I’ve been thinking about people “of a certain age” lately (the first wave of the Baby Boomer decades). It started with the reactions of this age bracket to my lobby to implement yearly driver testing at the young age of 60, mentioned in several posts here on the hazards of having people still driving around who should be stopped. I am continually surprised at how many people are so hell bent on keeping their illusion of youth that they are willing to put others at risk for it.

If anything, I would have thought the generation that brought about so much social change in the 60s and 70s, from war protests to feminism, reproductive rights, gender and racial equality and more would have been willing to keep going. I would have thought they would be making social changes for the better well into their aging years, continuing to inspire us to do better as well. Instead, they seem to be making decisions that are selfish, one after the other, trashing a variety of things for the coming generations.

I know this post is hyper-generalized, and that not every person in this age bracket is like this. But enough boomers are like this that the generalization seems warranted. After all, if you are one of those people “not like that” and are in the generation of boomers, and you aren’t fighting the wave of selfishness coming from that direction, that makes you part of the problem as well, doesn’t it?

I’ll be fair – the baby boomers didn’t ask to part of the largest generation born in a certain time frame. It isn’t their fault that their parents chose to overpopulate the country in a few short years. What is their fault is the toll their sheer numbers, their entitled attitude and their refusal to see their own mortality is taking on the next generation.

Baby boomers born in the first half of the Boomer years** seem to have an odd sense of entitlement overall. When they were young, in the 60s, they fought The Establishment in attitude, clothes, music and resistance. Now that they have become The Establishment themselves, they refuse to see that in making the transformation they lost their “cool” factor. They don’t get that they became the very thing they fought so hard against. One example is how the boomer representatives voted in the vote to enter into war with Iraq.

Representatives in the age bracket to possibly have protested the Vietnam war and been incensed it was dubbed a “police action”, preventing soldiers from receiving some benefits related to war, were all over voting for a war in Iraq years later. They did this without even requiring more justification than one irate President’s ravings. Had they waited until the proof that there were no WMDs and that Iraq wasn’t even the cause of the attack on 9/11, we may have saved billions of dollars. Those billions would have done much to help offset the cost of the housing bubble popping in this looming recession.

Baby boomers have a sense of entitlement about growing older and death as well. By their refusal to adopt an attitude of death with dignity and overall wellness in life, our health care system is now focused on keeping people alive well past a time when it is cost effective or beneficial to do so. This takes focus away from prevention, wellness and educating the younger generation about ways to stay healthy. Worse, it has bred a mind set that you don’t have to be responsible for your own health in a proactive way, because people now expect the medical establishment to work miracles on them at great cost to the younger generations as they age. It also does nothing to further the cause of dying with dignity.

Many people complain about the burden on the social security system as baby boomers age. Frankly, I think this is a problem created by more than just the baby boomer generation alone. The generation before them stopped saving for their own retirement in the age of a solid social security system and company pensions. Then, in the quest to “rock the establishment”, baby boomers made changes to the way business was done that made inroads on a pension system already straining under the pressure of so many boomers in the work force.

By the time baby boomers started borrowing against pensions and voting to borrow against social security to fund political agendas as if it were their own giant piggy bank instead of money earmarked for their kids as well, it was too late to save either system. Now the baby boomers are exacerbating the problem as their lobby, the AARP (that’s right, boomers, you are getting older now, whether you want to acknowledge it or not), refuses to allow congress to change the system to handle the load.

This means that my generation must rely on our own savings to retire. But wait, we won’t be able to retire. Baby boomers’ refusal to see their own mortality won’t let us. Because many baby boomers refuse to admit that you can’t put death or aging off forever, many of them haven’t really planned for their care. That means that when we get time to retire we will be working still, to support our parents and our kids, because the job market couldn’t grow as fast as the population did in the 50s, and the people born then refuse to change the way companies work now to accommodate an increased population and a need for more jobs kept here at home.

It is the baby boomer set that first began to “outsource” American jobs to better line the corporate coffers back in the 80s. I’m sure this seemed innovative at the time, and I certainly hope that the people who started the trend simply weren’t forward thinking enough to know how it would harm our economy. Mainly because if they did foresee this damage that would mean they inflicted it on purpose, and that would mean that there was no hope of ever rekindling that flame of change that used to burn in their hearts.

For in the end that is what this post is about – rekindling a flame of change. Am I angry at the way the generation that so inspired me lost its way? Absolutely. For whatever they fought for, even when it was directly opposing (one side protesting Vietnam, one side fighting there; one side burning bras, one side pushing for a return to family values; one side protesting segregation, one side fighting integration), they fought for it with passion. The baby boomers we studied in school believed in change, and now they have allowed themselves to be ruled by fear.

Fear of what? Danger, change, aging, illness, death. Fear of the lies being told us by the very government they resisted way back when. Fear of becoming obsolete. Fear of abandonment by their children. Fear of the innovation they wanted so much to inspire when they were young. So much fear it cripples them. I’d give an inspirational speech now about how my generation can be the next generation of change, and that is true, to a point.

We will be the next generation of change. But in order to do that, we need the help of the baby boomers. They are going to be around and in positions of power for a long time to come. We need them to reach back to their past to help ensure our future. We need them to spend their final years in power fighting once again for what is right. There is still time to undo at least some of the damage done to society – health care, social security, the economy, jobs, the government. There is time to repeal mistakes like the Patriot Act, get rid of problems like health insurance companies mucking up the works, set new examples for the younger set by making responsible decisions about how driving should be handled as you age, and more.

Can the baby boomers once again answer the call? And if not, is my generation, Generation X, and the one coming after us ready to answer the call and take their place? I hope so. It is too sad watching every backwards step we’ve taken over the years, and never more so than now.

–

**# Baby Boomer cohort #1 (born from 1946 to 1954)

* Memorable events: assassinations of JFK, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, political unrest, walk on the moon, Vietnam War, anti-war protests, social experimentation, sexual freedom, civil rights movement, environmental movement, women’s movement, protests and riots, experimentation with various intoxicating recreational substances
* Key characteristics: experimental, individualism, free spirited, social cause oriented (from Wikipedia)

Baby Boomer cohort #2 or Generation Jones (born from circa 1956–1964)

Memorable events: Watergate, Nixon resigns, the Cold War, lowered drinking age in many states 1970-1976 (followed by raising), the oil embargo, raging inflation, gasoline shortages, Jimmy Carter’s imposition of registration for the draft, punk or new wave from Deborah Harry and techno pop to Annie Lennox and MTV
Key characteristics: less optimistic, distrust of government, general cynicism
Key members: Douglas Coupland who initially was called a Gen Xer but now rejects it and Barack Obama who many national observers have recently called a post-Boomer, and more specifically part of Generation Jones[29][30][31][32]

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites