It’s All About Us

As the Baby Boomer generation begins our gradual slide into retirement, it will be interesting to see how our children reflect upon our accomplishments, especially in contrast to the generation of our parents, who mostly comprised what Tom Brokaw famously referred to as The Greatest Generation.  It was a title that stuck, and for good reason. Their accomplishments are noteworthy in a historical context, when simple survival, either through the dust bowl, the depression, or from enemy bullets, defined success.  After turning back tyranny on two fronts, they came home to build families and businesses. Many were successful beyond their wildest dreams.  They were mostly unified in their vision of a strong America, and possessed an optimism buoyed by success and security.           

The Greatest Generation then spawned The Baby Boomers.  We “Boomers,” are a statistical bubble.  A “frog in the snake” created when tens of thousands of service men returned home, got married, and established families in an environment of prosperity and promise.  Most succeeded in providing for their families what they were lacking in their early years.

History notes that our generation had different objectives than our parents.  In some cases we set out to be everything our parents weren’t: more focused on our country’s internal flaws of inequality, intolerance, environmental negligence, and in the beginning, an unpopular war. We made our first marks not with battlefield bravery, but through our protests on the National Mall, in town squares, and on college campuses. 

Most historians also agree that we were more self-indulgent, and more demanding.  We have been rarely motivated by duty or simple patriotism.  During the seventies, we were referred to as the “Me Generation.”

We attacked The Greatest Generation’s view of societal mores that had clear boundaries of acceptable behavior. We became more inclusive and understanding, but also created a “no blush” generation that interpreted poor decisions as accepted lifestyle choices, where the worst sin was being “judgmental.”  We replaced Bob Hope and Red Skelton, who could deliver long monologues without ever saying an off-color line, with humorists that bring every scatological joke imaginable from the locker room to the living room.  Traditional, family oriented television programs were usurped by entertainment that glamorized self-indulgent lifestyles that were neither realistic nor tenable. It became popular to emphasize family flaws in our entertainment. Any assertion that a traditional marriage was better for raising children was met with howls of criticism from the cultural elite. Our family structure is barely recognizable in many quarters, with divorce and out-of-wedlock birth rates that are twice that of our parents.  We pretend it is ok so as not to be “judgmental.” In short, we became more liberated but less stable, and consequently more dependent upon government than our parents. 

We have also been at war within, a hyphenated menagerie of placard-wielding activists, many of whom identified ourselves as something other than Americans first, but still ready to take to the streets and fight over a multitude of issues. We have agreed on little, from the definition of marriage to whether or not English should be our official language. Even the brief unity that enveloped the country after 9/11 quickly dissipated with much criticism focused on our government and our way of life, as if we deserved it.

The Greatest Generation grew up in cities with safe neighborhoods.   Many of our Baby Boomer parents roller skated on city sidewalks and played in the city parks.  They walked to their neighborhood schools and delivered newspapers on bicycles.  Today, most of our cities have become urban cesspools.  Detroit, once a shining city that provided jobs for tens of thousands, is now an urban cesspool with city blocks that are being bulldozed in hopes of developing urban farmland.

No better metaphor for the Baby Boomers may exist than Bill Clinton, who was handed, by his Greatest Generation predecessors, a world, for the first time in fifty years, not threatened by the Cold War.  But as he oversaw a period of great economic prosperity and national security, his behavior was marred by self-indulgent personal transgressions that may be his enduring legacy.

So the Boomers replaced patriotism with activism, but to what end?

We had some victories, but we also made some messes, and that may be what we are remembered for.

Our greatest mess may be our sense of entitlement and the accompanying debt that we are leaving our children.  The problem will grow as the trickle of babyboomer retirees becomes a torrent over the next decade.

How fitting it may be then, that the table has been set for one great last protest.  But this one will be focused not at the institutions of our parents, but at our own children…a massive angry gray crowd filling the streets, all unified for once in agreement that we deserve the entitlements that we voted for ourselves-not only our social security, but our “right” to free prescription drugs, and now healthcare.  And we will probably win…due to our low birth rates, we outnumber our children. 

So if one of us has spawned the GenXer’s version of  Tom Brokaw, don’t be surprised if the tone of our definitive epitaph is more resentful instead of awestruck. A more cynical study may be in order, with a more appropriate title, such as “The Baby Boomers:  “It Was All About Us.”

But why worry now?  The crisis is years away.  For some, the motor home is packed and the medicine cabinet has ample supplies of Cialis. 

Margaritaville is just around the next bend in the road.