Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast has words for the young folks who blame America’s problems on Boomers.
Last month I had an extended and rather heated exchange with one of our commenters who made a host of sweeping generalizations about baby boomers, few if any of which were true. I’ve had conversations with some of my Gen-X friends on this as well, with many of them similarly blaming the baby boomers for their own plight. I’ve even seen Gen-Xers trying to claim Keith Olbermann as one of their own, even though he was born in 1959 and therefore is indisputably a baby boomer. I hate to tell them this, but no less a Gen-X icon than old Lloyd Dobler himself, John Cusack, only escaped the dread Baby Boomer label by a mere six months.
I’m seeing a lot of this lately; blaming the baby boomers for everything that’s gone wrong in this country, hand-in-hand with the idea that Gen-X, Gen-Y, and the Millenials are somehow either a) hapless victims of the evil boomers (largely the province of Gen-Xers who are now reaching an age when the refusal to “sell out” is starting to have the nasty consequences of no savings and no health insurance); b) greedy, evil people who have sucked up all the resources and left nothing for anyone else; or c) an entire generation of hippies who had all the sex and all the drugs and all the fun and then became Republicans and tried to deny anyone else the fun they had.
I’ve seen a lot of this, too, and while I don’t think all Gen-Xers, etc., are guilty (that would be generalizing), enough of ’em are guilty, and it annoys the bleep out of me.
Jill is right when she says,
There’s this notion Chris and others put forward that the 80-hour workweek is somehow the invention of sellout baby boomers out of pure greed for bigger houses and ever-more electronic gewgaws and STUFF. But the fact of the matter is that at least for people born my year and later, especially those of us on a white-collar track, the defined benefit pensions and job security that our parents enjoyed was already largely gone by the time we emerged from college into a recession caused by the second oil shock in a decade.
This was my experience, also, and I’m older than Jill. By the time I was out of college the kind of job security my parents had enjoyed was already evaporating. I agree that younger people today are getting a raw deal generally compared to us Boomers, but we Boomers got a rawer deal than our parents did after World War II. And I believe the forces causing this creeping rawness were put into place while most of us Boomers were still babies.
I have in my hands a book titled Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-1960 by Elizabeth Fones-Wolf. Dr. Fones-Wolf documents that during the very years the Boomers were birthed, a cabal of wealthy corporate leaders used their resources to undermine the popularity of New Deal progressivism and unions. They succeeded, and this success ushered in the era in which corporations could demand that workers pretty much turn over their lives to the Company. Before most Boomers were even in high school most of the damage had been done, and by the time we entered the workforce the rules had already been changed, although we didn’t realize it right away.
Our parents were certain that the road to success lay in staying with one employer for years and years and years, accumulating pensions and vacation time, and for the most part that worked for them. But most of us Boomers learned, slowly and painfully, that this life plan was no longer possible. Certainly some among us bought the corporate bullshit and played the games, but most of us have just been trying to survive. And now making a living is even more precarious. This concerns me deeply. I want to reverse this pernicious trend and help younger people achieve a better quality of life.
However, my dears, if you are going to blame me for your problems … go bleep yourselves.
I’ve pointed out many times that the archetypal rightie-bot is a Gen-Xer whose earliest political memories are of the Carter Administration. You see this over and over again. I’m not saying all Gen-Xers are rightie-bots, but I do think a disproportionate number of the loyal soldiers of the Right are Gen-Xers. I expect someday the Millenials will turn around and slam Gen-Xers for causing their problems, so be prepared.
Every generation has its idiots. My generation is as diverse as any. The activists among us did get some things wrong, such as putting too much faith in single-issue and “identity” politics. We also thought Ralph Nader was our hero … oh, wait; that’s a cross-generational mistake. Sorry.
The truth is that we Boomers were brought up in the 1950s to be idealistic and patriotic. I’ve written about this before, here and here. We faced an entirely different culture with entirely different challenges than younger people do today. No doubt some of what we did makes no sense outside that context — you had to be there — but if you’d been brought up in the 1950s, you’d have felt drawn to beads and patchouli oil, too. Trust me.
