The Baby Boomers Failed

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Let’s be honest with ourselves for a minute here; let’s face it.  The baby boomers is an example of a failed generation.

Can you honestly say that the world is better off today than it was before they took charge?

I mourn the people I see around me who were raised by idiots who bought into the hype of the 1960’s.  Liberalism has destroyed this country.

But how did this happen?  Was it the drinking water or Japanese atomic winds that mutated the young boomers’ genetics into some kind of self-actualized bastardization of humanity?  Personally, I blame Hitler.

Check it out.  Our grandparents, “the finest generation”, were drafted to go kill Nazis in 1942.  This really sucked a lot of ass for them.  Even the ones who were too young to see combat were still immersed in a war culture and looked up to young men who were shaped and hardened by war, discipline, and order.  You did your job or the guy in the foxhole next to you gets his head shot off.  All because Hitler had a tiny dick.  Oh, and he also invaded Poland.

So now you’ve got a society inherited by our grandparents.  You get unions, and somehow we get John F. Kennedy.  Their kids, who were raised to be little soldiers, come to the bright conclusion of, “fuck this shit” and alternatively, “hell no, we won’t go.”  They see how their parents did it — far too “right” — too militaristic, disciplinarian, orderly, fascist — that they have to swing too far left to compensate.  Now you get the 60’s and hippies.

Here’s where everything goes horribly wrong.  And it goes horribly wrong because our parents, in their infinite 20 year-old wisdom, come to the conclusion that drugs are good, sex is good, and doing anything the way it was done before is bad.  The result is the Age of Aquarius and what has become modern liberal thinking.

Of course, modern liberal thinking suffers from a serious problem that nobody ever seems to mention.  The 60’s liberal movement was based on the premise that everything in the past was done wrong and that they alone knew the secret to enlightenment.  Take a step back and think about that for a minute.

Does it sound even remotely feasible to you that a group of kids with longer hair than their parents could possibly know how to live their lives to achieve happiness and fulfillment better than every other generation before them?  I hate to break it to you, kids, but there have been thousands of generations before yours and there will be thousands after.  What makes you so special?

“The times they are a changin’” … but were they?  Our parents, the all-knowing Boomers, decided to discard every ounce of traditional wisdom about how to be happy in life in favor of smoking weed and listening to new edgy music like The Beatles and … *gasp* … Jimmy Hendrix!  Society wasn’t brick and mortar any more — theirs was a generation where ideals were as good as facts.  If you give poor people money, they will use it to escape poverty and help contribute to Utopia.  As long as my drug use doesn’t directly affect anyone else, it should be perfectly legal and will have absolutely no consequences.  Let’s get married for love and only love.  I think there’s a Shakespeare play that says that, right?

Wrong.  You were wrong.  And your children, and everyone else, is paying the price.

If your parents were born in the period between 1940 and 1960, you’re screwed.  You have inherited a world in abject disrepair that we are charged with fixing.  Politically, the Boomers will continue to live and vote themselves into office until we can finally be rid of them and actually bring back some common, instinctual sense. We live in a Western cultural wasteland that I am afraid we are simply too stupid and incapable to fix.  And why?

Because our parents have no idea how to be happy.  We were raised by them, and they can’t give us any good advice.  They’re all divorced, self-centered, and doped out on anti-depressants.  How are we supposed to know how to live to find happiness?

Look at what the average person in the 40-50 age group did, and …

Here’s where it gets tricky: if you ask a Boomer, he’ll finish that sentence with: “the exact opposite!”

That’s how and why they got themselves into trouble and ruined the world.  They blindly discarded everything their parents knew and did because they knew better.  But they were wrong.  The answer is:

Look at what the average person in the 40-50 age group did, and figure out what made them so unhappy, and avoid that.

The biggest single factor: divorce.  Divorce makes everyone unhappy.

This isn’t an easy task.  You could easily argue that I’m doing exactly what my parents did: reject the old, because I know better.  But there’s a key difference here.  I don’t believe that I know better.  I believe that former generations — my ancestors — did know better.  Unfortunately, the Boomers forgot it all, and my grandparents are dead.  So I’m on my own.

