I'm too old to be screwing around with renaming things for stupid reasons. I'm not changing my maps and I'm not changing what I call these two bodies of water, which, I don't think the US gets to rename unilaterally. I am teaching my grandchildren that this is what they are named, and that is the end of it.

Edit: I appreciate your response. Thank you for the different perspectives. You’ve given us much to discuss.

I have a question, but first some background and a preface. We’re specifically looking for the opinions of people over the age of 45 as we’re from the 70s and because the question is about how American culture has changed over time.

I’m a WOC and an immigrant, and I’ve lived in the U.S. for eight years. My husband is white, a U.S. citizen, and about as corn-fed Midwestern American as they come.

My experience of the U.S. has left me with the impression that racism is deeply embedded in the culture.

My husband agrees with me wholeheartedly about the racism I see today. Where we disagree is on whether it was always this visible or prevalent.

He remembers a time, particularly before 9/11, when he felt racism was genuinely diminishing in the U.S. His view is that the post-9/11 era, combined with the rise and influence of people and outlets like Fox News, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and others, helped fuel and normalize racism again.

I disagree. My feeling is that the racism was always there, but perhaps social norms made it less acceptable to express openly. Obviously, I wasn’t living here during the period he’s talking about, so I can’t compare my own experience with his.

So we decided to ask people who actually remember that period as adults:
If you’re 45 or older, do you remember racism genuinely declining in the U.S. before 9/11? Or do you think it was always there at roughly the same level, but became more openly expressed later?

We’re genuinely interested in hearing how people who lived through both periods remember the cultural shift — or whether you think there was a shift at all.

And please, don’t bring racist BS into the comments. That isn’t the discussion we’re interested in having.

On Aug. 28, 2014, the tan suit that then-President Barack Obama wore to a White House press conference became an unexpected story as right-wing critics attacked Obama[....]

Here’s the news: Obama gave the suit away cleaning out his closet.

So, where is the suit?

Follow Lynn Sweet, former Sun-Times Washington Bureau Chief, in her quest to find the original tan suit.

Truthfully?

After breaking for Trump all three times and basically collectively giving the finger to the Democrats ever since you've all been able to vote. A generation weaned on Reagan and his voodoo trickle-down economics and capitalism gone amok (which is how we've ended up with fat cats like Bezos and Musk).

You've always collectively leaned MAGA at worst, libertarian at best, which is pretty sad for the first generation to fully undergo racial integration in schools.

You've all always been obsessed with hating the idea of PC. Being able to be un-PC has always been a virtue and so it follows that you'd fall for a bankrupt conman who makes being loud, vulgar, and un-PC his entire persona.

And now you all want to have a president of your own? For what? What would a Gen X president even represent? You've all made your disdain for younger generations very loudly clear and so it's certainly not to help them. You all don't seem to want change. You seem to want just enough status quo to make it through retirement and fuck everybody else after you.

How about a third term??

To those of you that think the wealthy elderly are praying upon younger generations, what do you think should be done?

I propose the following:

Change how Social Security is collected and distributed. First part should be no Social Security tax until you make $40k, $80k, whatever is needed with no cap. Second part is means testing it like many credits, so the more you make, the less you receive.

The market value for keeping track of passwords, email, using Quicken, etc is so much higher than people realize. I doubt there's a Congressperson over 65 that knows how to do this and keep it straight.

As if our health care “system” wasn’t already complicated enough, here’s example No. 9,572.

I spent the better part of one year trying to ask a prescription drug provider one simple question about my prescription. Even as someone who works in health policy and with advocates on my behalf, I kept getting the run-around.

Unfortunately, as I found out firsthand, big conglomerates — in this case, CVS Health — make profits by keeping the system complicated, bureaucratic, and opaque. But (eventually) I found out there’s a simple solution: returning to good, old-fashioned cash transactions.

Van Jones refers to these full-fledged communists as turds in the dem’s punch bowl

By Andy Caldwell, July 29, 2026 6:30 am

Before you laugh off the demands and priorities of the Democratic Socialists of America, do realize that over 30 of their members have won their primaries against democrats.

CNN political commentator and establishment democrat Van Jones is worried, and rightly so. He basically refers to these full-fledged communists as turds in the dem’s punch bowl. That was his language, not mine.

Born in 1961, Barrack Obama is Generation Jones and so far the closest Gen X has had a President our age. The two after him were much older, and in 2028 they are already looking at Millennials.

I personally can't think of anyone that could run in 2028 and have a real chance in our age cohort.

Is the trend going to continue and Gen X will be ignored/skipped over for the highest political office in the US?

I would have gotten this in the late 90s while I was in college. Interesting snapshot of history.

To understand the scope of corruption, one must live it. I was born in a tiny college town near the middle of Illinois, yet close to the Mississippi River. My mother grew up in the very town I live in today. My grandparents were prominent members of society. My uncle died in Vietnam.

For the first 10 years of my life, we avoided DCFS by moving repeatedly throughout a tri-county area before moving to mid-Iowa. The stark difference between the two states was evident in the instant reaction by officials in both schools and government. Where Illinois had failed several children for more than 10 years, Iowa accomplished it in two. Four years in the Iowa juvenile system educated me on a life only available outside of corruption.

I then raised my children in Illinois and maintained the same dependent and defiant behavior throughout the majority of my life. Without realizing it, I raised my children in an abusive home, in a police state, just as I was raised. The police and DCFS were always a threat, and DUI's a common way of life.

