Baby Boomers Owe Young People an Apology--Conceits of the Horrid Generation

Frontpagemagazine ^ | 12-17-07

[SJackson]

Baby Boomers Owe Young People an Apology

By Dennis Prager
FrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, December 04, 2007

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=1E5D04AE-14DA-4920-8F6A-1DCE01801277

 

We live in the age of group apologies. I would like to add one. The baby boomer generation needs to apologize to America, especially its young generation, for many sins. Here is a partial list:

First and perhaps foremost, we apologize for robbing many of you of a childhood.

We baby boomers were allowed perhaps the most innocent childhoods known to history. We grew up without material want, in one of the most decent places in world history, with media that preserved our sexual and other innocence, in schools that generally taught us well, and we were allowed childhood play from boy-girl play to rough and tumble boy-boy play to monkey bars and ringalievio. Our generation has deprived you of all these things. And while we were aware of the threat of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, few of us believed that we were threatened with death anywhere near the amount we have scared you about death from secondhand smoke, global warming and heterosexual AIDS, to mention just a few of the exaggerated death scares we have inflicted on you.

Our generation came up with two truly foolish slogans that also ended up robbing you of childhood.

One was, "Never trust anyone over 30." Our infantile attitude toward adult authority has inflicted great harm on you. Because of it, many baby boomers decided not to become adults, and this has had disastrous consequences in your lives. It deprived you of one of the greatest needs in your life -- adults. That in turn deprived you of something as important as love -- parental and other adult authority. With little parental authority, you were left with little personal security, few guardrails and a diminished sense of order in life. And we transferred this denial of authority to virtually all authority figures, from teachers to police.

The other slogan whose awful consequences we baby boomers bequeathed to you was, "Make love, not war." Our parents had liberated the world from immeasurably cruel and murderous regimes in Germany and Japan -- solely thanks to waging war. But instead of concluding that war could do great moral good, we sang ourselves silly with such inane lyrics as "Give peace a chance," as if that deals in any way with the world's most monstrous evils. So we taught you to make love and not war. And we succeeded.

We made you anti-war and almost completely sexualized your lives. We told you that having sex was terrific or at least to be expected, even in early teens, and that your only concerns should be avoiding sexually transmitted diseases and getting pregnant. And if you did get pregnant, we made sure that you could extinguish the life you were carrying as effortlessly and guiltlessly as possible.

We started teaching you about sexuality and homosexuality in early grade school and we taught you how to put condoms on bananas. It is true that we did not grow up learning about these things at such young ages -- certainly our schools never taught us about these things -- but we chalked that up to the preposterous, if not reactionary, values of the 1950s and early 1960s. We had contempt for our parents believing that "Father Knows Best" and "Leave It to Beaver" and "Superman" -- with the show's motto of "truth, justice, and the American way" -- were good things for young people to be exposed to. So we replaced these shows with MTV's mind-numbing parade of three-second images and sex-drenched shows for teenagers. Sorry.

We also made you weak. We did everything possible to ensure that you suffered no pain. Sometimes we changed game scores if a team was winning by too large a margin; we abolished dodgeball lest anyone suffer early removal from the game; and we gave trophies to all of you who played on baseball teams, no matter how awfully you or your team played so that none of you missed getting a trophy while members of another team did. Much of this was thanks to the self-esteem-without-having-to-earn-it movement, which in our generation's almost infinite lack of wisdom we inflicted upon you. Sorry for that, too.

We also apologize for coming close to ruining so many of your schools and universities. Despite the unprecedented sums of money we had America spend on education, most of you got an education quite inferior to the one we got at a fraction of the cost. But we thought of our teachers as fools (they were, after all, over 30) who just concentrated on reading, writing and arithmetic (and history, music and art). We were sure we knew better and we therefore concentrated on sexual issues, and teaching you about peace, global warming and the horrors of smoking. The fact that few high school graduates can identify Mozart, let alone were ever exposed to his music, is far less significant to many baby boomers than your knowledge of the alleged perils of secondhand smoke. Most of you cannot identify Stalin either, and we are sorry for that, too. But, hey, we did make sure you saw Al Gore's film.