Recently Andrew Sullivan wrote an article for The Atlantic that extolled Barack Obama as the post-Boomer candidate (in truth, Obama was born in the waning years of the Boom) and blamed the Boomers for America’s culture wars and “a cultural climate that stultifies our politics and corrupts our discourse.” This is, IMO, one of the biggest piles of steaming crap Andy has ever produced, and that’s saying something. The rifts in our culture pre-date the Boom, and what has corrupted our discourse more than anything else is the emergence of the extreme Right via the Goldwater/Reagan wing of the Republican Party. (See pseudo conservatism.)
Must of the griping against Boomers is the result of rightie propaganda about the 1960s and the counterculture and Boomers generally, and like most rightie propaganda the Narrative has little to do with what actually happened. It’s disheartening to see so many allegedly progressive people fall for it. So if you’ve fallen for it, wise up.
Update: See also Richard Blair at All Spin Zone.
“Must of the griping against Boomers is the result of rightie propaganda about the 1960s and the counterculture and Boomers generally, and like most rightie propaganda the Narrative has little to do with what actually happened.”
— Precisely.
I don’t really like blame games…and to be honest, I’ve got a lot of respect for some of the things that the boomers have accomplished. Like the Civil Rights Movement. At the same time, as a 29 yr- old member of the post-boomer generation, it feels like we’ve been stuck in the same endless debates for a couple of decades now.
I know, thinking back, that the issues have changed from election year to election year. And yet each debate has a subcurrent of “evil bigoted conservatives” vs “open-minded idealistic liberals” or (alternatively) “family values and preservation of our nation” vs “clueless ideologues who would make us defenseless and encourage casual sex and keep us from praying where we want to”.
And that whole subtext is bullshit. There are still some bigoted, racist conservatives…but we also have some leading minority conservatives. To our generation, those culture wars are over and done with and only aging dinosaurs and back-hills hicks are still racist. Bringing that accusation against the Republicans in general (as opposed to specific idiots like the “macaca incident”) is a sign that some people are still stuck fighting the old Civil Rights Movement.
Those are the ones who are giving liberals a bad name. The ones who rush to condemn the Duke LaCrosse players without proper evidence. The ones who think that in order to fight racism they should continue the old fights…and fail to adapt to the new situation, where the issues have less to do with color (as black Jamaican immigrants do about as well as our other immigrants) and more to do with our issues with poverty and crime.
Conservatives and liberals need each other. Good business sense includes taking care of your people, or it should at least. Its not a “one-or-the-other” proposition. At the same time, taking care of people and improving their lives includes teaching them how to fish rather than giving them fish. It means addressing the disadvantages poverty brings. And it means making people take responsibility for their own lives…something that liberals sometimes overlook when they rush to blame it all on racism or circumstances. (Which is not to say their arguments lack merit. Just saying that we can work on programs to help compensate for circumstances, but no program will help compensate for people who aren’t willing to put in the effort it takes to succeed. Studies show that young black men are aware that they need to work hard at school to get an education and a good job. Yet they still don’t. The ‘why’ is more complicated than simple racism.)
http://www.kff.org/kaiserpolls/upload/7535.pdf
“Nearly all black men ages 18-29 say that black parents should tell their sons that anyone can be successful in this country if they’re willing to work hard (96%). However many also say black parents should warn their sons that they will have to work harder than whites (52%), and that the police are looking for any reason to give a black man a hard time (49%). Their views on “the system†and who is responsible for the problems facing black men are also somewhat mixed. Two-thirds say the problems facing black men are more a result of what they have failed to do for themselves rather than what whites have done to blacks, but half say America’s economic system is stacked against black men (compared with four in ten who say it is fair to everyone).”
Still a lot of work to be done, to make everything fair and equal. But the work should be different now. The foot is in the door, and its about capitalizing on that…it sucks in some ways. Its unfair, and they’ll have to work harder than a white person would. Still. But the opportunities are there, and probably will grow as the older generation dies out. My generation…race barely registers as an issue. I’ve had black friends, hispanic friends, asian friends…dated and thought about dating people from other races.
So why are we so stuck on race issues today? Is it just the old fogies, or what?
And its not just the Civil Rights Movement. Take Vietnam – of which most of what I know came from college classes, rather than actual experience.
Its easy to look back and say (with perfect, 20/20 vision) that Vietnam was NOT strategically important to the US, that the domino effect did not take place, and that we should have left that nation a long, long time before we actually did. But its also obvious that the men who thought we should be there really did believe all that. They weren’t evil, they were doing what they thought was the right thing.
