The key factor most people seem to miss, or ignore, with the boomer generation is NOT that the boomers were any better or worse than previous generations, just that there were so MANY of them.
Thus, the percentage of those who rebelled was far greater and its subsequent impact felt more strongly (and is still reverberating today).
But... don't forget. In the 20's, there was the whole Fitzgerald thing going on - I've read a lot about the wild parties and drunken orgies Fitzgerald, Hemingway and so many others got involved in - oh, and don't forget the flappers and bootleggers and all that jazz. Each generation has its own form of rebeliousness. To single out one is just wrong. Again, if there had been such a huge number of children born and coming of age in the 20's, THAT would've been the roaring 20's like nobody has ever seen and would've had far more dire consequences than probably even the 60's did. Don't forget, this is when the automobile popped on the scene and people could have illicit and premarital sex so much more easily than ever before. Booze was illegal which made it more attractive.
Even before that, you had the many bohemians of other ages - I think of Shelly, Byron and their comrades doing opium and writing their tales. Even, Poe. Yes, we can single out each generation, but unlike the boomer generation, there has never been such a huge mass of people all coming into the years when one sows his oats and questions things at the same time.
Just some food for thought from a fellow boomer.
Furthermore, you had the beatniks of the 50's and they were smoking pot and engaging in free love and all that stuff that many people think just began in the 60's - wrong!
The lefties have been trying to take over since before I was ever born. They've made inroads and will continue to do so. I am a proud boomer and glad to say that though I got sucked into a few of the nutty ideas of the 70's, I have come through the fire and am the better for it. I give that glory to God, however.
I know that not all the members of our generation were destructive. All one has to do is to go to findagrave.com and read the comments posted by boomers to such departed icons of our generation as Bob Keeshan and Shari Lewis. There you will find many, many people bemoaning the coarseness of popular culture and wishing that today's young people could be exposed to such gentle and uplifting influences. Yesterdayland.com is no longer online, but onc could find the same thing there: very gentle people of our generation who are still as gentle as they were when The Captain read them stories who wish such innocence could return. Or one may go to the Internet Movie Database and look up beloved Baby Boomer-era television shows and see the comments by very sane people who miss the "sanity" of those former times.
There has indeed been a tendency to depict all Baby Boomers as highly irreverent even towards their own icons (for example, the use made of old Hanna-Barbera cartoons during Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim"). And we have all been told that the first television show created by "boomers" was the irreverent and leftist "SNL." As a boomer myself I really should be aware that this isn't the whole truth, but sometimes I am overpowered by this image.
And btw, I not only not wild now, I have never been wild (my life is externally observed probably the most boring in history), yet I look back fondly on the Seventies, with all that decade's faults, as the time I came of age (and I still like to listen to disco, even though I have never been to a discotheque and would never go to one).
I must confess also that despite their faults and my differences with their philosophy that I have a certain fondness for the beatniks of the Fifties. They weren't nearly as atrocious as the hippies that followed them, and I think they were much more consistently libertarian rather than the hypocrites who "rebelled" at home while cheering the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China. And maybe it has something to do with the stereotype of the beatnik affecting a bit of a Southern drawl?
I love the oldies!
Thank you for reminding me that I am not alone and that not all of us were so destructive. Unfortunately, the destructive ones seem to have had much more influence than those of us who wish Captain Kangaroo were still around.