And a real apology to those of you hooked on drugs. While your choice to do drugs is your responsibility, it was our generation that romanticized them and made them cool. "Mind expanding" we called them. But it turns out that they don't expand minds, they destroy them. Sorry.

And, young women, we apologize especially to you. Many of us baby boomers bought into the feminist idea that getting married and making a family with a man were far less fulfilling than career success and that marriage itself is "sexist" and "patriarchal." So, to those of you women who have career success and didn't get married, we sincerely apologize. Turns out that most careers aren't as fulfilling as we promised.

So we really blew it, and what's really amazing is that few of us have changed our minds. Most people get wiser as they get older. But not those of us baby boomers who still believe these things. Of course, many of us never bought into these awful ideas that have so hurt you and our country, and some of us have grown up. But many of us still talk, think, dress and curse the same as we did in the '60s and '70s. And we're still fighting what we consider the real Axis of Evil: American racism, sexism and imperialism.

But for those of us who know the damage baby boomers as a whole did to you, a heartfelt apology.

Conceits of the Horrid Generation

By Jason Maoz
JewishPress.com | Monday, December 17, 2007

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=0ECBB973-5E16-41F3-B89D-999BD71A281B

 

Dennis Prager, the sometimes controversial, always thought-provoking radio host and syndicated columnist, wrote a column last week on the legacy the baby boom generation has bequeathed to younger Americans.

“We live in the age of group apologies,” wrote Prager. “I would like to add one. The baby boomer generation needs to apologize to America, especially its young generation, for many sins.”

One of those sins, according to Prager, is the mindless pacifism espoused by Sixties-era liberals and leftists and passed down to their ideological heirs – a pacifism neatly summarized by the popular 1960’s slogan “Make love, not war.”

“Our parents,” Prager continued, “had liberated the world from immeasurably cruel and murderous regimes in Germany and Japan – solely thanks to waging war. But instead of concluding that war could do great moral good, we sang ourselves silly with such inane lyrics as ‘Give peace a chance,’ as if that deals in any way with the world’s most monstrous evils. So we taught you to make love and not war. And we succeeded.”

The column struck a chord because this writer has long viewed baby boomers as the most overindulged, overrated, self-infatuated and self-destructive generation America has produced to date. (Full disclosure: this writer is also very much a part of that horrid generation.)

Many things about the boomers merit disdain, perhaps none more than the baseless claim – repeated so often it’s been virtually inscribed as historical fact – that antiwar boomers basically shut down the Vietnam War.

Of course, even if one accepts the premise that the antiwar movement ended America’s involvement in Vietnam, the fact is that most of the more intelligent opponents of that war, and certainly just about all of those with the means and influence to do something about it – elected officials, journalists, financial contributors to political parties – were born well before 1946, the start of the baby boom era.

But the reality is that antiwar activists – of whatever age – were in no way responsible for ending the war.

All the major public opinion polls of that era, from the first stirrings of antiwar sentiment in 1965 to the mass demonstrations four and five years later, showed that the majority of Americans remained more or less supportive of their government’s policy in Southeast Asia.

The peace candidate Eugene McCarthy’s near victory in the 1968 New Hampshire primary was fueled in great measure by voters who felt the Johnson administration was not being aggressive enough in its prosecution of the war.

Many of those McCarthy voters actually went on to support the third-party candidacy of the Vietnam hawk George Wallace in the November general election.

As late as 1972 – a full eight years after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, four years after the Tet offensive, three years after revelation of the My Lai massacre and two years after the National Guard shootings at Kent State – the Democratic presidential nominee, George McGovern, running on an unambiguous vow to stop the war, suffered a loss of cataclysmic proportions to President Richard Nixon.

By then, of course, the antiwar movement itself had largely petered out as the Nixon administration implemented a series of troop withdrawals and the draft gave way to an all-volunteer armed forces.

