80’s Baby Gang, The Whole Story.
Ok this one is from the archives, I wrote it 5 years ago, and NGL it always kinda shits me when social narratives shift and people start spouting ‘new ideas’ to me that I already tried to discuss with them 500 years ago.
But I guess because it wasn’t on a You Tube video or MSM alternative site it’s labelled as ‘woke’ - which is a term now used to describe anything that strays from Capitalist and Christian social norms.
People are so afraid to reason with each other, that they’ve started calling non-conformity divisiveness. It’s a great political tactic to convince the people that any opposing ideas to their own are unfounded ~ one of the most dangerous things I’ve seen.
Anyway, I’ll whinge about that later, for now I want to share my version of events as a baby of the 80’s - and how those politics, are very much the politics of now, wanna talk about divisiveness… look for it’s roots.
Enjoy… (or don’t, I really don’t care 🤷🏽♀️ )
Born and raised in NZ, I grew up in a time when child abuse was still good parenting, when people believed that only homosexual men could get AIDS, when they were testing atomic bombs in the Pacific like it didn't even matter, and when the country was actually divided over whether Rugby was more important than racial oppression.
In my childhood lots of kids were sexually abused but they either didn't realise what it was, didn't understand the impact of it and mostly couldn't tell anyone because kids got blamed for everything, we were to be seen and not heard.
It was easier to abuse us because we were the first generation where absent parents became the normal thing.
We were the first children to experience a childhood without job security at home because before us families were protected by social policy that ensured people were paid enough to support their families so that one parent (usually Mum) could stay home and raise the kids, but the economy changed and that became unsustainable.
Coincidentally (or not?) around the same time the female contraception became readily available for all women, and child care centres were established.
They say this was because women wanted greater freedom and independence, not to have to rely on a man, but i don't believe that's entirely true.
More like a gradual manipulation of the feminist movement, hijacking the narrative of female equality to increase her burden in a culture shift that strengthened patriarchy, kept capitalism functional and maintained a balance of the economic inequity required by neoliberalism.
This was reflected in policy changes that clearly highlighted the expectation of women to hold down a job and still raise children, relieving men of the sole responsibility to provide, without any expectation, guidance or reimagining on a social policy level for them to expand their capacity for contribution in other areas, for instance paid paternity leave is only a very recent addition to social policy.
Western culture is driven by the state and the free press, protested in art, and directed by economics, structural changes to these democratic pillars are essential to cultural change.
The impacts of this failure to counteract the changes to our workforce and family structures, are what is referred to now as an ‘incomplete gender revolution’ - the social identity of men did not evolve alongside women, a direct consequence of this was that us 80’s babies grew up in a time that saw more single parent families than ever before.
And it was in my generation that the tradition of free university education for the greater betterment of society was turned into a business, securing even greater inequities yaaayyyy!
I was an 80's baby
We were apparently the last kids who played on the street until the lights came on, (and yea it was fun because so many of us didn't have much fun at home)
And yea we walked to and from school, (because a lot of our parents were at work before we even got out of bed)
And yea we went barefoot (because we had to save our shoes for special occasions)
And yea we recorded music onto cassette tapes so that we could listen to our favourite songs on repeat (because they helped a lot of us to escape, or they said things we couldn't say or they inspired us to write our own music, raps scribbled in the back pages of our school books)
I was an 80's baby, and most of us are more likely to die by suicide or drugs than any other generation before us, and so far - any that have come after
I'm sure for many of you it was great though
I just don't like to leave stories half told, or leave people out or fail to acknowledge the pile of shit among the roses, because there's more to learn from the fertiliser than the flower ✌🏽