before the Boomer generation came of age. It only adds to the general impression that you don't really know anything about social and political history or have any awareness of things that happened before you were born.

Yes, this. I don't know how anyone can look at the history of the modern period, so several hundred years at least, and not see that this is not about a particular generation of selfish people.

For that matter, the younger generations now seem to be interested in doing all kinds of things that are along the same lines, it's not like they are giving up technology en masse, vacations, food grown far away, etc, to lower their environmental impact. Some do, but not more than Gen X people or boomers.

In the US, the Pete Peterson Institute has been actively inciting inter-generational strife for at least 25 years, as a means of convincing younger voters to privatise Social Security -- Wall Street wants its hands on that money.

They argue that the Social Security Trust Fund is going bankrupt -- and this is true, it is. But it was MEANT to empty out. Prior to 1983, there was no Social Security Trust Fund. Social Security was funded on a pay-as-you-go basis, with working generations funding the retired generations. in 1983 Congress decided the Baby Boom generation was too large to be supported in retirement by younger generations and so they doubled payroll contributions as the last of the Baby Boom entered the workforce and set up the Trust Fund, designing it to empty out when the last of the Baby Boom generation died out, at which time Social Security would revert to pay-as-you-go funding.

The Baby Boom generation are the ONLY generation in the US, actuarially speaking, that is/has been funding both their own retirement and their parents' retirement.

The younger generations in the US have been sold a big lie that the Baby Boomers are "using up" all the retirement benefits and there will be none left for them.

Al Gore, when he ran for president, talked about putting the Social Security Trust fund in a "lock box" so that the monies allocated to it could not be used for other reasons. The press made enormous fun of him for that. But in fact, without being in a "lock box," the US government has "borrowed" from the Social Security account to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy. The press now say that the Social Security Trust Fund is stuffed with "worthless" IOUs, which is ridiculous and pure propaganda, because what they are filled with is US Treasury Notes backed by a government sovereign in its own currency (as, by the way, the UK is -- which makes it functionally impossible for either government to go bankrupt.)

I think much of the OK Boomer shit is coming from the US, and this is the reason why. It doesn't really make sense in a UK context, given that the UK didn't have the enormous birthrate bulge the US did in the aftermath of the war, in large part because the US did not endure the loss and privation the UK did in either the war or its aftermath.

It's also pretty silly as a sorting, in my opinion -- there's a big difference in the life experiences of people born in 1946 vs. 1964, not least of which, in an American context, is the draft and the Vietnam War.

Younger US generations truly believe the Baby Boom generation has devoured/will devour all government retirement benefits, leaving them nothing, and many in the older generation believe that too -- which reveals, more than anything, the extent to which Americans know next to nothing about banking, finance, and economics.

But it's that belief that's fueling a lot of enmity, along with the propaganda that the Baby Boomers are responsible for climate change or governmental failure to act on climate change -- which is a nice deflection away from the culpability of the oil industry.

The US government is sovereign in its own currency and has exactly as much money as it chooses to create and spend. (Ditto the UK, and that's one thing, at least, to thank Thatcher for: keeping the UK a currency-issuer rather than a currency-user, ie: not Greece.) If the US chooses not to fund retirement for younger generations, that's a political decision, not an economic one.

7Days thank you, I'll look up that book.
Certainly some food for thought in this thread but so far I remain in support - albeit anxiously - of euthanasia. Because to paraphrase Bette Davis, from what I've seen of dying, it ain't no place for sissies.

I didn't say they were the ONLY generation to contribute or deal with those things or never struggled with anything - clearly lots of crap to deal with. Or that the Millennial generation will fix everything (we clearly will not be able to! Maybe the kids will...). Perhaps leaving us with a crap housing market, fuck all social housing, crap employment prospects, and a ruined environment and then publishing endless vapid articles about us using mobiles and being lazy isn't reason for some resentment. Doesn't really matter.

As for not being aware of things that happened before you were born, this whole thread is based on the notion that previous generations haven't been ridiculing old people/the feckless youth for years, hundreds of years. A silly new insult is not a sign that Millennials (who aren't kids anymore btw, the oldest are approaching 40 according to one definition) specifically want to kill off the over 50's. I have no idea about kids and their murderous intentions, but I doubt they are anymore bloodthirsty than any other generation.

