There has been much debate recently regarding American baby boomers’ overall merit as a generation. A “generational war” was predicted decades ago, as it became apparent that boomers and millennials would battle over limited resources, and recent criticism directed at the former by the latter can be seen as part of this struggle. Beyond the economic considerations, there is much at stake regarding who wins the war, as we know that history is written by the winners.
As boomers course through their third act of life toward the big Woodstock in the sky, it’s time that the question is asked, and in the most simplistic terms possible: Historically speaking, and acknowledging that the jury is still to some extent out, are baby boomers a good or bad generation?
Full disclosure: I am unapologetically pro-boomer, a not-surprising thing, given that I was born in the sweet spot of the birth spike of the generation that came to be known as baby boomers because of their high numbers. As well, I have some personal experience with pretty much all of the seminal moments (most notably duck-and-cover drills, the Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK, the first moon landing, and the counterculture era’s final hurrah, Woodstock) that are commonly associated with the group.
This historical legacy has become so familiar that it understandably seems like to some as a documentary that one has watched too many times, part of the reason for the widespread antipathy directed at the group. Baby boomer bashing has long been in vogue, of course, with the “Me Generation” earning its selfish reputation in the hedonistic 1970s and its greed-is-good image in the materialistic 1980s.
Recently, however, criticism directed towards boomers has ramped up, a byproduct of the negative feelings many younger people have about older people in general. Boomers comprise “a bloated pile of historical ego and overinflated cultural self-importance,” wrote Jason Notte in thestreet.com in 2014, a typical example of the tendency among some Gen Xers and millennials to dismiss older Americans’ contributions to society that continue to this day.
In a nutshell, according to many boomer-critics out there, the generation deserves principal blame for most, if not all, of the biggest problems of the country and the world. “Boomers soaked up a lot of economic opportunity without bothering to preserve much for the generations to come,” posited Jim Tankersley, a writer for the Washington Post, the following year, thinking that their main legacy was having “burned a lot of cheap fossil fuels and filling the atmosphere with heat-trapping gases.”
If boomers’ collective past has been portrayed as either much ado about nothing or environmentally disastrous, according to such critics, their future is nothing short of apocalyptic. Because of their numbers and greedy tendencies, this theory (backed up by many economists), posits that boomers will wreck the American economy and health care system as they age, with millennials having to pick up the tab. Some go even further by saying it’s time boomers just got out of the way and allow younger generations to make their own mark in society, a classic case of ageism that has no place in American society. Putting older people on an ice flow to let them float away, as the (factually false) Eskimo legend goes, would seem to suit such boomer haters just fine.
It’s clear by now that boomers have no interest in going gently into that good night (or even to a retirement community in Florida), so we all should get used to the idea of having them around for at least the next couple of decades. This is actually a very good thing, I believe, as some of the boomers’ greatest contributions to society lie ahead. (The retirement of retirement is one such thing, and their philanthropic ways another.)
Often overlooked in such hostile accusations and misinformed predictions are the startling array of achievements that baby boomers have realized since the first one was born almost three-quarters of a century ago. Growing up in the Cold War, when it was commonly believed that the world could blow up at any point, gave boomers a sense of urgency to accomplish great things, many of which they actually did. Boomers fought bravely in the Vietnam War, led a cultural revolution grounded in the noble ideas of peace and equality, and then embarked on careers that propelled this nation to become the most powerful and wealthiest in civilization. Along the way, they popularized if not downright invented things like rock 'n' roll, the computer, and the internet, all the while giving more money away to worthy causes than any previous generation.
There is no doubt that boomers were undeniably fortunate to have come of age during the latter half of the amazing “American Century”; they greatly benefited from the incredible scientific and technological strides made in the post-war years and happened to be in the right place at the right time when the nation was ready to reinvent itself in the late '60s. Launching and continuing their careers in the economically advantageous 1980s and 1990s was also good timing, and the steady upward tick of the stock market and escalation of real estate prices over the last couple of decades has only added to the net worth of many boomers.
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While this is admittedly a rejoinder against the rising tide of vitriol directed at the group, I fully recognize that the generation has not fully lived up to its potential. Many have abused their physical selves in a manner to make them as a group less healthy than they could and perhaps should have been at an advanced age, given their obsession with “naturalness” when young. (“I would have treated my body better had I known I would have lived this long” is a commonly heard refrain.)
As well, some of the boomers’ preferences in popular culture over the years were questionable at best (I personally apologize for disco and the urban cowboy craze of the late 1970s and early 1980s), and they undeniably took conspicuous consumption to an entirely new level. More recently, boomers have failed to form any kind of significant coalition to fight virulent ageism, instead futilely trying to hang on to the remnants of their rapidly fading youth. Given their roots in social activism, this is a lost opportunity, and I urge my fellow boomers to take on the cause in their third act of living in the same way that they combated racial and gender prejudice and unjust war in their first and second acts.