Yes, many people complained, but only to each other.

The circles were small and tight then, and if your circle connected to the judicial circle like the Olympic rings, you were set. Things happened for you; loans were approved, offenses overlooked, and permits granted. If you ever lost that status, loans were revoked, and offenses elevated. If a dad didn't like you dating his daughter, you got a DUI on the way out of town. The place where “Don't make waves or throw stones in glass houses” came from. Inevitably, state departments don't trust each other here.

Something happened between then and now;

• We gained full access to the mass communication source.
• We can freely access the same information the elite used to gain their status and keep their wealth.
• We can communicate beyond borders with anyone, in any language, from anywhere.
• We supply the newest commodity, data.
• We now have power and resources the elite have used to start wars.
• We have a personal assistant named AI.

The 99% can form alliances, share stories, make algorithms, analyze data, contact those in power, make changes, and demand accountability with greater ease than the 1% have ever had.

The same way DNA has brought closure and justice decades after the crime, AI is working with We The People to end corruption and start accountability.

Snippet:

Americans have been hearing about the looming demise of Social Security for decades. The number of old people receiving benefits has been increasing much more quickly than the number of working-age adults whose taxes pay for those checks. Yet politicians have let the problem fester for so long that the public could be forgiven for thinking that the crisis would never actually arrive.

But it’s arriving. For the past 16 years, Social Security has paid out more than it has taken in. This has required dipping into its trust fund, built up over the decades when the Baby Boomers were in their peak earning years. That fund is on track to run out by 2032. When it does, benefits will have to be cut by an expected 22 percent across the board to line up with the tax revenue that funds them.

Pretty soon, politicians won’t be able to kick this can down the road anymore. Senators elected this November will be in office in 2032. So will the next president. They will have no choice but to come up with a way to save the federal government’s largest and most popular program, lest they be blamed for its partial collapse. The available solutions are politically tricky but not particularly mysterious.

They involve raising taxes, increasing the national debt, and cutting benefits, or some mix of the three. Even if our leaders settle on a way to keep Social Security solvent, however, they are unlikely to address the deeper problem underlying the budgetary one: A program designed to reduce poverty has morphed into a transfer of wealth to the richest members of our society.

This is not the timeline I want to be in.

The vast majority of White Boomers voted for Bush II. I know and have a hint of feeling that more Xers voted for John Kerry, but I remember reading on dial up Internet pages about Nader's platform. It included new biz regulations about consumerist protections involving plastics. A large percentage of Xers wanted to bring the troops home in that year as well.

Gen X usually has a pretty good nose for BS, but with support from our cohort for the current administration hovering around 50%, I am curious to know what people make of his prime time speech this week about forgein actors influencing or tampering with our previous elections, and the doubt it casts on the upcoming election.

The speech was unsurprisingly light on details while laying blame at the feet of China, whose leader our President has praised on many occasions. The facts laid out don't match the actions.

Which makes the whole thing feel mighty sus to me. It feels like they are setting up an argument to either meddle with voting locations or equipment, or cast doubt on the results of things go a certain way. If anyone remembers back before the 2020 election, the President didn't commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he lost and we know what happened.

There is a pattern here.

Thoughts?

The current budget for the US military stands at just shy of 1 trillion dollars and is the third largest expense for the US government. Only about a quarter of that is used for soldier pay, and the rest is maintenance of existing equipment and payments to defense contractors to develop and build stuff.

Between the bases and locations of the contactor sites, nearly every state gets a piece of that action. The estimate is that aerospace and other defense industry employees are approximately 2.2 million people.

That is aside from the roughly 1.3 million active duty service members, who will get lifetime healthcare, retirement, GI bills for younger service members that did their time, and other benefits (albeit low pay.)

With all of this in mind, would you consider the US military a giant socialist work program? Yes, military spending is something most US citizens feel is a legit use of tax payer money, and we generally are highly allergic to anything that feels like the vague boogie man of "socialism." But tons of money is filtered through the US military to private companies, some on the stock exchange, in ways that drive the economies of several regions.

Why is this a question for Gen X? Many of us might have kids in the military or served in the military ourselves. Being in our peak earning years, some of us might work for these defense contractors. Also, most of us saw the ramping up of our military spending in the 1980s under Reagan to "fight Communism" and then the next threat, and the next threat, and the next.

For the last 20 years every brown out was because people were using their washing machine and AC during the day. So we all got solar or started using heavy appliances off hours.

We were in various droughts so we cut back on watering our lawns, shortened our showers, and cought rain water in buckets.

But fuck all that, we need data centers. Our power grid across the nation is notoriously in bad repair, and repairing or upgrading it is frequently the excuse for raising people's electricity bills. But these data centers, that will require more power than the grids where they are being near built can provide, aren't building any new infrastructure. They are talking about, but not really done anything.

People in cities can light their water on fire because of fracking, but we need to make sure these AI data centers can use 1 million gallons of water a day for cooling. It took FIVE YEARS to get Flint Michigan clean water.

What are we doing? How is it that we have been guilted into shouldering all the climate and resource problems of the world, but for AI data centers we are just supposed to roll over and let it happen?

Why are federal, state, and city governments so enamored with this sector?

Why are we so excited to hand over resources we already don't have to the thing that is guaranteed to take most of our jobs? Why?

The option to disclose health information must change. We cannot have a situation where we literally do not know if a representative is incapacitated or even dead.