Okay, so now the 2016 presidential election is ancient history. Speaking for myself, I have moved on. I have moved from a somewhat smug winner’s stance to a behind-the-8-ball opposition stance. It really is a grieving process, albeit less severe than a death of a loved one. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Every time the pendulum swings, one side taunts the other side, but the pendulum swings both ways, so those taunts are shortsighted. I will try to remember that in the 2018 mid-terms. By the way things are going right now, we Dems will slaughter the Repubs, except for the severely gerrymandered districts. But a lot can happen in a year and a half. What happened in the election was the triumph of the white man.

Racism and sexism are twin evils in our society. Racism has gotten most of the attention lately, due to our black former president, and also due to the publicity surrounding the officer-involved shootings of young black males over the last couple of years. My opinion is that sexism is more prevalent than racism, and less recognized in society. Back in the late sixties and early seventies, there was a wave of feminism that swept the college campuses and the liberal establishment. The Equal Rights Amendment was never passed, but a lot was accomplished in terms of recognizing the value of women and their contributions to society. And a lot of people recognized the overt and subtle ways in which women were objectified and discriminated against. And now, there are more women than men enrolled in our colleges. To paraphrase an old cigarette commercial, we’ve come a long way, baby.

But in a way, we are victims of our own successes. A lot of female society seems to think that sexism is no longer an issue, especially the younger set. They think it’s an old fashioned issue of their mothers’ generation.

A majority of women voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. There were many reasons for that, not the least of which was the voters’ gullible belief in the vicious smears that have been made against the Clintons from the right-wing fever swamps, and more recently, by the left. However, that is compared to the enormous victory of the first woman president. And far from being an empty suit, Clinton was and is almost supernaturally qualified for the job of president. To me, it’s a crying shame that we are living through this disaster that is the Trump “administration”. What a bunch of kooks, ideologues, crooks, and incompetents. It is breathtaking, and it would have made one heck of a movie. But it’s real, and I hope that America as I know it is still intact when this horror departs, which it will sooner or later. The truth is that many women, just like the rural poor, elderly Trump voters, voted against their own interests. To put it in stark contraposition, they voted in a misogynist who was credibly accused of spousal assault and rape. He was willing to pass a “health care” bill that would have eliminated maternity as a covered benefit. His opponent has been an advocate for women and children’s causes for her entire adult life.

I think that a lot of the reason that women voted for Trump was that he projected such an image of masculine authority. Can you imagine for a nanosecond, Hillary acting the way Donald did, with such arrogance and mendacity, never ever apologizing for anything, offending our friends, further inflaming our enemies, and possibly being in league with one of those enemies? The only enemy that he doesn’t insult? Hell, the only country he doesn’t insult. She would have been run out of town on a rail.

Sexism is hard for many people to face. I think it’s harder to face than racism, because our society, in a large part, is self-segregated. We work and live and play with our own kind. Racism and racial prejudice doesn’t really confront us every day, and as a result, we can dismiss it, put it on a back burner, and say “Yeah, that’s true, there are a lot of racists around, but not me, thank god. I’ll think about it some other time.” But with sexism, people face the opposite sex all the time. Wives, husbands, children. They are our families, and it’s hard to objectively look at our feelings toward them and how we might be treating them unfairly. So it’s submerged in our consciousness. We watch our wives work eight hour days like we do, and we leave the household chores to them. We don’t want to look at that. We leave the children’s needs to them. We don’t want to look at that. Women have internalized this supposed servile identity without realizing it, and they demean themselves and exalt men without realizing it.

Society will never be perfect, because human nature isn’t perfect. We all have our faults, and it takes a long time for society to change its attitudes. But a requirement for change is awareness. If we aren’t aware of the problem of sexism, how are we going to make it better?

“My Generation” by the Who is a classic, about the Mod generation in the United Kingdom, in the 1960s. And, like most classics from the great arena bands from the late sixties and seventies, it has been overplayed to the point that I no longer feel moved by it. At all. But seriously, I AM talking about my g-g-generation. Right now, anyway.

I am right exactly in the middle of what is known as the “baby boom” generation, or “boomers”, the shortened, more popular label. My generation was the founder of what has passed for “rock” music for the past 50 years. The slightly older generation provided the foundation for our music, with Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard. Their music was more rootsy “rock and roll”, which in turn originated with black rhythm and blues. But we built a mansion on that foundation, both musically and culturally. We were the first modern generation that based its identity on youth. Youth is what we were all about. That line from My Generation, “hope I die before I get old”, was part of our psyche. Life, to me and my confederates, was about being young. Anything else was irrelevant and not really a valid subject. Like, “what will happen when you grow up if you behave like this now”, which was a valid point, went right over our heads. Didn’t even muss our hair. We attended rock concerts in Woodstock, NY, and Altamont, CA. I didn’t attend either one of those. I was a bit on the young side then, too young to drive. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t want to go, or that I didn’t envy those who went. Looking at it now, it seems insane. Especially Altamont. Hundreds of thousands of people elbow-to-elbow, most either drinking, high on various controlled substances, or both. It seems to me now to be a crazily dangerous thing to do, attending something like that. Anything could happen, and there were no police officers to protect you. You were at the mercy of the crowd, and in the case of Altamont, the Hells Angels, who had been hired as security in exchange for all the beer they could drink.

Now before I go any further, I will admit that us boomers were not monolithic. Some of us were quite responsible. Many of us answered the call of duty and went to Vietnam as volunteers or willing draftees. Many of the college students were quite serious about their education. But what I am talking about is my crowd, the crowd I identified with, and the cohort that epitomized the baby boom generation. Fairly or not.

Fast forward to the years starting with Barack Obama’s presidency. President Obama was elected in 2008, and won reelection in 2012. He drew support from many categories of the voting population. A lot of young people, a lot of women of all ages, and a lot of minorities. One cohort that didn’t support Obama in overwhelming numbers was my g-g-generation. Especially the males. We overwhelmingly skewed Republican. There is a fair amount of evidence that we screwed the millennials economically as well as being at odds with them politically.

It seems as though, in the process of raising families and paying taxes, many of my old friends became rock-ribbed conservatives. I got a severe reality check when I created my Facebook account a few years ago. When I retired in 2015, I spent a lot of time on Facebook for a while. I found out that a large percentage of my old friends and associates, mainly of the white male variety, had metamorphosized into Richard M. Nixon. I was aghast. It wasn’t just the kids who had been studious and outwardly conservative. It was some of the guys who I had admired as being cutting-edge cool. The kind of guys who could stand up to cops and not break a sweat. They would smoke controlled substances right out in the open in high school, both outdoors before school, and in the rest rooms. It was crazy. I’m not saying that I advocate for that kind of behavior. It was incredibly self-destructive. It’s more that I have a sense of cognitive dissonance when I encounter them now. How could this be the same person?

Here is a Boston Globe op-ed piece about some of the damage that my g-g-generation has done. They are better at expressing it than I am, after all, they are professionals. I’m just a baby boomer with a vanity blog that I am working on as my mother is asking for my help on her taxes. I guess I’ve put her off long enough. After all she has had to put up with me, it’s the least I can do ;-).