Rather than give credit to the antiwar movement for stopping the war, it’s at least as valid to suggest that the turmoil created by the movement served further to paralyze U.S. policy makers, whose aims in Vietnam were never very clear to begin with.

After all, the war in Vietnam, at least in terms of Americans fighting and dying, lasted three times as long as the Korean conflict of the 1950’s – a war that, by way of comparison, elicited minimal backlash on the home front.

Speaking of the baby boom generation, former “NBC Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw is out with a new book, Boom!, a follow-up of sorts to his mega-seller The Greatest Generation, which chronicled a generation that, unlike its boomer offspring, actually did end a war, defeating Germany and Japan in World War II.

Boom! makes for interesting reading, but for a more substantial – and sobering – look at boomers and what they wrought, see Peter Collier and David Horowitz’s Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties.

[wtc911]

My Husband is a Gen-exer, was 24 y/o on the Fulda Gap with a 14 second life expectancy.

___________________________________

Not in 1980 he wasn't, nor during the bulk of the Reagan years. It was boomers standing watch then.

[dfwgator]

To so-called “Greatest Generation” voted for FDR 4 times, and for the greatest expansion of the Federal government in history.

[Colonel Kangaroo]

The spirit of "Generation X":

Apologies to all you in that age group who do not indulge in broad brush generational slander.

[businessprofessor]

Both boomers and succeeding generations allowed the entitlement disaster to continue. We failed to confront the greatest generation about the need to privatize entitlements. It is odd that boomers and succeeding generations would not confront the greatest generation. The greatest generation would never have been on the wrong end of the entitlement Ponzi scheme. It is because of the tremendous prosperity that boomers and later generations have not demanded privatization and reform of entitlements.

[wardaddy]

most boomers were in their late 20s to early 40s in the 80s
hardly a time to be blamed for holding political power

[wardaddy]

Which generation made abortion legal in 1973?

I was 15.

[Dudoight]

I agree w/ you. The 50’s was the last generation to grow up in innocence. When drugs and sex dominated the culture...traditional values were flushed down the toilet. Civil rights and racial equality were the only good things to come from the 60’s.

[TKDietz]

Aside from the fact that blaming a whole generation is just wrong, Baby Boomers didn’t do half the stuff they are blamed for. They just followed the lead of people that were older than them. Most of them were children in the 60’s. A lot of them were born in the 60’s. If you look back at the big influential names of the 60’s you will find almost all were people born before the Baby Boom, in many cases decades before it, like Timothy Leery for instance who was born in 1925. In politics today, Baby Boomers are just now really getting to where they are taking over the reins. They’re just now becoming the majority of Congress but won’t be the majority in the Senate for a few years. The Supreme Court won’t have a Boomer majority for quite some time. We’ve had a couple of Baby Boomer presidents, but their advisers, the legislative branch they’ve had to work with and so on, not to mention the older voters who actually get out and vote that they’ve had to appease, have mostly been people born before the Baby Boom. Now that’s finally changing. The Baby Boomers are becoming the elders of our society, the most powerful group. The oldest is now 61 and the youngest is 42, about to turn 43. They’re just reaching the point where they are the most powerful demographic and will occupy that position of power maybe for a couple more decades. If you must judge an entire generation, let them finish their turn.

[Just mythoughts]

Well I'll tell you a few things about the boomer generation that are different than the younger generations. We were kind, thoughtful, concerned, helpful and polite. I see none of these qualities in many of the self serving young people today. They would sooner run you over than step around you, that is, if they see you at all.

Your statement begs the question - who raised these self serving young people today?

[wbill]

If I may comment on this....

My first thought is that the article is correct in all facets.

Second thought is how quickly the "changeover" happened. For instance, my father went to college in the mid-60s. He said that, when it came to drugs, he didn't know anyone that used anything harder than beer. I went to college in the late 80s. I hardly knew anyone who *didn't* use illegal drugs - or who hadn't at least tried them.

