“I’m not a fan of baby boomers,” begins this Vox article. “And no, it’s not really fair to paint an entire generation with the same brush, but I’m doing it anyway,” the writer — somebody I’ve never heard of — continues. “Hopefully, the boomers will make a graceful exit and we can start seeing that soon,” the article concludes.
In other words, drop dead, and be quick about.
As a boomer, I’m vaguely aware that the alphabet (X, Y, and perhaps Z) generations don’t like us, and while I’m not exactly sure what their beef against us is, I’m guessing it’s along the lines of we (a) screwed up the world, and (b) have all the money, or anyway, most of it.
This isn’t true. Our parents screwed up the world. And plenty of millennials make more money from their jobs than we do from our social security and investments.
However, even though we’re 99% innocent, or at least no more guilty than all the now-dead generations that preceded us, the article may help shed light on exactly what we’re being accused of. So, here’s the indictment:
Count 1: “[T]he baby boomers are responsible for the most dramatic sundering of Western civilization since the Protestant Reformation.” Explanation: “The Protestant Reformation, which led to chaos and war across Europe, was a direct consequence of the printing press.” Boomers watched TV. (Which, from my observations, created a generation of couch potatoes too lazy to cause any chaos and war. This may be a case of mistaken identity; our parents, not us, were the World War 2 and Cold War generation.)
Count 2: We watched TV. Why is this so bad? Because television “caused people who grew up in its wake to have their minds filled with pseudo-knowledge, rather than actual knowledge … [and] the main consequence of that was the destruction of both high culture and folk or local culture, and their replacement with mass culture and pop culture.” In other words, we listened to the Beatles instead of Tchaikovsky. I say, so what? Hitler was a big fan of Wagner, and look how that turned out. Lennon was a peacenik. If you’re really against chaos and war, why would you prefer high culture (Wagner and his fans) over pop (Lennon and his fans)?
Count 3: We watched TV, and “a generation glued to their screens was going to scramble their brains and make them stupid.” Well, if we’re so stupid, how did we end up with all the money? Do you see the internal contradictions in their arguments there? (Spoiler alert: Our parents made it, and we inherited it.) If we’re so stupid, why were we the most educated generation in history, until the alphabet generations? It was our generation that made computers, wrote software, expanded the internet, paving the way for all those six-figure-a-year jobs for Generation X, Y, and Z software engineers.
Count 4: Boomers inherited “social cohesion” and “made a mess of it.” We inherited a society that was racially segregated, demanded strict conformity, and made people go to work in suits and ties. The alphabet generations don’t have to put up with any of that anymore, thanks to us. This is a crime? Well yes, because if you read the article carefully, you’ll realize it’s a conservative bleating by a pair of young (by boomer measure) conservative writers, who apparently yearn for the return of a society they never lived in, know nothing about except vicariously, and wouldn’t want to live in any more than we did if they had to live in it.
Count 5: The “uncomplicated patriotism” of … what? who? … has been “replaced” with the “uncomplicated narcissism” of boomers. What, exactly, is the basis of this rap? Well, this: “[M]ost people who say America pre-1965 was actually awful” [it was] “and not even remotely living up to its ideals” [also true] “go on to say that America only became a decent country once the baby boomers showed up.” The fact of the matter is that the boomers, when young, were an idealistic generation who wanted to make the world better, which is clearly reflected in the movements we participated in and the music we listened to, and we did make it better (or at least different). Why is this a problem? Because, “I had to hear it over and over again during 12 years of public school history classes.” As we learned to say in the Army some of us were conscripted into, to fight and die in a war foisted on us by our parents that we didn’t believe in, that sounds like a personal problem to us. (If you don’t know this, according to the Army of that time, a “personal problem” was one which had no military importance, and therefore didn’t require a solution. For example, if you were killed in Vietnam, that was a personal problem as long as replacements were available.)
