Not Boomers?
Same technicality might be applied to the musicians at Woodstock etc. The 1945 birthday technicality is not the way this generational sociology works, as livius seems to me to acknowledge.
Sociology is a science of generalizations that can still hold useful though the conclusions can be attacked in just such a way. If you do not accept sociology as a science, then that is fine. My son is so. We cannot discuss sociology without first laying ground rules. He thinks that any generalization can be defeated with a single counterexample, but he has agreed that on some level there is “something there” when it comes to sociology, so he mentally adjusts himself and then we have a good discussion.
Really there is nothing about Powell or Mueller emblematic of the Boomers. And spare me the condescending prattle about sociology: I’ll leave it to your son to be stuck with that.
The musicians at Woodstock were mostly not Boomers, nor were the “Generation of ‘68” who led the European riots, nor were people like Abie Hoffman.
The actual Boomers were young and impressionable enough to be whipped up by them...and they were also being taught by some awful anti-American leftists, including some who had come back from WWII and gotten their degrees under the GI Bill.
Believe me, I’m a legitimate Boomer who grew up in NYC and went to public school and even one of the “elite” schools. It was a solid indoctrination in anti-Americanism by people at least 10 years older than we were.