The Aging of Aquarius - Boomers can take credit for the 60s (LAUGH ALERT)

Washington Monthly ^ | January/February 2006 | Jamie Malanowski

[conservative physics]

opps.. Alito sorry, kind of early.

I don't blame all the boomers, just the ones who now run the democratic party, which are the same one's who in the 60's had long hair and protested the war.

[Kenton]

Dear Boomers: hurry up and DIE ALREADY! WE'RE SICK OF YOU!

Sorry, dickhead. I plan to live until I'm 95. And your kids are gonna pay for me, so gimme!

Think of it as payback for all those taxes I paid to send you and your kids to school.

[laney]

LOL...Agree!

I think Boomers have taken it upon themselves to understand thier own destiny and do not fall into these so called groups of the past namely- *Senior Citizens*....I hear all the time from Gen X/Yer's.. how Baby Boomers have trouble getting old? I say why do we have to get Old? we can get OLDER but Old? as in sickly, house bound,uninteresting.

I for one do not want to depend on Medicare or be a hostage to the Pharmecutical Industry, we as an older generation do not want to end up like so many of our parents and grandparents ended up, as they aged sickly in nursing homes, dependent on a small pension or retirement check.

I say Gen X/Yer's should be Thankful to a generation that has showed them both the positives and negatives in life's journey and that you can make a *Change* in all aspects personally, socially politically and spriritually.

[laney]

Self Absorbed? for all the bad you think came out of the BABY BOOMER GENERATION, you should know that you have also reaped some great things from this generation.

Think of the women from the Post World War 11 group, many many were in horrible abusive relationships, they were married at 18 had 4 or 5 children, had no way of supporting themselves.

When Baby Boomers especially the girls graduated from High School they wanted options relating to work marraige and family, many did not want to marry at 18 and have children before age 23.

Yes some took it to far and maybe put Career over Family but many did not.

Many 60's TV sitcoms like JULIA, THAT GIRL, MARY TYLER MOORE showed women out on there own working as a single girl or a single mother having a fun filled independent life.

The realization was FAMILIES were not like *The Beaver*, Father Knows Best, Ozzie and Harriett, many families were plagued by Alcoholism, Physical Sexual and Mental abuse, we just did not hear about it because it was totally swept under the rug.

What legacy will Gen X'ers leave the rest of the world that comes behind them?????

[laney]

Hmmmmm. Well maybe you can tell us who are raising today's youth? Today's youth that brings guns to school and has no quams about killing? Kids who have no respect for nothing or anybody. Girls who are so sexually agressive now, they look like the ones with all the testosterone and the boys with to much estrogen.

The Gen Xer's who are feeding thier kids fast food and junk so that we have an epidemic of Obese kids with an onset of Diabetes? If Gen Xer's/Y want to make a positive difference in the world today why don't they?

[linda_22003]

There are bad parents in every generation. I see spelling and grammar are steadily on the decline these days as well.

[laney]

Bad parenting? that is an understatement.

It's more important to have Implants a Rock Star Body
and the latest and greatest toys than it is about spelling and grammar otherwise celebrities would be poverty stricken.

[JCEccles]

Boomer here. I personally loathe and repudiate the leftist nonsense that the writer lays at boomer feet collectively, although I must admit that some boomers are directly responsible for it.

And I cannot deny that the 60s were an amazing decade in which to come of age. Dennis the Menace and The Outer Limits, atomic bomb shelters and school drills, the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, Lou Christie and his falsetto pop, dickies and polka dot shirts, the Beatles and British bands, the Black civil rights movement, the Apollo moonwalks, Jimi Hendrix, Woodstock. Loathe it or love it, it was seldom dull and uninteresting.

The 70s were a superficial piffle for the most part, but the Reagan 80s were the most glorious decade of all for this boomer for the very reasons decried by the writer of this essay.

[JCEccles]

many families were plagued by Alcoholism, Physical Sexual and Mental abuse,

More families were not.

The now prevalent notion that 50s families actually occupied one of the lowest rungs of Dante's infernal pit of hell is a convenient fraud, a disingenuous piece of feminist revisionist history.

[laney]

Well according to many people I have spoken with over 70 yrs of age most families had many skeletons bad ones in the closet, they just didn't have Jerry Springer's or Maury Povich talking about it.

Families kept there dirty laundry in the house and no one knew...

[illinoissmith]

"We're also in better shape than most Xers...and we have greater personal wealth than most of them will ever acquire...and I for one expect to see 100...if only to piss them off."

This is so weird. Who else cares if you boomers live to 100 or to 80 or to 60? What have you done? What do you leave behind? How will you have changed the world?

