I’m not working anymore- I’m helping my daughter with a state online school which requires a parent to be a full time ‘learning coach’- but in my last job, I spent as much time as I could on Reddit. Then Lemmy. Now she doesn’t want me to sit with her during her video lessons, so I have a similar amount of time to kill and post on Lemmy.
One day I’ll have more to do and you people will be rid of me.
Underground cartoonist Dan O’Neill had an amazing comic strip in the late 1960s and early 1970s called Odd Bodkins. It started out as a gag strip, but became one of the most epic comic strip arcs of all time, starting with a magic creature in a tree, going to Mars, ending up in Hell, and other crazy adventures. At one point, they find out that cars and smog are a Martian conspiracy to colonize Earth because Martians breathe gasoline.
Anyway, this comic strip made me think of that.
I couldn’t find an image of the part where they talk about smog being a Martian conspiracy, but this comes from just afterward-
The book that’s collected in is called A Collective Unconscience of Odd Bodkins. It’s long out of print, but I highly recommend a copy. Mine is falling apart.
My mother is pre-Boomer (born soon after the U.S. entered the war) and has been incredibly progressive her entire life. She has never voted for a Republican. She marched for civil rights. She wanted me to know that women and men are equal and that color and religion and ethnicity should not make you dislike someone. She taught me about sex (appropriately) when I asked about it at 3 or 4 years old rather than shielding me from it. My brother and I both have (had in my case, but that’s another story) gay best friends who were also best man at both of our weddings. She always welcomed them even though my brother and his friend became friends in the mid-1980s. I remember asking my mother what she would do if I was gay and she said she would love me no matter what I was. I don’t specifically know her politics, but my dad, born even earlier (1931) was mostly the same way. He definitely had his prejudices- although he would deny it- and he was a lot more sexist than he thought he was, but he was also an outspoken socialist until the dementia got too bad for him to be outspoken about it. One of the last things I was able to tell him before he was too far gone to understand was that Bernie was running for president.
I have certainly had a lot of issues with Boomers and people older than them, but it is far from universal, but I am really proud of my parents for always being progressive.