Posted on 01/01/2011 3:37:02 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
In keeping with a generation’s fascination with itself, the time has come to note the passing of another milestone: On New Year’s Day, the oldest members of the Baby Boom Generation will turn 65, the age once linked to retirement, early bird specials and gray Velcro shoes that go with everything.
Though other generations, from the Greatest to the Millennial, may mutter that it’s time to get over yourselves, this birthday actually matters. According to the Pew Research Center, for the next 19 years, about 10,000 people “will cross that threshold” every day — and many of them, whether through exercise or Botox, have no intention of ceding to others what they consider rightfully theirs: youth.
This means that the 79 million baby boomers, about 26 percent of this country’s population, will be redefining what it means to be older, and placing greater demands on the social safety net. They are living longer, working longer and, researchers say, nursing some disappointment about how their lives have turned out. The self-aware, or self-absorbed, feel less self-fulfilled, and thus are racked with self-pity.
[snip]
“But the pig has moved through the python, and is moving to the final stage,” Mr. Gillon said. “And we won’t describe what that stage is.”
Here is an attempt: retirement, old age, then a release to a place where the celestial Muzak plays a never-ending loop of the Doobie Brothers.
..... In addition to testing the sustainability of entitlement programs like Social Security, this wholesale redefinition of old age may also include a pervading sense that life has been what might technically be called a “bummer.”
A study...indicates that the suicide rate for middle-aged people, notably baby boomers without college degrees, rose from 1999 to 2005. ......
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The crappy health care coming down the pike will help alleviate the situation by eliminating a lot of us taking up too much (fill in the blank).
My attitude towards the whole thing is simply give me back the money I contributed to SS. I don’t care about any interest or even my employers share.
I’ll take care of my self from this point on.
Right on, EBH. I’ll be 60 my next birthday, and I really resent being lumped in with the aging hippie movement. I was the total opposite in my teens,twenties, and all through adulthood—very conservative, never tried drugs, and (though no one will believe me) have never had a drink. In fact, my husband was a naval officer during Vietnam and returned to hoots and disrespect from the liberal fellow Boomers. Been busy with a 39-year marriage, four kids, and six grandkids. Been busy teaching college and trying to counter the constant brainwashing today’s students are subjected to. I don’t need know-it-alls to lecture ME about ANYTHING. If anything, THEY should be sitting at MY feet, learning a thing or two.
The Kenyan plans to abort the baby boom generation.
The NY Times continues its contempt for the generation which actually worked for a living, paid taxes and supported free-loading Democrat voters.
"Ascribing personality traits to a bloc of 79 million people is a fool's endeavor. For one thing, people born in 1964 wouldn't know the once-ubiquitous television hero Sky King if he landed his trusty Songbird on their front lawns, just as people born in 1946 wouldn't quite know what to make of one of Sky King's successors, the big-headed H. R. Pufnstuf.
"For another, the never-ending celebration of the hippie contingent of boomers tends to overshadow the Young Americans for Freedom contingent. After all, while some boomers were trying to "levitate" the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War, other boomers were fighting in that war."
I agree with most of what you said, except for any expectation that boomers should be "thanked" for supporting those who came before us. We are not due any thanks for having been mandated to knowingly participate in a Ponzi scheme.
I also agree that it is our duty to collect as much as possible as quickly as possible to destroy through participation that which we could not destroy through the legislature.
You are right. My writing was more rhetorical than a request for a true "Thank you."
The previous generations knew full well they were laying the burden of payment to them on us.
We did knowingly participate but we did so at the point of a Government employee's gun and the threat of confiscation of everything we owned if we did not participate. The older generations had the numbers to out vote us at every turn to repeal this garbage and also the uneducated of our generation chipped in their votes to continue the handouts.
I will agree with some of what you write but you must remember the "Greatest Generation" planned their retirements on our, and our grandchidren's, backs. Social Security is just one of their schemes. The rest are the now underfunded gold plated retirement packages they negociated through their unions that we are now bailing out through all the "stimulus" packages being rammed through Congress.
It was not hard to have such a great economy after you just finished blowing up all the other industrialized nations on the planet (WWII).
Their hubris was thinking that they could do what they did and think it would last forever, based on an ever increasing population and not taking to account certain nations would rebuild themselves and become players in the world industrial market.
We were complicit in that we allowed the uneducated leftists to not only set the Nation's political agenda but allowed those same uneducated idiots to takeover our entire education structure from Kindergarten through college, thus creating untold millions of airheads who think Government payouts are not only the norm but the proper way to do business and save for retirement.
Amen to your post!
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