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You're conflating a lack of life experience with a lack of bigotry. There are all kinds of Gen-Xers, Baby Boomers and "GIs" who either recognized and addressed discrimination and the backwards ideas behind it, or actually experienced it themselves because ostriches like you were busy using TV and movie clips to mask your dreadful reasoning.
I think one of the answers to why all organisms have a finite life span is not that it's biologically impossible to live forever, it's just evolutionarily unhealthy for the species. As you age you become resistant to change, more confident in your own ways and suspicious of the ways of the new. I see this in myself as I've gotten older. Every movement, every innovation, every person I meet even, just seems to be another iteration of the past, completely ignorant to the mistakes they carry within themselves. But you know what? The world presents us with a finite set of resources. It's our job, as we age, to step aside and let the new come in and take over what we've started. We need to die so that others have an opportunity to do something different with the roles that we thought we were the best in the world at assuming. My generation is faster at processing information from multiple sources (and much faster at typing) than the generation before me. And the generation below me is even faster than I am. We lament the lack of attentiveness in children--we call it ADHD--but it's not inattentiveness, it's just a shorter, more adaptable attention span, evolved to adapt the world around us. So yes, there will be some backtracking among the youth as we observe them. They will be blind, ignorant, and foolhardy as many of us were. But there will also be some gems among them. The past stands tall on the backs of giants well-remembered, but the future will have some who are ready to meet the challenge.
Back in my day we had to march uphill 15 miles in the snow without shoes after working 29 hours in coal mines just so we could get an education before we got sent off to a war half-way around the world. Tell you what.
Also, one thing the video was wrong about: the Nam generation wasn't in better shape than their parents. They actually grew up significantly fatter and more unhealthy. I call the Nam generation the Blame generation because I always see them in the hospital looking for someone or something else to blame for all their health problems. The VA, for example, became a terrible place to work at once all the gracious WWII vets passed away and the majority of business became surly Vietnam vets. The younger vets, for example, from the Gulf War and OEF/OIF are MUCH nicer. Maybe Dragnet was right, and there really was something wrong with just one generation...
Don't complain when I punch you in the chest, because a generation ago I would've slapped you in the face.
Back when Deckard was a young man, people had to walk across a split sea just to escape prosecution only to get lost in the dessert.
You're hit and miss on this observation. The previous generation is less sensitive about death and their mortality. Slaughtering an animal for food was another daily task for most people. Knowing an infection could very well be a death sentence. They learned to live life with out fear. Marching into the front lines of WWII was just another risk. Vietnam was very different. That generation was much more sensitive and being drafted to fight a pointless proxy war against a very brutal enemy. This is the generation that brought forth drugs to cope with problems.