Final thought is to truly assess blame. I think that it sits with the media. The vast majority of Baby Boomers were *NOT* dope smoking, free loving, tree hugging, Woodstock-listening Hippies. Plenty of Freepers can attest to this. However, the media grabbed onto that tiny minority and mainstreamed them, with the resulting consequences detailed in above article. Further, the media is still doing it with any one of a multitude of 60s retrospectives giving a nostaligic look back at the drug/sex/protest/etc culture of the 60s.

I find these retrospectives particularly disgusting. Who pines for the days that you spent protesting good men, days that you can't remember (from drugs) anyway? Sad, really. My best days are in front of me - and even in my 50s (like these pathetic boomers) I'll still think the same thing.

/rant off

[Colonel Kangaroo]

Another cover boy for "Generation X":

[Nea Wood]

Bravo! I, too, am sick of the boomer-bashing on this site. There are good and bad people in all generations.

[RetiredArmyMajor]

I am sick and tired of the Boomer bashing. MOST of us have worked hard our entire lives. MIllIONS of us volunteered to serve in the military in Vietnam AND after, who do you think it was who manned the defenses that brought down the Soviet Union during the Cold War? Who do you think fought Desert Storm? Who do you think LEADS the current military? WE didn’t put in place the “Great Society” or Medicaid. WE didn’t put the judges on the Supreme Court that decided “Rowe”. WE weren’t the ones in Power in DC that bungled bothe Korea and Vietnam. We weren’t the ones who broke the piggy bank that was the “Greatest Generation” (Welfare, Medicare and Social Security).

Sorry but I have NOTHING TO APPOLOGIZE FOR.

Before exploding like a pumpkin under a tractor-trailer tire, you might review Prager's column more carefully. He closed with:

"So we really blew it, and what's really amazing is that few of us have changed our minds. Most people get wiser as they get older. But not those of us baby boomers who still believe these things. Of course, many of us never bought into these awful ideas that have so hurt you and our country, and some of us have grown up. But many of us still talk, think, dress and curse the same as we did in the '60s and '70s. And we're still fighting what we consider the real Axis of Evil: American racism, sexism and imperialism.

But for those of us who know the damage baby boomers as a whole did to you, a heartfelt apology."

He quite clearly said that not all Boomers bought into the infantile values and psychology of the general Boomer population.

What in Algore's Holy Name did you do? Start typing your post halfway through his column and just not get around to reading the rest of it?

FWIW, the Greatest Generation was not as political as succeeding generations were . . . and were caught off guard by Roe v. Wade and other early leftist trimphs. No one ever said the Greatest Generation was perfect. But surviving the Great Depression, winning the world war against fascism and then winning the Cold War against communism still overwhelms the accomplishments of the Boomer generation -- probably by 10:1.

As a Boomer myself, one who grew up poor in the South and immediately went into the military as most young Southern males have tended to do, I was spared being exposed to the debilitating Boomer culture. And praise God for that.

Frankly, I think Prager understates the case. I had come to the same conclusion about the Boomers around 15 years ago.

[wtc911]

He does post here frequently.

[stentorian conservative]

Oh well damn then. And all these years I thought I could count or at the very least know where and when my husband was fighting tyranny. (then and now.Jan 2008 QRF) But your right, the boomers can take all the credit lest they throw a temper tantrum.

[Colonel Kangaroo]

There are good and bad people in all generations.

Thats the simple truth that is so lost in all this talk about artificial divisions between generations that are merely the product of pop sociology nonsense. Somebody's bright idea in order to sell books and make money is taken too seriously by too many people.

[Scotsman will be Free]

What’s this “we” crap? You french or something? Had I been king for a day, you could point your finger at me. Otherwise, fuggetaboutit.

[ImpBill]

Thank you brother. I’m with you.

[Colonel Kangaroo]

Oh well damn then. And all these years I thought I could count or at the very least know where and when my husband was fighting tyranny. (then and now.Jan 2008 QRF) But your right, the boomers can take all the credit lest they throw a temper tantrum.

Why shouldn't we take all the credit? We might as well. We all get all the blame for every evil in the world. That's merely the logic of the generational broad brush.

[Wings-n-Wind]

Hey Prager...

Sorry buddy-ro...
No apols here...