Turns out they were wrong, and Vietnam wasn’t that critical. And yet, in another sense, they were right. They were right that by showing weakness and giving in, it would affect our ability to deal with other nations. Documents from North Koreans (which are now available for historical purposes) showed that we really might have defeated them. That the Tet Offensive destroyed a lot of their manpower. That the bombings did affect them, that our decisions really did affect their will to continue fighting.
And…our loss in Vietnam really does embolden our enemies today. They really do think that if they continue to attack us (or Iraqis) long enough, we’ll just give up and go home.
Doesn’t mean we should stick it out just because…that’d be stupid. But we must be aware of the consequences of our actions, and try our best to avoid the worst. If we give up too easily, then we may end up in a nastier and even longer war somewhere else. Especially since the enemy doesn’t understand that our reluctance in Iraq stems from our belief that it wasn’t really a legitimate war. All they would know is that they fought us and we gave up, and if they continue fighting we’ll give up yet again.
Anyways, what I see as the worst of the legacy left to us by the boomers is exactly that. This belief that the opposition is the enemy, evil and vile and manipulative. That if the public doesn’t agree with you its because they’ve been duped by the other side, are stupid, or apathetic.
Its this belief that there are no honest differences in opinion. And you just illustrated that issue quite nicely with your own post here.
Sorry Chris…You flunked on Vietnam…
Chris —
Anyways, what I see as the worst of the legacy left to us by the boomers is exactly that. This belief that the opposition is the enemy, evil and vile and manipulative. That if the public doesn’t agree with you its because they’ve been duped by the other side, are stupid, or apathetic.
The Boomer didn’t start that, m’dear. That was a legacy given us by people long gone. But your comments are a good illustration of what I’m talking about.You have a shallow understanding of history and have been duped into thinking all social ills we are grappling with now somehow started with the Boomers. The truth is that what we’re dealing with originated long before us.
Also, every new generation resents the older one as it goes through adolescence, but I believe you are old enough to get over that now. Make an effort.
PS
Those are the ones who are giving liberals a bad name. The ones who rush to condemn the Duke LaCrosse players without proper evidence.
FYI, the bloggers of my acquaintance who made that mistake are in their 20s and 30s.
“The riffs in our culture pre-date the Boom”
I think you meant to say “rifts”, but on reflection, the riffs have all been there, too, in various iterations.
I mean, some of these people are still fighting the Civil War.
(But I’m going to link this piece, so do your poofreeding now!)
Chris also flunked economics. A thorough review of economic history will show that liberal policies lead to a healthier economy at smaller over-all costs. Liberal economics is investment in the nation; conservative policies are mainly gutting the nation. There is no evidence that conservatives have better management skills, policies, or theories.
Jeez, and David Horowitz thinks kids are getting a “liberal” education. It sure doesn’t sound like it.
I think there is something to boomers having some responsibility for the political climate we have. Take a look at this profile of Bill Kristol:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/e/easton-gang.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
On one side you have really unrealistic New Lefties, who couldn’t sustain a movement. On the other side, you had Bill Kristol and company, who were key in building the Republican Noise Machine. It took too long to address because the left was wrapped up in identity politics and whatnot–a legacy of 60’s style politics.
I’m not saying it’s simple, but there is something generational going on here. “Gen Xers” were the first to say that there’s something strange going on with the media, a decade and a half before David Brock caught onto his whole thign. See the early work of Thomas Frank:
http://tinyurl.com/2vdbum
He wasn’t the only one saying things like this.
By the way, the demographic goalposts are a little slippery with regard to “Genx.” I trace the coining of the term back to the recession in the early 90’s. Douglas Coupland wrote “Generation X”, but was born in 1961. So a boomer wrote the novel that coined the term?
I agree that a lot of the movement conservative foot soldiers are GenX. It may be that it’s more of a cultural style… I doubt, for instance, that many movement conservatives listen to Beck.
Let’s not forget who it was that raised the Baby Boomers — it was “the Greatest Generation.”
Now Boomer-haters have someone else they can blame.
