"Baby Boomers are a very strange anomaly. They are the Worst Generation (apologies to the many fine people who don't fit the stereotype)."
They tend to be a pain, I agree. But, it's pretty simple, really. The anomaly has its origin in a simple fact: they were the first generation to practice in grade school, middle school, and high school scurrying under their desks kissing their rear ends good bye b/c of a white hot fire ball that the depression era folks kindly invented. Their parents never had to practice that when they went to school during the last 'innocent' age.
(Don't get me wrong; a very, very large number of Japanese and Americans would have gotten killed but for the reality of the bomb - C. LeMay was burning down the whole country quite nicely ... but it was still looking like a million US soldiers would be required as an invasion force.)
Indeed, the boomers showed us xers that despite the bomb, self centeredness is simply a gross feature of character and hurts kids. I spend a good bit more time w/ mine, than my boomer parents did w/ me. But, I had the benefit of seeing how the boomers practiced dealing w/ the bomb in their psyches. I suspect, strongly, that if I had been a young person faced w/ daily nuclear holocaust propaganda .... and I had been in the first gen to experience .... well, I think I would have done a lot of drugs and been cursed w/ a lot more self centeredness than I struggle with....
We're each of us shaped by the situation around us, thats for sure.
But I see generational differences not so much as a result of those forces than as a factor of whats inside us. Some of the most liberal people I've ever known were members of the "Greatest Generation" while me, a boomer, is just to the left of Ghengis Khan. Heck, the Greatest Generation gave us the welfare state. You simply cannot generalize.