Posted on 06/21/2009 5:28:54 PM PDT by JoeProBono
Baby boomers — which the Census Bureau defines as the group of 78 million or so people born between 1946 and 1964 — are obsessed with grades.
They rank everything: best to worst, least to most, zero to 100, A to F. They grade movies, hotels, beef, municipal bonds and restaurants — for the quality of food, for speed of service, for cleanliness. They mark up school essays and driving tests and citizenship exams. After the release of the 1979 movie 10, starring boomer Bo Derek, men and women began appraising each other on a 1-to-10 scale. The first Zagat survey also appeared in the late 1970s, featuring diners' ratings of cafes and restaurants. Entertainment Weekly, launched in 1990 by Time Inc. (sidebar), grades movies, books, TV shows, video games and other pop culture items on an A-to-F scale.
The latest example of baby boomers' drive to assign grades: the "data-driven movement" in U.S. education. As reported recently in The Wall Street Journal, this push to quantify — relying heavily on gadgets and computations for student improvement and systemwide accountability — is an outgrowth of the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind legislation.
"The high-tech strategy, which uses intensified assessments and the real-time collection of test scores, grades and other data to identify problems and speed up interventions," the Journal reports, "has just received a huge boost from President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan."
In other words, Obama (born in 1961) and Duncan (1964), like George W. Bush (1946) and many Americans of a certain age, just love grading systems. So let's take a moment to turn the tables and issue the baby boom generation its own cohort report card.......
Hell, looking at your page, you never even drove a couple of hundred miles east to see the deepest of the deep south....you coulda had a downright impressive "been there" map, but you get a big FAIL in this regard!
Tweak alert PS to Graybeard....Wednesday the 24th marks the first nip o' the teat for this shameless Boomer. Wifey gets her first suckle two weeks later.
We're gonna celebrate with Moon Pies and RC Cola, all compliments of the X'ers Y'ers and the grandkids. Drinks all around...
Don’t be so hard on us, okay? A fellow I met recently entered service at about the same time I did (1980), but he had a pretty interesting career - he flew the A-4, A-7, F-16 and F-18s ... smart guy; he said he got more flight time in the reserves than he had on active duty, flying the no-fly zone in the early 90s and flying recon over Bosnia-Herz.
>> Hell, looking at your page, you never even drove a couple of hundred miles east to see the deepest of the deep south....
That’s not the *deepest* of the Deep South, just the “eastest” of the Deep South.
I gotta have SOMETHING to do when I retire. If I retire.
Well, all I can say is that the “Greatest Generation” didn’t raise the “Gradest Generation” properly then.... LOL...
That’s a hoot. More than a little truth in there, too.
I admit to not going to the link to read the entire article, but I must say this is really a stupid piece.
1. Gave legal sanction to the death of 50 million innocent unborn children.
2. Dismantled the greatest manufacturing system in the history of the world with a series of feel-good but useless regulatory and punitive tax laws.
3. Convinced millions of Americans to trade their economic freedoms and opportunities for the yoke of dependency on government handouts.
4. Squandered the wealth created by prior generations of producers. Demonized those producers and elevated society's so called victims.
Epic Fail.
Ditto that. There were quite a few of us that made small contributions to win the cold war with the former Soviet Union..
Bullshit article. Bullshit thread. Hate bait for morons.
Flame away...
I know, not all boomers were so misguided; it just seems the general tenor of the generation was off. Boomers as a group grew up with a life devoid of hardship and proceeded to squander all that their parents had given them. And while electing Reagan stands at least to their credit, I doubt they would have done so had their prior choice been even minimally competent.
Agree.
And I'm not a "boomer"
Oh but there is a great difference between those born 1946-1956 and the generation we are from Generation Jones 1957-1964. The eariler boomers are the ones who give us all a bad name. We are much more conservative and quite comapred to them, so take heart. I too give the early boomers a D, us later ones probably more a B+ afterall we did go and vote for Regan in 1980 and 1984!
Itis truethat we got sold out by the prior generation (Vietnam, thanks Johnson/McNamara and Social Security Johnson again) but we fell into the trap of something for nothing.
If you were a Major then you should know that 9.4 million boomers are veterans and that unlike the soldiers in WWII the boomers volunteered, they were not draftees.
You mean that in January of 1973 the boomers that ranged in age from nine to twenty seven were running the nation and the Supreme Court?
When the sixties started the “silent generation” ranged in age from 15 to age 35, their little brothers and sisters, many of whom were not even born yet, did not create the sixties.
You also seem unaware of the religious revival that started among the young during the late sixties and early seventies, that in time led to the reemergence of Christians in American politics.
In 1972 many boomers were old enough to vote for president. The 18 to 29 year old vote went for Nixon 52% to McGovern's 46%.
The boomers were the last warrior generation, producing well over 9 million warriors, Joe are you a vet?
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