No one is hating anyone. At least I’m not. But self awareness is good. The boomer reality is not the eternal one–it’s important not to be permanently stuck in Berkeley 1968. There were other years, before and after.
JJ — there’s always “something generational going on.” Different generations will tend to have different perspectives because we’ve lived in different cultures and have different life experiences. This is a fact of human civilization you can find recorded even in ancient times.
Bill Kristol proves my point, though. He’s a legacy; his father was a founder of neoconservatism. Ol’ Bill, who’s a year younger than I am, is just carrying on what his old man started.
Gen Xers were not the first ones to notice something weird was going on with media. I noticed it while David Brock was still in diapers. And the “something weird” largely is the creation of a right-wing media infrastructure built by wealthy right-wing old men many years ago. These guys were way older than Boomers. For example, Richard Mellon Scaife, who was a major instigator and Brock’s old boss, was born in 1932.
All of these awful things Boomers are thought to have started were already in the works when we came along. We didn’t so much start stuff as step into it and get caught up in it. We get blamed for rebelling, but the truth is that we didn’t rebel enough.
The boomer reality is not the eternal one
Jeez, you sound just like us when we were younger. I used to call out my old man because he wouldn’t let go of World War II.
We sure as hell didn’t rebel enough…
When I was in P.B. high school (class of ’63) the “groan-ups” idea of a rebellious youth was Maynard G. Krebs…
there’s always “something generational going on.â€
Agreed. But there are always particularities too. And one particularity in this case is that boomers are a very big demographic. So they dominate the larger culture and the political conversation as well. So you can get a kind of monoculture where the conversation gets stuck. Take a look at this Kevin Drum post re: Joe Klein:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2007_03/010854.php
Must of the griping against Boomers is the result of rightie propaganda about the 1960s and the counterculture and Boomers generally, and like most rightie propaganda the Narrative has little to do with what actually happened.
By the way, I agree with this.
I’ve got two beefs with Boomers:
1. You kept commercial radio in a Classic Rock stranglehold for a good decade after that stale 60’s and 70’s crap had any relevance.
2. It’s your fault my TV is overflowing with ads that feature people in their 50’s and even 60’s skydiving and rock climbing and otherwise being bold. Gah! Maybe when you folks start getting hip replacements you’ll stop thinking you’re hip.
Politically though? I have no beef with Boomers. Hell, we progressive Gen-X’ers need all the help we can get fending off the wingers and glibertarians that plague our cohort.
we progressive Gen-X’ers need all the help we can get fending off the wingers and glibertarians that plague our cohort.
Agreed there, too.
We didn’t so much start stuff as step into it and get caught up in it.
Didn’t Billy Joel write a song about that? 😉
The comments from some of the “Boomers” in this forum, are in themselves, sanctimonious and condescending enough to inspire the loathing of younger generations.
What many of the “Gen-Xers” and “Millenials” is the nearly complete replacement of a genuine, American culture with that of a marketing plan. Although that tendency has always had roots in the United States, I don’t think it can be disputed that it has been taken to absurd extremes during the years when “Boomers” sat in the driver’s seat of the American corporate boom.
Whether it is completely rational or not, there is the sense among “Gen-X” and “Millenials” that the previous generation sucked the marrow out of life in the US, and sold us the bones with mass media and shopping malls. However, I think that the real sense of indignation arises from the unwillingness of so many “Boomers” to even contemplate taking responsibility for some of deleterious effects that their behavior has had on the culture, which I think has been demonstrated in abundance within this forum.
I know many fine individuals from the “Baby Boom” generation, but I also know quite a few more narcissistic, self-righteous, self-serving, and condescending representatives. Maybe it is time for that generation to be accountable for their actions, and realize that this resentment does not arise from iterative historical and generational patterns. It’s personal and based on observing the actions of the individuals that belong to it.
“Gen-Xers” and “Millenials” are certainly far from perfect, without question, and I think that most will frankly admit it. I for one would simply like to see the self-recognition of fault in some “Boomers” that doesn’t amount to blaming the other side of the political spectrum or another side of a generation divide.
The more I hear the nonsense in this forum, the more personal it gets, so please get on the clue-train, a take some ownership. It would also be nice to respond to the posts from non-boomers with some respect and genuine self examination, instead of righteous indignation and condescension.
Interesting post. It’s definitely true that whenever you generalize broadly about groups as large as 80 million people, a lot of what you say isn’t going to apply to individuals, and there is always going to be a lot to object to.
Having done some work on this subject professionally, I find certain that generational characterizations are applicable in some areas, but they are broad enough that they cut across political and partisan differences. For example, Boomers, because of their upbringing and their historical experiences, tend to find more appeal in big ideas that promise sweeping social or personal transformation, and tend to see more value in spirituality and self-actualization. Not every Boomer, but enough to establish clear social trends that are visibile across their 50 year footprint on American history.
GenXers, by contrast, tend to be more skeptical about big ideas, more individually focused, more materialistic (in both the philosophical and commercial senses), and more interested in finding what works than finding what’s True with a capital T. That doesn’t make us either liberal or conservative necessarily, but it does give a different generationational spin to the politics we embrace. Look at the prominent GenXers of the left in the blogosphere: principled, but practical and far more interested in process and results than ideology. GenX wingers tend to be more libertarian than theocrat, for what that’s worth.
Just because these differences exist doesn’t require that we make judgments about the different cohorts. Politically, there are times when society needs idealism and spirituality to break out of a period of smug secular apathy, as happened in the 1960s, and there are times when the Big Idea is the Wrong Idea, like Bush’s mania for invading Iraq. GenXers as young adults tended to embrace a kind of immature vision of independence (libertarianism, for example) and frenetic entrepreneurism. In middle age, they are likely to become effective managers and executives – most of America’s great generals (Washington, Grant, Eisenhower) were from generations historically similar to GenX, and as mature leaders, either extremely effective pragmatists (Truman) or utterly corrupt and socially-indifferent hacks (McKinley).
Right now, Boomers appear to have over-reached politically because they completely dominate the upper tier of leadership, in the same way that the once-great Veteran generation looked arrogant and out-of-touch to the rising Boomers. As GenX and Millennials start making more of an impact and tempering Boomer excesses, I think that both conditions and opinions about Boomers will mellow a bit.
The comments from some of the “Boomers†in this forum, are in themselves, sanctimonious and condescending enough to inspire the loathing of younger generations.
It’s what we old folks do. Our elders dished it out to us, and now I know why. It’ll be your turn someday.
Whether it is completely rational or not, there is the sense among “Gen-X†and “Millenials†that the previous generation sucked the marrow out of life in the US, and sold us the bones with mass media and shopping malls.
I can understand why you might have that misperception, but it’s a misperception nonetheless. What sucked the life out of America was the turning away from New Deal progressivism in favor of the right-wing, hyper-individualistic, “libertarian” ideal. And you can spread the blame across several generations for that.
The more I hear the nonsense in this forum, the more personal it gets, so please get on the clue-train, a take some ownership.
Sorry, but you really do come across as an adolescent whiny-baby.
Rob Salkowitz — I agree entirely with your comment. Thanks.
Hmmm…someone please tell me they see the irony of this last post?
I’m not going to try to identify the differences between Boomers and subsequent generations other than to note the differences in how they were brought up. Think about it a little. I’m an early Boomer, but my mother grew up on a farm without indoor plumbing and electricity. My father fought in WWII, and I grew up in the 50s and 60s with the blinders of the times.
We were not a cynical generation, had better lives than our parents, had good schools, and were fairly optimistic about our futures. When we entered the job market there were union jobs with pensions, there was the military, there were many choices.
Vietnam, the assassinations of Kennedys and King, and the arts and music explosions rocked our world.
Subsequent generations have come into a world where change is the norm, where the future is cloudy and where America tortures people to keep them free.
It’s not that human nature has changed, it’s just given each generation a different set of challenges.
I recently read a great post by someone on TPM Cafe which pretty much summed up where we are politically as a country right now. But the question that occurs to me is, how did people let it happen? I do think the Democrats of the older generation (older than me) kind of checked out at a certain point.They weren’t much of a force pushing back in the other direction. There may be some good reasons for this, I don’t know. But anyway, a while back I remember reading Bob Somerby, and him talking about “fops” (scroll about a third of the way down). The first thing I thought of was, “boomers.” I mean, I think my liberalism comes from having a good education (education from boomers, in fact), but it also comes from the experience of being dirt poor at a certain point in my life, and other people of the same generation around me being the same. I think there’s a flavor of this on the left that maybe we didn’t have before–it more had the character of the foppishness that Bob Somerby was complaining about.