Apologies I always mix up millennials and generation Z. My point is simply that pretty much every young generation has its own scars and that the young blaming the old for the troubles of the world is timeless and possibly a necessary part of growing up. Still doing it at 40? weird. All my opinion of course.

I'm not 100% sure I understand the reference to trans ideology in comparison to euthanasia. That said, I'm taking a break from coursework and my head is fried.

The OK Boomer certainly is a little tit for tat, but one I've refrained from - although DS has jokingly taken to calling me a Boomer whenever I ask him to leave his phone alone for five minutes. (Definitely a millenial here.) But it's definitely taken a step further than the "Millenials are ruining x, y and z" and the discourse revolves around either silencing or provoking a little anger.

But when it comes to euthanasia, as much as I do believe that human suffering should not be prolonged as someone nears their death, there are far too many openings for legalisation of euthanasia to be abused.

I worked in care up until shortly after my brother's death, and rather than clarifying my own thoughts on the subject, it made them even muddier. My brother would have embraced the legalisation of euthanasia, and we'd have lost him a lot sooner than we did, but when you see your own brother emaciated and allowed nothing more than a sponge soaked in water... Or when you see elderly people on end of life care, still suffering immensely, but their bodies unwilling to let them go quite yet...

But then I've seen elderly people miraculously bounce back from end-of-life care, being told they had less than two weeks. One of them managed another two years. And then we saw endless cases of coercive control from family members towards residents, or neglected residents who didn't see family for months - sometimes years - on end. Even in the early stages of my nan's dementia, my mother said she'd throw herself off the cliffs if she ever started showing signs of dementia. I was grateful then that she wasn't involved in Nan's care. Not that I'm saying my mother would have pushed for euthanasia, but there's certainly people with her mindset that would have, without consideration for the wishes of the patient.

It'd be exercised as a cost/energy cutting exercise, and that's a very real risk.

We can give euthenasia to an old dog who is suffering with no quality of life and no hope of getting better. So why can't we do the same for people we care about?

*euthanasia

Traceyracer, the issue, however, is how do we prevent euthanasia from being abused by people who don't have the best interests for those patients at heart?

There's been a subtle shift in social attitudes from "bearing suffering with fortitude is a virtue" to "sparing others from having to watch your suffering is a virtue."

This shift has been significant IMO and seems to bring worrying elements into a number of areas.

There has been a film posted a few times here about a detransitioner from (I think?) Sweden, and in one part of the film one of the doctors talks about how these young women are suffering on account of having breasts, so what can they do but cut them off for them? And it seems to be a problem also with many of the young people now who are very very adverse to any sort of discomfort, emotional, intellectual, as if they think it is abnormal.

There is something very disturbing about it. I suppose because the ultimate, and really only, cure for suffering is non-existence. Yet it always seems to be through suffering that great insights and growth occur.

The crap housing market exists because of the financialisation of the economy. That was not put into place by any generation. That was put into place by the 1%, who profited off its rise, it’s collapse, and it’s rise again.

Generations do not have agency or even common interests within themselves.

The ruling class, however, do.

If you’re targeting your anger and your activism at “generations” which are only arbitrary divisions with very blurry boundaries, you’re allowing your righteous anger to be deflected and you’re ultimately doing the work of the ruling class.

As a disabled person, I have argued against euthanasia on this site - due to the societal pressie of feeling like we "should" choose to die to avoid being a burden. I was told that safeguards would be in place to prevent it and was worrying unnecessarily.

How interesting that now other posters are worried about societal pressure, due to them being Baby Boomers, they suddenly have concerns.

Not so cut and dried when you are in the targeted demographic, is it? I know a pain consultant who sits on the BMA panel about euthanasia. He was against it for the same reason as I was. On a previous thread I have stated this, and was told that if it spared one person dying in pain, they didn't care.

I hope people finally understand what those of us, who have ALWAYS been in one of the qualifying categories, have felt like when concerns have been dismissed.

I am not a boomer, but in spite of working hard my entire life, I have no pension, no savings and don’t own my own house. Therefore I have no way of supporting myself when I die. So assisted dying for me would make sense.