You aborted more children than you brought to term (if you included the action of the pill to prevent implantation in uterine lining), you raised your kids by sending them to government schools without any care that the more extreme leftists of your ranks took control of that institution from the top, you divorced and put your kids through that hell, voluntarily out of selfishness, more than any other generation previous, you tore down the morals and traditions and structure needed for kids and teens to grow up as something other than nihilists (you think school shooting come out of thin air? they come out of nihilists... the broken, hopeless, empty, sick people your generation has been so skilled at raising your offspring to be)... and now you're proud that you're going to be living an extra ten years of old age traipsing around in your perversely extended teenager-hood?

You know what? Sadly, thanks to your disinclination to change the social security system for the past 30 years (THIRTY YEARS you had to try to change this scam, and you a generation which outnumbered your predecessors, giving you some power at the ballot box... what chance does mine have?) you have been big players in politics, and your disinclination to refuse government tidbits like the prescription drug benefit, those of your children who you didn't abort and who weren't raised by parents who had morals beyond warming their own buns and bringing in Socialist Utopia, those people will quite likely (as above posters have suggested) pass laws making it very easy to give you the Schaivo treatment.

It will be a tragedy if it happens and I will fight it, but should it happen the role of your generation in bringing it to pass should be known, if only as a warning to yet future boom generations.

If you're one of the conservative boomers who saw what the herd was doing, and fought it (like Alito, like various conservative activists across the country, like the homeschooling parents here, like the parents who aren't homeschooling even but who did give their kids a conservative values-based upbringing), I (and I'm sure your children) thank you a thousand fold for giving us our cultural inheritance as Americans and for giving us some chance at keeping that inheritance alive. You're the ones I hope live to 100, but you're also the ones who have other things to revel in than just piling up more years fruitlessly crawling around on earth.

[laney]

Well one BOOMER Bill Gates has given you the computer you are typing on...

[Tevin]

The 1964 cut-off is used when Boomers want to seem bigger than they are, to pad their resumes (as usual).

---

Baloney. It's a simple demographic based on number of live births per thousand.

No one questioned it unti
self-loathing tail end boomers came of age and started demanding to be called part of a different generation.

Typical boomer behavior actually.:)

[Tevin]

If you ever want proof, play a game of Trivial Pursuits, Baby Boomer Edition with someone born in 1964. They don't know who the hell Sky King was, don't know what the Micky Mouse Club was, and were toddlers when Kennedy was shot

---

You'll find that with the end of any generation.

[Chi-townChief]

Very good point; the Baby Boomers needed to bad mouth the 50s, which were actually "progressive" in a good way, to try to make themselves look better.

[illinoissmith]

"Boomers did not set up the social security scam, and our generation and the next will put more into that Ponzi scheme than any other."

Your generation didn't set it up, but your generation didn't scrap it, either... and, by virtue of having been a boom generation (lots of numbers to vote), you probably had the best chance to scrap it before it started wreaking major havoc in society.

I don't necessarily mean you personally - the conservative boomers (the kinds you find here, the kinds that turned to Republicans to vote for Reagan, etc.) are, I think, largely to thank for the fact that the US is not in the major social/economic/cultural/demographic mess Europe is in (you want to see nihilists and knee-jerk socialists, go meet some Continental gen Yers...).

But, I mean that the majority of boomers seems to have some sort of faith in socialist programs, or some sort of selfish interest in them* and that prevented them from fixing things that really badly needed to be fixed before they started retiring. (*Of course, the selfish interest was why FDR designed them the way they are, so there would be pressure from the majority not to scrap this particular socialist program.)

"I see the Xers, the Ysers and whoever follows as being the harbingers of euthanasia as a government institution."

Probably true, sadly... You should have seen the sick frenzy most of the (left-leaning) gen Y and Xers I knew got into about the Schaivo case, not even willing to hear about the "husband"'s adulterous and blatantly conflicting interest situation.

I'll fight it, and after, say about 5-10 years from now, our wages are docked to new heights to pay for boomers' obesity meds and Viagra and antidepressants, hopefully the spouse and I will still have enough to homeschool children such that they're of the mindset to fight it as well.

[horse_doc]

Baloney. It's a simple demographic based on number of live births per thousand.

Hardly baloney. Your "simple demographic" has floated as low as 1959, and as high as 1965. Read Boomer-themed media articles over the last 20 years, and you'll see a dizzying array of dates for the endpoint.

[wtc911]

This from a kid who posts nothing but a Muppets Comic book as her profile.

[Tribune7]

You're a boomer whether you like it or not.

You're a cruel, cruel woman linda_22003. LOL

[Radix]

I appreciate your post.

I promise you that as long as I am healthy and able, I will never apply for Social Security benefits. I know others who feel similarly.