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

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.

Gen Xers I know very little about. Nirvana and the 90s tech boom whiz kids is pretty much it, so far as I've seen. But demographically they're a dip, not a boom, so they don't really seem to have the numbers to be a boomer-style cultural force.

I was under the impression that the Clinton years were some sort of boomer wet dream revenge for Nixon, not something due to gen X, but I suppose you have a point - the moonbat faction of the boomers couldn't have come to political power over the sane boomers without help from Xers.

Gen Yers, I would guess, are probably the slowest out of the box of any generation yet because:

(1) Given the tremendous tech advances society has made (and that is mostly boomers, thank you, the industrious and inventive faction of the boomers), for the vast majority of fields, a heck of a lot of education is needed to really contribute substantially to society. Many boomer parents see that education as a worthwhile investment. Insofar as their children enter engineering and biology research and 4-year or Masters nursing programs and the like, I don't disagree. Insofar as parents often end up funding a 5-year frat party so their children can drink and bugger their way to a Gender Studies degree, I do.

(2) A huge number of gen Yers are really disturbed, dysfunctional people who have no values of their own (basically, apathetic nihilists) and can't function outside of the system of their youth, where there is an authority figure telling them exactly what to do each minute. Without that constant supervision they turn into blobs in front of a TV or videogame screen... rendering them incapable of functioning outside of high school environments. This group is going to spend a long time as parents'-basement-livers, and when they do finally get off their bums, I doubt it will be to do more than flip burgers to get money to smoke pot.

I think these two groups account for most of the slowness of gen Y getting out of the box... I hope for a lot of interesting work, eventually, from a subset of the former (there both the liberals and conservatives in the former), and expect nothing but impotent whining on DU from the latter.

"However, before you burn up the last of your remaining brain cells fretting over this, I fully expect Congress to face a fiscal reality in the next decade or so and reduce the government bennies for the boomers."

I hope you are right but my fear is that boomers may choose the route of the railroad unions... voting to drive the thing into the ground rather than give up an inch of entitlement. I fear the new prescription drug benefit is a harbinger of that path.

Bill Gates did not invent the PC.

However, point in general taken - the innovative people who invented all this computer technology, made the chips go faster, worked out the logic in the programs, etc... these many many scientists and inventors, many of them, maybe a majority, are boomers. Granted. Those who invented, even those who organized the inventing and brought it to market (Intel, say), great people. Thanks to them.

Those who, say, changed the sexual norms such that middle school children commonly engage in oral sex, or who changed norms such that women have been frequently reduced to "bisexuality" in order to compete with porn and with corrupt peers, or those who cheered on communist dictatorships that killed millions of people (Mao's China, the USSR, Cuba), that faction of the boomers should be ashamed of what they did with their time on earth. No thanks to them.

A lot of good points in your post. Let me address a couple. While I am generally pretty hard on Gen X/Yers, I also have to acknowledge that they got screwed on the education side and, that is one complaint that they are justified laying at boomer's feet. The aging hippies that we contributed to the world of academia realy sold the X/Yers short. They know next to nothing of American history, the Constitution, math or science. Thanks to Clinton killing off the Super-Conducting SuperCollider, we lost a huge opportunity to spark a rebirth in the interest of all things engineering and/or scientific. Now, with engineering jobs being shipped offshore, we have taken a definite leap down the slippery slope of irrelevance. Like many great nations that have gone before us, we are headed down a disturbing path.

The issue with Yers is more acute. These folks have grown up in a world filled with computers, VCRs, Nintendos and Gameboys. Because they spend so much time in isolation either palying video games or playing on the computer, (as a group) they lack well-developed social skills or much of a sense of reality. I worked as a substitute teacher for a couple of years and was surprised by the majority of the kids I encountered. Most of them are convinced that they will either be pro athletes or music stars. I hate to think of the rude awakening these kids are in for when they discover that someone is going to fix cars and someone will have to deliver bread and someone will have to build houses and buildings. The Yers may, eventually, figure it out and accomplish great things but, currently, I ain't impressed.

Not trying to get personal … But so you are saying Abusive relationships don’t happen now, JULIA, THAT GIRL, MARY TYLER MOORE are sitcoms that changed the world and liberated women from getting married early, and helped women to realize the nuclear family was optional, but not necessary? That’s the contribution you want to tout?

I’m sorry, but that is what I got from your post to me (#144) and I’m not going to quote the whole thing here.

As for your question:
>>What legacy will Gen X'ers leave the rest of the world that comes behind them?????

We intend to work hard raise children ourselves and instill in them the morals our forefathers had. We have specific steps we are taking to effect this change.
1. My wife stays at home and raises the kids.
2. I work hard to support the family so she can.
3. We send our children to private schools (no government indoctrination).
4. We are teaching our children to work by giving them chores.
5. We require accountability
6. We live within our means
7. We spend time together as a family
8. We go to church together
9. We have an evening meal together every night.
10. We talk about current events and how ethical behavior is better than “instant” success.

What legacy will I leave behind? Strong children who will know what is right and have the faith to do what is right even when it’s hard. That’s all I can hope for.

GOD Bless you for that...If every family was like your's the world would be a much greater place.

What I was saying in my posts was before the Baby Boomer generation I suppose, came along many troubled families especially women who were living with physical,sexual mental abuse by thier husbands felt they had no way out because they had no where to go, no money, no social support, no education and many daughters of these women did not want to end up like there mothers.

My mother even told me when she was a child in the 40's many husbands did not even allow thier wives to drive a car.

I feel Girls today should have balance with family and career but to say they should go back to the days where women were trapped is ludacris.

The problem with the Women's Movement was they did not incorporate into thier agenda how important family was as well as women knowing how to achieve educational and financial success as well.

Today's women are stay at home mother's with an education and the ability to work outside the home with a decent job if they need to and that came from the generation prior to them.

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