But the question that occurs to me is, how did people let it happen? I do think the Democrats of the older generation (older than me) kind of checked out at a certain point.
I think that’s true. We sat on our hands and let the Right take over. Dems didn’t know what hit them until well into the Reagan Administration.
You could see it happening. Sometime in the early 1970s Gloria Steinem went on a speaking tour to college campuses, and she was practically begging young people to get over identity politics and form coalitions, and no one listened to her. And a lot of that was about being ego-driven and full of ourselves, as young people tend to be. People had carved out their little bits of activist turf and didn’t want to share. At the same time, the Right was pulling itself together and becoming a force. So, yes, we screwed that pooch, big time. I’ve written about this before.
But another part of this was just exhaustion. The Vietnam era just plain wore us all out. If you think the nation is polarized now, you should have seen it then. At some point in the mid-1970s a lot of us, me included, just walked away from politics and causes and got on with our lives. And then came marriages and babies and jobs. I had my babies during the Reagan Administration, and I’m still trying to figure out what happened back then. I was a bit distracted at the time.
Maha: Maybe, you’d like to respond to the point of my posting, rather than sticking to the party line. Specifically..
“I don’t think it can be disputed that it has been taken to absurd extremes during the years when “Boomers†sat in the driver’s seat of the American corporate boom.”
“I think that the real sense of indignation arises from the unwillingness of so many “Boomers†to even contemplate taking responsibility for some of deleterious effects that their behavior has had on the culture, which I think has been demonstrated in abundance within this forum.”
“I know many fine individuals from the “Baby Boom†generation, but I also know quite a few more narcissistic, self-righteous, self-serving, and condescending representatives. Maybe it is time for that generation to be accountable for their actions, and realize that this resentment does not arise from iterative historical and generational patterns. It’s personal and based on observing the actions of the individuals that belong to it.”
“I for one would simply like to see the self-recognition of fault in some “Boomers†that doesn’t amount to blaming the other side of the political spectrum or another side of a generation divide.”
As far as the whiny-baby comment is concerned..wasn’t I saying something about respect and condescension?
The Vietnam era just plain wore us all out.
Now that’s something my generation didn’t have to deal with. And I agree that that must have been exhausting. (A totally non-ironic statement from someone of a generation that sometimes has trouble expressing itself non-ironically…)
Brian — Do look up the term “psychological projection” and reflect on it. Thanks much.
Thank you for this post, by the way, Maha. It’s an interesting subject.
Maha, your capacity for respectful, non-condescending, and self-evaluating replies is truly astonishing.
A comment on the nature of the conflict being personal was not an invitation for you to personally attack me. So rather than pollute this thread with a flame war, I’ll leave you to your devices and bid you all adieu.
Speaking as a Young Person, I personally agree with Rob and will add also that the obvious reason for all the Boomer Blame is that it’s the Boomers that now sit in most of the positions of power. I have felt frustrated that some elected officials don’t seem to speak to my generation, but on the other hand, I think there’s also a lot of apathy among people my age, since we had abundant evidence when we were growing up that the political system is deeply flawed. So, many checked out, and the problem is cyclical. Gen X feels that the Boomers in power don’t act in the interest of Gen X, so they stop participating, and the Boomers don’t act in the interest of Gen X because there aren’t enough people clamoring for them to do so.
Although, I think this is less true now. The things most people my age want are part of the discussion, although this might be because I’m just older and less idealistic than I was in college (or that my regular sources for political news are a skewed towards opinions I agree with, heh). It felt to me that for a long time the greatest problem was that not enough people under the age of 60 even bothered to vote, so the national discourse was all about social security and medicare benefits. The discourse seems to be shifting such that we’re talking about some of the bigger issues affecting people of my generation — lack of insurance, for example, or concern about the environment — but we also kind of hit critical mass there, too.
I do blame the boomers for the fact that I can’t find beauty products, though. Everything is anti-aging this and anti-wrinkle that. 😛
The funny thing is, I don’t resent the older generation. And I diodn’t even touch on economics, really. They have their history, things developed for a reason…some of the results were good and some weren’t so much.