In addition to adamantly rejecting the possibility of divorce, I also reject many of the tenets of Boomer culture.  Here are some that have worked for me so far:

• Forget how something sounds on paper or in theory.  How does it work in practice?  If there’s one value that the Boomers threw away entirely it’s practical thinking.  This is evidenced in everything from romantic for-love marriages up to the war in Iraq.  Sure, in theory, the Iraqis want to be free.  On the planet Earth, they like to worship Allah and kill the other kind of Muslim and have civil wars and gas each other.  In theory, everyone should be free to do whatever they want, but in practice, society suffers.  In theory, socialism is awesome.  In practice, it’s at best capitalism + bribes and at worse, it’s Joe Stalin.  The Boomers couldn’t get around this idea, which is why we have things like Earth Day and the feminist movement.
• Proverbs kick ass.  A bird in the hand is better than two in the bush.  A penny saved is a penny earned.  Look before you leap.  These tiny little sayings were “square” in 1960.  Proverbs contain more truth per sentence than anything you will read anywhere.  In fact, you should leave this blog immediately to go google proverbs.  Read them and use them.  Your life will instantly improve by orders of magnitude.
• Your actions always influence other people.  If you think that you can sit around in your house and smoke heroin all day and that’s okay because you’re not robbing people to pay for it therefore you are not impacting society, you’re wrong.  You are, because your very existence serves as an example to other people.  We are a culture, a society, an a nation, and we are cooperating.  If you choose to do things that contribute to nothing other than your own happiness, you are hurting everyone else.  Because at some level, we’re propping you up.  Here’s a question that a Boomer will never ask: “If everyone is doing what I’m doing, will that be OK for my society?”
• Listen to your heart, not your brain.  Your brain is usually wrong.  Your heart almost never is.  Instincts — gut feelings — are you.  Whatever complex logic and rationale you may use to justify things like buying that shit you don’t need, cheating on your lover, voting for Hillary Clinton, etc., is all bogus.  Your emotions drive you.  Your brain is just along for the ride.

I could go on forever but I’m already starting to sound preachy.  Take a closer look at the culture your parents created and ask yourself if it’s something you really want to perpetuate.  Let’s forge a better path based on sanity.  That would be totally fetch.

Boomers: you fucked up.  Thanks a lot.

The Worst Generation

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by Paul Begala

I hate the Baby Boomers. They're the most self-centered, self-seeking, self-
interested, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing generation in
American history. As they enter late middle age, the Boomers still can't grow
up. Guys who once dropped acid are now downing Viagra; women who once eschewed
lipstick are now getting liposuction. 

I know it's a sin to hate, so let me put it this way: If they were animals,
they'd be a plague of locusts, devouring everything in their path and leaving
but a wasteland. If they were plants, they'd be kudzu, choking off ever other
living thing with their sheer mass. If they were artists, they'd be abstract
expressionists, interested only in the emotions of that moment -- not in the
lasting result of the creative process. If they were a baseball club, they'd be
the Florida Marlins: prefab prima donnas who bought their way to prominence,
then disbanded -- a temporary association but not a team.

Of course, it is as unfair to demonize an entire generation as it is to
characterize an entire gender or race or religion. And I don't literally mean
that everyone born between 1946 and 1964 is a selfish pig. But generations can
have a unique character that defines them, especially if they are the elites of
a generation -- those lucky few who are blessed with the money or brains or
looks or skills or education that typifies an era. Whether is was Fitzgerald and
Hemingway defining the Lost Generation of World War I and the Roaring Twenties,
or JFK and the other heroes of the World War II generation, or the high-tech
whiz kids of the post-Boomer generation, certain archetypes define certain
times.

You know who you are. If you grew your hair and burned your draft card on campus
during the Sixties; if you toked, screwed, and boogied your way through the
Seventies; if you voted for Reagan and believed "Greed is good" in the Eighties;
and if you're trying to make up for it now by nesting as you cluck about the
collapse of "family values," you're it. If not, even if demographers call you a
Boomer, you probably hate our generation's elite as much as I do.

Let's start with the Sixties, the Boomers' dilettante ball. While a few
courageous people like John Lewis and the Freedom Riders risked their lives --
and others like Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner gave theirs
-- the civil-rights movement was led by pre-Boomers like Martin Luther King Jr.
(who would be 71 if he were alive today) and continued without strong support
from the Boomers on college campuses.

Still, I must say this: If you were one of those young people who did risk their
lives to fight racism in the Sixties, who put their bodies on the line to
register voters, who marched and sang and taught and preached against
segregation, you stand as the best refutation of my anti-Boomer tirade. In that
one moment of conscience and courage, you did more with your life than I've done
in all the moments of mine. In a generation of selfish pigs, you were saints.

But the reality is that most campuses did not become hotbeds of unrest until the
Boomers' precious butts were at risk as the Vietnam War escalated. They didn't
want to end the war because they were bothered by working-class kids being blown
apart; if they had been, they wouldn't have spat on those working-class kids
when they came home from Vietnam, or tried to make heroes out of the Communists
who were trying to kill them.

