Posted on 01/15/2006 10:06:43 AM PST by Chi-townChief
With the oldest of the Baby Boom generation now starting to turn 60, it seems inevitable that we will soon be inundated with books and TV specials assessing the impact of this huge cohort on American society. The Greater Generation, by American University professor Leonard Steinhorn, can be considered a very sympathetic brief for the defense. No doubt some opportunistic right-wing scribe is energetically pitching Regnery Press on the merits of prosecuting Boomers for their various crimes against humanity, even as some third party is pounding out an even-handed assessment. Hopefully at some point, Friends of the Forests will step in and remind everyone that a generation is an awfully large category to make meaningful generalizations about, and perhaps we should spare the trees. But for now, back to Leonard Steinhorn.
Readers will recall that it was Tom Brokaw's great good luck as a journalist, as a reporter of news, to uncover that back in the 1930s and 1940s, a large mass of young Americans had to suffer, a) the trials and deprivations of the Great Depression, then b) fight a terrible war —a “world war” in the parlance of the time—against countries bent on global domination. Not only did Brokaw have the courage to bring to light this virtually hidden chapter of our history, but he or an associate had the marketing savvy to title the book The Greatest Generation, an irresistibly flattering phrase which sustained the book through many printings and multiple sequels. I'm not sure, but I think Brokaw meant the phrase sincerely, if not exactly scientifically. It's not like he sat down and assigned coefficients for hardships and accomplishments, or calculated what the ratio between opportunity and outcome should be, or figured out whether one should subtract for embarrassments and shortcomings, or actually divide by them, all in an effort to come up with an equation that would yield a Greatest Generation Coefficient by which we would rank Founders and Boomers, World War II troopers and Gilded Age inventors, Civil Warriors and Manifest Destineers. No, Brokaw just grabbed a pithy, vivid title, and skipped off to the bestseller list.
Nor has Leonard Steinhorn gone the scientific route, but he certainly wants to jump into this Greatest Generation discussion. However, it's not immediately clear where he means to land. He doesn't seem to argue that Boomers are greater than the Greatest Generation. After all, he didn't call his book An Even Greater Generation, with the implication that we have superseded our elders. He called it The Greater Generation, which implies that he might be satisfied coming in second to The Greatest Generation, comfortably ahead of The Great Generation, The Good Generation, and The Generation That Needed Improvement. He even starts off the book giving props to the World War II-sters. “No one should ever doubt the valor and sacrifice of the World War II generation.... This was the generation that sacrificed their blood…suffered through the Great Depression…bravely answered the call…a horrid and heroic struggle.... Normandy and Iwo Jima…they deserve every accolade they've been given.”
However, if any of you thinks the next word could possibly be something other than “but,” I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you.
Steinhorn's “but” is a big one, and justly aimed. He points out that the Greatest Generation came home from World War II to an America that was racially segregated, restricted by sex roles, bigoted against gays and environmentally ignorant, and that it wasn't until the flowering of the Boomers in the sixties that progress in these areas became a reality. And in that progress, he stakes the claim for his generation's superiority.
Steinhorn is an ardent and impassioned Boomer-booster, and in an era when liberal has become a label that even liberals wear reluctantly, he is providing a very useful service. The change in America that has accompanied this generation's march through life has been profound, and because America changed, the world followed. For all the sideshows that encumbered the '60s—the sex, the drugs, the music, the hair—the ultimate legacy of the period is a Great Moral Leap Forward, such that America is now more publicly committed to equal opportunity, diversity, fairness and environmental preservation than at any time in our history. And the fruits of this progress are among our country's greatest ornaments.
But to say that these triumphs belong exclusively to the Boomer generation is to give my contemporaries more credit than is deserved. Assigning credit for historical development is a lot harder than deciding which pitcher in a ballgame deserves the win. George H.W. Bush may have been president when the Berlin Wall fell, but that doesn't mean that he ended communism. The fact that Boomers came of age in this era of social progress doesn't mean that they should get all the credit. For one thing, there were an awful lot of Boomers who spent the sixties surfing, listening to the Beach Boys, and limiting their participation in the events of the era to growing sideburns. There were, for that matter, even Boomers who were antagonistic to the great movements of the period — for instance, George W. Bush. In addition, a lot of the great leaders and heroes of the Boomer generation weren't Boomers. Martin Luther King Jr. wasn't a Boomer. Bob Dylan wasn't. The Kennedys, Lenny Bruce, Barry Commoner, Ralph Nader—none of them were Boomers. And it's not as though they were stray prophets wandering around until Boomers discovered them — they were the spear tips of large bodies of people who shared their thinking. And beyond that, lavishing credit on the Boomers undervalues the great moral struggle that our parents underwent to open their hearts and their minds, and actually change. Many Boomers accepted their politics with as much ease as it took to memorize the lyrics to “Eve of Destruction;” it was our parents, obviously with greater or lesser degrees of success, who had to overcome life-long ways of thinking to accept a black person as their neighbor, or a woman as their boss, or a gay man as their son.
Still, Boomers deserve a lot of credit, and Steinhorn does a matchless job of dishing it out. “In the 1960s,” he eloquently writes, “both Baby Boomers and Greatest Generation Americans witnessed the same society and its many flaws. One made the choice to accept and defend the status quo. The other made the choice to advance the principles of democracy, equality and freedom... to end the hypocrisy of proclaiming but not observing our national ideals, and to address the gap between the promise of American life and the reality of that life for so many Americans. The Greatest Generation deserves every bit of credit for protecting democracy when it was threatened; but Baby Boomers deserve even more credit for enriching and fulfilling its promise.”
But Steinhorn is entirely too forgiving of this generation's shortcomings. We may have been behind the political and social fervor of the sixties, but we were also behind the narcissism of the seventies and the materialism of the eighties and after. Since the Reagan administration, when Boomers shed their shag vests and disco shoes for power suits, Boomers have enthusiastically bought into the corporate values that dominate our lives. Boomers have backed Bush, and his tax cuts, and his war (of course, we've also been against Bush, his tax cuts and his war—that just goes to show the poverty of making sweeping generalizations about generations.) The point is that history is an eminently forgettable subject, and if Steinhorn thinks Boomers don't get enough credit now for making the world a fairer, more decent place, wait until the only things our sons and daughters remember us for is a whopping deficit, global warming and endless war.
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.
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.
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.
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?????
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?
There are bad parents in every generation. I see spelling and grammar are steadily on the decline these days as well.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Well one BOOMER Bill Gates has given you the computer you are typing on...
The 1964 cut-off is used when Boomers want to seem bigger than they are, to pad their resumes (as usual).
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
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.
This from a kid who posts nothing but a Muppets Comic book as her profile.
You're a cruel, cruel woman linda_22003. LOL
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.
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