But yet again a few people on this thread blame the divisiveness on the Republican counter-movement to the 60’s, and either blame the current divisiveness on previous generations, the Republicans, or point out that things were even worse in the 60’s. (and they were worse in the 60’s. Things died down, but not everyone feels they were resolved.)
Yes, a lot of the crazy lefties (like the ones condemning the Duke Lacross players before properly evaluating evidence) are my age. But they grew up that way because they were raised by the boomers who wanted to pass on their values to their children. Again, not a bad thing in and of itself, but we get people my age who don’t use their brains and are just as mindless about supporting things their parents told them as conservatives in the 60’s were about supporting things passed down to them.
Some of the people in my generation saw that the kids raised by hippies were just as robotic as the good little conservatives…
Anyways, the point of my post wasn’t to blame the boomers, but to point out that the divisiveness that seemed to peak in the 60’s wasn’t ever really resolved….and that current politics include a legacy of bitterness and divisiveness that has been passed on by the boomers. I don’t particularly care where it started, or why. I just don’t want to see it passed on to further generations.
Which means condemning the Republicans railing against liberals as much as it means condemning the Progressives ranting against the vast Right-wing conspiracy.
Now that’s something my generation didn’t have to deal with. And I agree that that must have been exhausting.
I’ve got a feeling it’s something Gen-Xers and Millenials are going to have to deal with quite soon. I know plenty of lefty bloggers, for example, who have walked away or shifted the focus of their writing due to “Bush Burnout”. The constant stream of scandalous political atrocities over the last seven years — combined with the media’s “ho-hum, nothing to see here” attitude towards same — has been quite exhausting.
Although Brian’s tone was a little bit too aggressive to be a good conversation starter, I think he does make some good points. So let’s put this another way.
A question to the other Boomers here
What would you personally have done differently with your lives if you could, and what do you feel somewhat responsible for, when it comes to the things that the younger generations are up in arms about?
– Sam
A boomer with at least few regrets.
Not as exhausting as getting drafted, though, for sure.
I visited the Viet Nam memorial a few years ago and I didn’t expect it to affect me. But the sheer volume of names, each with families, communities, really hit me. Plus all the letters and mementos.
The thing I’ve found spooky with this war, is that the noise machine keeps churning on, almost as if nothing happened. The propaganda doesn’t stop.
I disagree. I think things after Bush will tone down, as far as activism goes, but I don’t see it going away. I think a lot of people are in it for good. Plus there are new institutions: The Center for American Progress and such. I think people have pretty much figured out that there has to be a counterbalance to the right’s institutions, if we don’t want to see the legacy of the New Deal crumble. And look at the spate of new books that have come out, like Krugman’s *Conscience of a Liberal.* I think these kinds of “big picture” efforts are just getting started.
(Responding to Toast.)
Rob Salkowitz, comment 22, wrote much of what was kicking around in my mind, and he expressed it better than I could at the time.
I suspect he would echo what I’m about to say next: read The Fourth Turning for a terrific discussion of this subject. It shows how each successive generation is a reaction to the former generation, how the social context of one generation influences the way the next generation is raised, the lifecycle and influence of each generation, and how there is a regular, repeating pattern to all of this.
Rob’s comment echoes ideas in this book, when he says that Boomers are given to big ideas and quests for the Truth, whereas Gen-Xers are more practical and concerned with what works.
Boomers are coming into the peak of their influence, and these big ideas can be good (Al Gore and the need to do something now about global warming) or bad (the various idiots on the right who want more fascism or more theocracy, now). Beyond the Boomer/Gen-X conflict, the book talks quite a bit about Millennials, and how they are very conformist, connected, team-oriented, and very susceptible to follow whatever big idea (good or bad) prevails. It also explains why this is.
I hope I’ve whetted your appetite – I feel that no dicussion about generations is complete without some familiarity with the ideas presented in The Fourth Turning.
Toast wrote: I know plenty of lefty bloggers, for example, who have walked away or shifted the focus of their writing due to “Bush Burnoutâ€.
Hey, I resemble that remark! Plus, the subject of generational attitudes is much more rewarding than trying to figure out how to clean up after Bush.
JJ- I hope you’re right.
