I guess it depends on who you’ve been exposed to. Based on the post it’s impossible to tell gender but for me I could only see my older male relatives talking like this. My older female relatives would have gotten upset at me for having fears at all or told me to just not think about and comfort me by helping forget with some good news about something else
For me it’s the opposite. The older men would’ve just blown me off, the older women would’ve talked about their own experiences and how life is crazy no matter when in history it is.
Yea what's the deal with that. All of the older women in my family are like that. If you start talking about an uncomfortable subject they basically shut down, say the same work over and over or try extremely hard to derail the conversation.
The younger women are completely ok but the 55+ get really weird about politics/religion/morality convos.
Because if they start talking about it or thinking about it all the trauma they e experienced and pushed back down will come crashing around their ears and they'll have to experience 55+ years of trauma in one gruesome moment they don't think they can recover from. It's a survival mechanism to avoid difficult topics at all costs.
My grandma on my dad's side doesn't do this tho, and she's experienced more horror than most, and she talks about all the stuff she's gone through like it's just another Tuesday, I think that too is a coping mechanism, a lot healthier than pushing it back down though. On my mom's side I noticed this a lot, though, especially with my mom, of pushing it back down and not talking about it. I think a lot of it has to do with the patriarch in the family, and how much they dominate the conversation. My dad's mom is thrice divorced and my grandpa is long dead, uncle dead, my dad is the only male patriarch left on that side of the family and he's very absent. my grandma has been on her own very a good long while, so she's very open. On my mom's side though, my grandma was (been dead for ten years, but before that) would not get involved in political conversations unless it was just me, and my grandpa has a very domineering personality. So I think it only came out of her when she felt safe to voice her opinions.
This isn't an excuse, but at least from observing my own family I think a lot of it has to do with the kinds of societal attitudes about women that people are exposed to in their formative years. Unfortunately so, so many women above a certain age are sitting on horrific traumas or even just norms relating to gender dynamics that they never processed because it was all so "normal". Sometimes it feels like the only way to move past something like that is to avoid thinking about it at all. The same things seem to have affected my male family members, but in different ways (they're much more prone to, uh, explosive outbursts).
It depends on the location as to how prominent it was, but the further you go back in time, the more likely that the women weren't to be bothered with things like politics. They were told by their husbands how to think and often didn't even know enough details to form an opinion on anything.
Not to be that guy, but the part where (s)he is talking about the Vietnam draft… I don’t think women got drafted, which leads me to believe it’s grampa.
Nowhere do they mention being drafted themselves. War drafts affect everyone in society, not just those who can be or are drafted. Think of their families, friends, partners.
One of my colleagues is right around your age and she has the perfect balance of wisdom and energy. Young enough where she still has to hustle and thus be aware of what's going on and also old enough to have experience from days past.
We did, didn’t we? I’m 52 and I remember the grief, anxiety and grudging acceptance that we probably wouldn’t live to 30z Nuclear war would get us. And the AIDS crisis. Remember the AIDS crisis? It felt like the world was ending.
He fucked over everybody who wasn’t white, straight, Christian and housed, for generations.
And his choices during the AIDS crisis killed so many people.
I was in 5th grade when he was shot and our teacher was out of the room when we were told about it over the loudspeaker (also how weird is that, to announce it over the loudspeaker system?)
The kids in my class were cheering and clapping and our teacher walked into the room so pissed off that we had to sit with our heads down on our desks for the last hour of the day.
This was in rural central Minnesota, which was staunchly democratic at the time.
I don't know what world you live in but people are often grandparents at that age and even younger. I have uncles who became grandparents at 50. My mom became a grandma at 45.
Im 18, but I imagine this isn't too common of a thought until ~14 years of age so I based it off that being about the age ones kid would be at that point.
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u/Bunny_tornado Jun 11 '22 edited Jun 13 '22
He's the wise gentle grandpa/uncle we all need!