I resent all the crap laid on the baby-boomers. I am one. I've never owned a tie-dyed anything, never smoked pot and never protested anything except the idiot that was in the White House between the Bushes. I served 20 years in the US Army and since retirement have worked steadily in the military-industrial complex. I'm sure there are many many more who feel the same. To let a few loud-mouthed fools paint the majority is reckless and foolishly ill-informed. I would like to hear someone tell Rich Connolly, Dave Seaman and many others who gave their lives in Vietnam while I was there that they were a bunch of whiney baby-boomers. This guy needs to get a grip and realize the world does not revolve around the self-absorbed idiots the media likes to hold up to the rest of us. < /rant>
.....a ??FEW?? loud-mouthed fools.......??? What planet do YOU live on?
As for Country Joe, he was just another stoned-out, fame-following rock star who rode the wave of hip disdain for the rest of us to a successful career. Lots of them were like that, including one William Jefferson Clinton. But Joe, at least, has dignity enough not to continue wallowing in a discredited political fantasy just for old times' sake. We should give him that much.
I read the article to state just what you said. The media protrays their vision of the majority, not the actual majority.....
Bill and Hillary Clinton are Baby Boomers (1945-64), but so are George W. and Laura Bush.
Ted Kennedy and the Beatles are/were members of the Silent Generation (1928-44), but so are Phil Gramm and Lee Greenwood.
Lyndon Johnson and Walter Cronkite are/were members of the G.I. Generation (1905-27), but so are/were Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley.
Earl Warren and Alfred Kinsey were members of the Lost Generation (1884-1904), but so were Robert Taft ("Mr. Republican" of the 1940s) and Friedrich A. Hayek.
You could take this chain back for numerous generations, back to the Enlightenment of the mid-1700s. Much of the public perception of strong, patriotic, taciturn World War II veterans, self-indulgent, leftist, promiscuous Baby Boomers, poorly educated, nihilistic, whiny Generation Xers are stereotypes, as much as those of lazy blacks, drunken Irishmen, and obnoxious Germans.
The cultural war is not an intergenerational conflict, a regional conflict (Northeast, West Coast, and Great Lakes vs. the Great Plains, the Rockies, and the South), nor a racial/ethnic conflict (Blacks, Hispanics, Jews, and English/German/Scandinavian Northern tier liberal Protestants, vs. British Southern and Midwestern evangelicals, Germans and Dutch (both evangelical and Catholic), and white Catholics).
The culture war is nonetheless a war; Pat Buchanan was correct in labeling it as such at the 1992 Republican convention. It is a war of ideas first and foremost. When it is over, either the Christian and Western based, rational, moral culture that characterized this nation for its first century of independence or the naturalistic and humanist, emotive, relativist culture that is presently the mainstream culture will prevail. The losers will be marginalized and eliminated.