The media or those who are the most outspoken seem to be at fault for this so-called "war". The boomers who shout the loudest, "me, me, me" (think Bill Clinton) are the ones we notice the most. Just like the Generation X-ers everyone hears about are the idiots on MTV. Sometimes I see people my age and think, "I feel so old."
I am trying... I mean I am *really* trying to believe this. But there are at least three posters on this very thread who echo the Democrat's party line as far as SS goes. Your generation had 40 workers for every 1 retiree. We will have 3. That's right. It will take three of us Gen X and Gen Y workers to support every one of you.
There are three posters on this very thread that are telling us to shut up, suck it up, watch them burn through our money until they die and get over it. Yet the numbers tell me that, not only will *I* have to bear the brunt of the burden of the Boomer's final days, but so will my children. This will especially effect them when they are in their financially vulnerable 20's and early 30's, raising their own small children. So what's going to happen? The economy supporting the retired Boomers is not only going to crush my generation, but my children's as well. What the heck kind of society will *my* grandchildren be raised in?
The big picture scares me. When I find three so-called "Conservative" posters who happily ignore the math and flip their own children and grandchildren the bird while doing so, it does tend to make me hate an entire generation. How can we, as a generation, respect our elders when our elders are so callus about their own grandchildren's future? These are *our* babies' lives we're talking about. My daughter. My son. And yet I get to read how some Boomers plan on going RVing and having fun and enjoying their retirement. Too bad they don't love their own children and grandchildren enough to want the same thing for them.
Then that thought pattern leads me to another. I look at my peers and see waaaaaay more raised in divorced, fatherless households than not. The idea of staying with someone you didn't love, of sacrificing for your children, was lost on the vast majority of your generation. So many of you really set us up for failure is a thousand ways. But it was about *me*. *My* happiness. *My* fulfillment. It wasn't about the kids. It was about the now. I see a seriously horrible pattern here of Boomers behaving in a selfish way in my own personal experience. Now our parents are killing our (and our children's) financial future as well as leaving us with the social mess with which they participated.
Lord, I want to have faith that it was just a noisy minority of Boomers that created the problems, not the group. But individuals keep popping their heads up and forcing me to see that it really is more prevalent than I care to admit.