Wow! Hot button, for sure…
I’d like to point out that, while the “Boomer Generation” is NOT the cause of the failure facing Gen-X & Gen-Y, individuals in the Boomer Generation certainly are. Decisions were made, against many of (y)our better judgments, leading to the current predicament.
I’m near the cusp, myself (1956), and have had a FAR better life, and FAR more choices than my Greatest Generation parents, though, to be honest, I’m not 100% sure I had greater opportunities (parents both dropped out of college, limiting their opportunities).
Yes, a lot of the crazy lefties (like the ones condemning the Duke Lacross players before properly evaluating evidence) are my age. But they grew up that way because they were raised by the boomers who wanted to pass on their values to their children.
Yes. And we Boomers grew up the way we did because of how our parents raised us. And our parents grew up the way they did because of how their parents raised them. And your children will grow up the way they will grow up because of you, and some day some of them will blame you for Whatever. There is no beginning; there is no end.
the divisiveness that seemed to peak in the 60’s wasn’t ever really resolved
No, it was not, but that divisiveness had its origins in earlier divisivenesses that stretch back to before we Boomers were born. You can find the seeds of it scattered backward through the 1950s and 1940s and 1930s and very much the 1920s, and back to the 19th century, and in some ways earlier. And in the same way we’re all doomed to replay variations of the same old tapes until we can rise above it and see the bigger picture. I suggest that endlessly harping on how the Boomers screwed up is not exactly rising above it.
Ha! Small world. Here’s George Packer today complaining that Arthur Schlesinger spent the late 70’s partying at Woody Allen’s (see the Bob Somerby rant about Woody-Allen-related New York foppishness above):
So the Greatest Generation could slack with the best of them…
I agree that it’s endless, but we shouldn’t just stare at the Escher painting, we should try to learn lessons from it, right?
we should try to learn lessons from it, right?
That’s about all we can do. IMO the more you learn about the past, the harder it is to fix blame in any one place.
You wrote:
No doubt some of what we did makes no sense outside that context — you had to be there — but if you’d been brought up in the 1950s, you’d have felt drawn to beads and patchouli oil, too. Trust me.
—
I know you’re speaking mostly to Gen X’ers, but consider those of us born before 1945. I was born in 1940 and my generation was never drawn to beads and patchouli oil. How come? What changed. This divide has long puzzled me. I grew up in the fifties, too, yet my generation never recoiled at our parents’ materialism as did the people born five years later.
After reading that Packer post, I think I now get Thomas Frank’s joke about naming his next book “What’s the Matter with Connecticut?”
Phil– My stepmother told me she was in college when things changed culturally. She said the divide was clear among the different graduating classes… Maybe it’s something Malcom Gladwell could explain…?
I guess it just feels as though the generation that redefined everything…that questioned racism, that questioned authority, that fought to have equal rights for minorities and women…
would not see and fight the divisiveness that they were raised with, as well. People keep bringing up the Republican/conservative rise…but its obvious that rise gained its strength from a phenomena studied today – blowback. Or pushback, or whatever you want to call it.
Change was happening so fast, to so many people, that many felt as though all their foundations were being undermined and were uncomfortable/unhappy. Instead of addressing this concern and adapting, people who weren’t comfortable with all the changes were ignored. Of course there was a Republican rise. The Democrats then screwed things up by refusing to adapt, and change. They could still have pushed for the same goals, but in a less confronttional manner. Instead we’ve got people like Michael Moore making asses of themselves in the national limelight.
The rise of conservatives could have been predicted, and should have been seen for the last gasp it was – in regards to racism at least. And in other areas, it should have led to the question of “what makes this appealing?” Why do people think that the conservatives are on to something, w/regards to national defense?
Instead, all we hear is about how the Republicans (or “repugs” as some call them) destroyed everything and caused all this divisiveness. Or, alternatively, that the divisiveness existed before the 60’s. No acknowledgement that the way the 60’s was fought carried certain consequences, no recognition that along with some very good things there was also an added dimension to the political fighting. That what once was considered unacceptable (the old belief that politics ended at the ocean, and that foreign policy should not be subject to domestic political maneuverings) was shattered by Vietnam.
Your stepmother is right, JJ. I graduated from college in 1963, and by 1965 the entire landscape had changed. Something happened to people born between 1944 and 1945 that still eludes me.