My Dad grew up in a very homogeneous society in a small Canadian city - where things were very vanilla and for the most part: predictable. Dad was born 1942 - during the war. His Dad was very racist and very, very socially conservative. In his daily life as a child, Dad encountered white protestants (like himself) or white catholics. Everybody else was "strange" or foreign. Multi-culturalism under Trudeau was not yet a "thing."
All the "bad" stuff in that society like rampant alcoholism, wife-beating, child abuse or family incest...were very common situations that were simply hidden away. People didn't talk about it, but nearly every family had one or two of those skeletons in the closet. In that upside down world, the "bad" people seemed to be the ones who did talk about the hidden stuff, the ones who brought "shame" upon the family.
I think in the sixties and seventies, my Dad became a bit confused by the civil rights and women's movements. A smart man, he understood these things on an intellectual level. But his own upbringing had created a strange mental and psychological filter. For example, abortion. He firmly believes in a woman's right to choose, yet strangely longs for the days when girls still wore poodle skirts: the 'feminine' fashion sense of the 40's and 50's. In his mind, it's also perfectly fine for a woman to work outside the home. But women oddly shouldn't talk "too much" about politics. They should never swear. He was a semi-modern man - to a point.
Pierre Elliot Trudeau tripped some kind of wire in my Dad's brain. It was from that point onward that Dad gradually became more and more entrenched in his conservatism. At first, it was some kind of instinctual backlash against multi-culturalism. By this point, it was becoming awkward for me. I had friends of all different ethnicities. It could be quite painful to see how two-faced he really was at times. Nice to my Pakistani friend -until her parents arrived to collect her. Then he'd start with the stereo-typing. It angered me then, as a child. But I'd been raised in a fairly orthodox manner - you didn't back talk or disrespect your parents, unless you wanted the belt.
Things started to change once I became a teenager. By that point, I would engage him. I would debate. I would defend my friend from Jamaica. And you've never heard so much vitriol pour out of a man's mouth! I think the bottom line was my Dad felt as though I was rejecting all the values he'd been trying to instill in me. I wasn't rejecting everything. I believed in honesty, family, etc. I was beginning to reject the racism, the anti-liberalism, the "cute" little remarks he'd make about gay people. Dinner time was no longer peaceful and quiet in our home - it'd become more like a damn battle field as I began to assert myself.
These grumpy old men that you are talking about are stuck in a very romanticized fantasy of their own past - their generation. They remember the good things from that era, but fail to remember the bad. The media has played a tremendous role in this as well. The news never used to be like it is now. There was no Fox. There wasn't "infotainment." There was no internet where you could surround yourself with like-minded people - the modern day echo-chambers. I can see the impact Alex Jones, Fox News, etc., has had on my father. It's all caused him to become much more extreme in his senior years. He's become a fist-thumping, ranting and raving conservative caricature.
I suspect my own father visits Storm Front. I'm not certain, but it's an uncanny feeling I have. And if true, then even his own (racist) father would be rolling in his grave. My grandfather fought in the war - he was a sailor in the Canadian navy. My grandfather, imperfect as he was, at least had the common decency to despise the nazi mindset. My own father? I'm no longer sure about that.
And it's frightening.
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I do the same!!!!