Count 6: Boomers replaced “worship of America with worship of themselves.” Those conservative writers “don’t at all see how that shift is morally attractive in any way.” Harrumph. This from someone who probably voted for Trump. Boomer narcissism is an ancient rap, one that’s been circulating for decades, and apparently originated with our parents, who are to blame for everything. I’ll simply say we were misunderstood — by everybody. What looked to them like narcissism was actually insecurity. We were insecure about everything. We had no money. We were being conscripted to die in Vietnam. Our economic lot was inflation, recessions, and underemployment (we had to wait for older generations to retire or die off before we could advance). We were raised by parents made neurotic by the Depression and World War 2. How can anybody become narcissistic from experiences like those? But getting back to morality, it’s probably true that a bunch of us voted for Trump, although I personally didn’t.
Count 7: “[T]he failure of the so-called countercultural revolution in the 1960s.” That’s bad? That we’re not living in communes or supporting ourselves by making candles?
Count 8: “There were so many of them ….” We didn’t ask to be born. That was our parents’ fault, not ours. “That naturally led the baby boomers to be narcissistic and to think that they were the center of the universe.” Which puts nature second in line, behind our parents, for the blame. “And unfortunately, this coincided with a period of uncharacteristic prosperity in the United States and the rest of the western world.” Poverty and deprivation are better?
Count 9: “And so the boomers also came to believe that wealth and stability were the natural order of things. That’s what made the boomers so careless and also so lazy. … They had no sense that no good thing comes without sacrifice. That’s what made them hippies in the first place, and that’s what made them such ineffective revolutionaries in the ultimate sense.” Dirty pot-smoking hippies! But I admit that boomers weren’t very good at revolution. We failed to overthrow capitalism and our warmongering government of the time. So what? The Trumpers failed to overthrow our government, too. Wait, a lot of the Trumpers are us, so we failed at revolution twice. I guess that’s a bad thing if you believe revolutions and destroying existing orders are good things. What the Trumpers wanted to destroy, though, was democracy and racial progress.
Count 10: “The most striking thing to me about the boomers has always been the gap between their intentions and their ultimate impact, and no one represents this as much as Steve Jobs …. He’s the entire arc of boomerness, isn’t he? A former acid-dropping hippie marries his surface-level bohemianism with unprecedented corporate ambition …. I mean, come on …” Of all the millions of boomers, exactly one of them was Steve Jobs, and he’s not exactly a representative sampling of either our corporateness or our wealth. But … acid-dropping hippies again! (Anyway, so what? Hunter Biden — he’s one of theirs — smokes parmesan cheese.) It’s been decades since anybody was a hippie, but conservatives just can’t get over the hippies’ brief, fleeting, inconsequential arc through history, like a Fourth of July bottle rocket.
Count 11: “They were the generation that first decided everybody needs to go to college,” which is “a massive waste of money,” because, “What a college degree represents today could be, and not so long ago was, taught in high schools, so we are wasting people’s time, valuable years of their lives, prolonging adolescence.” College was hard when I went. If it’s been dumbed-down, it seems to me the dummies are the generations that came after mine, when college was still hard. Touche.
Count 12: “[W]hile not every boomer is progressive, the boomer legacy is a progressive one.” What this article by two conservative writers really is, is a beef that conservatives aren’t getting their way. Same beef as the Trumpers who stormed the Capitol, killed and injured cops, and tried to overthrow a democratic election in favor of a racist demagogue somewhat more than faintly reminiscent of Hitler. Frankly, I don’t yearn for the 1930s. If they do, and get outvoted, that’s their personal problem.
My main motive for posting excerpts from this article, and replying to them, is to show how prone to stereotyping, illogical dot-connecting, and whining today’s young conservatives are. In other words, they’re just like the old conservatives my generation tried to overthrow. We didn’t succeed, but we eventually outlived them, and inherited their money. This cycle will repeat itself again, as it has since time immemorial; i.e., the alphabet generations will outlive us and inherit our money. And, just as we were, they’re impatient for their parents to drop dead.