…the backlash has begun:
at the level of public policy and moral leadership, as a generation we have largely failed. The Boomer Progressive Establishment in particular has been a huge disappointment to itself and to the country. The political class slumbered as the entitlement and pension crisis grew to ominous dimensions. Boomer financial leadership was selfish and shortsighted, by and large. Boomer CEOs accelerated the trend toward unlimited greed among corporate elites, and Boomer members of corporate boards sit by and let it happen. Boomer academics created a profoundly dysfunctional system that systemically shovels resources upward from students and adjuncts to overpaid administrators and professors who by and large have not, to say the least, done an outstanding job of transmitting the cultural heritage of the past to future generations. Boomer Hollywood execs created an amoral morass of sludge — and maybe I’m missing something, but nobody spends a lot of time talking about the towering cultural accomplishments of the world historical art geniuses of the Boomer years. Boomer greens enthusiastically bet their movement on the truly idiotic drive for a global carbon treaty; they are now grieving over their failure to make any measurable progress after decades spent and hundreds of millions of dollars thrown away. On the Boomer watch the American family and the American middle class entered major crises; by the time the Boomers have finished with it the health system will be an unaffordable and dysfunctional tangle — perhaps the most complicated, expensive and poorly designed such system in the history of the world.
All of this was done by a generation that never lost its confidence that it was smarter, better educated and more idealistic than its Depression-surviving, World War-winning, segregation-ending, prosperity-building parents. We didn’t need their stinking faith, their stinking morals, or their pathetically conformist codes of moral behavior. We were better than that; after all, we grokked Jefferson Airplane, achieved nirvana on LSD and had a spiritual wealth and sensitivity that our boorish bourgeois forbears could not grasp. They might be doers, builders and achievers — but we Boomers grooved, man, we had sex in the park, we grew our hair long, and we listened to sexy musical lyrics about drugs that those pathetic old losers could not even understand.
I’m largely ashamed of my own generation.
What strikes me the most is how many people are out trying to create enemies instead of allies…
And incidentally, who created Silicon Valley and the computer age and the greatest acceleration of technology in human history? Whose music will still be played and studied along with Bach in centuries hence? Who pushed biotechnology ahead, sequence the genome, invented nanotechnology, created New Space? I can go on, and on, and on, and on. One might as well focus on the fact that the Greatest Generation also had a big flirt with the original Communist Party in their college days… but I won’t. Such generalizations are simply intellectually laziness. Much easier to shove it all into a few adjectives than face the full complexity of tens of millions of individuals in their positives and negatives.
What you see is what you point your telescope at.
Did you read the whole thing?
As I posted over there:
Social Security was passed in the 1930s before any Boomers were born. The two other giant entitlement programs, Medicare and Medicaid, were passed in the mid 1960s when the oldest Boomers were in their early 20s. Not a single Boomer was in Congress at that time. Admittedly, way too many Boomer politicians who came along later made matters worse but the blame for those programs lies with previous generations.
Like millions of Boomers, I spent years in the military. I paid my taxes, have zero debt, and have saved for my retirement so I won’t be a burden on my children and grandchildren. Since I have no pension, those savings will have to last the rest of my life. My kids can have what’s left over when I die.
The Boomer generation has about 70 million members. In any group that size, you’re going to find good people and bad people. To characterize an entire generation by the excesses of some is absurd. It’d be like condemning all of today’s young people based on the Occupy movement while ignoring the incredible sacriface of a couple million of them who voluntarily joined the military in time of war, knowing they’ll be sent in harm’s way.
I have to agree with the commentators — my gen is worse. 🙁
Plus, the babyboomer blame game has been going on for decades. The “backlash” is the same old whining. I also see no differentiation between the early and late boomers. The early ones had the advantage of being able to exploit the trends (such as rising real estate prices) that came with the surge in population (though a bunch of them ended up having to fight in the Vietnam War) while the latter always ended up on the tail end.