Yet as troubling as that may be, the Sixties were in many ways the Boomers'
finest moment. It was at least a fad then to pretend to care about racial
justice at home and war abroad, to speak out against pollution and prejudice.
But it was mostly just talk. As they came of age, and as idealism might have
required some real sacrifice, idealism suddenly became unfashionable.

And so the Boomers careened into the Seventies without a thought to picking up
where King and the Kennedys left off. Without a war to threaten them, their
selfishness came into full bloom. You know the results: Drug abuse, once a
boutique curse of hip musicians, became more common than the clap. And speaking
of sexually transmitted diseases, the Boomers began to fornicate with such
abandon that rabbits we asking them to cool their jets. They didn't invent sex
or drugs or rock 'n' roll, but they damned near ruined them all.

And don't give me this crap about Boomer music. The Beatles were all born before
the end of the war. So was Janis. So while the Boomers can claim they had the
good taste to listen to gifted pre-Boomers, when it came their turn to make
music, the truest expression of their generation, what did they give us?

Disco.

The generation that came before the Boomers gave them Dylan. The Boomers gave us
KC and the Sunshine Band. Thanks a lot.

Unfair? Perhaps it is a bit of an overstatement. Some friends of mine have
suggested it's an outrage to ignore Baby Boomer Bruce Springsteen, for one. True
enough.

But even more than music, our remarkable economy is what drives and defines the
times we live in today. And as the generation in the economic driver's seat, the
Boomers should get the credit for building this remarkable prosperity, right?

Well, not quite. Nothing can detract from the breathtaking entrepreneurship of
Boomers like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. But what's interesting is that much of
today's prosperity owes its origins more to the high-tech young nerds of the
post-Boom generation than to the Boomers themselves. The most vital role the
Boomers have in the current economy is to sit on their brains and invest in
post-Boomer high-tech start-ups. The same folks who sponged off their parents
when they were young are now, as they age, getting rich off the industry of
their younger brothers and sisters.

Boomer political and economic values reached their most perfect expression under
pre-Boomer president Ronald Reagan in the Eighties: Screw your neighbor, lay off
the factory workers, shuffle a lot of paper, build an economy in which a few
people get the gold mine and most people get the shaft. It is telling that when
he ran for reelection, Reagan got higher support among Boomers than he did from
his fellow older Americans. Perhaps some of the Greatest Generation saw the
selfishness in Reaganism and turned away from it. And perhaps the Boomers saw
those same qualities, that savage selfishness, and embraced it.

In the long run, will it matter that one generation was so spectacularly
selfish? Maybe not. In a great karmic irony, the Worst Generation may in turn be
raising another great one. Having taught the children of the Baby Boomers off an
on for five years now, at the University of Texas at Georgetown, I find them to
be the opposite of everything I despise about their parents -- they are engaged
in their communities, spending endless hours volunteering to build housing for
the poor or to feed the homeless. They are concerned about their classmates,
having calmed down the PC mania and replaced it with a sensible sensitivity to
the feelings of others. They care about the future and are concerned about their
grandparents. They are more responsible in their private lives and more engaged
in our public life. I have no idea whether it's because of the Boomers or in
spite of them.

Greatest Generation chronicler Tom Brokaw has the difference pegged: "The World
War II generation did what was expected of them. But they never talked about it.
It was part of the Code. There's no more telling metaphor than a guy in a
football game who does what's expected of him -- makes an open-field tackle --
then gets up and dances around. When Jerry Kramer threw the block that won the
Ice Bowl in '67, he just got up and walked off the field."

That kind of self-effacing dignity is wholly alien to the Boomer elite. But when
that day comes, when they finally walk off the field -- or what's left of the
field -- a few of us who've been trailing behind them will be doing a little
dance of our own.

- ESQUIRE, April 2000

Baby Boomers: The Ungreatest Generation

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The United States today is in a dismal state of affairs—as far perhaps as it is possible to be from the mythical American Dream of peace, prosperity, security, and unity without fomenting open rebellion in the ranks of the citizenry. If you’re in doubt about why this is, just stop to ponder who’s running the country these days and what that means. In virtually every walk of American life—certainly in government, business, and academe—the Baby Boomers are fully in charge, and it isn’t a pretty sight. In fact, it’s downright ugly.

In the interest of full disclosure, I herewith admit to being a card-carrying Boomer myself and not especially proud of it. Not completely ashamed yet, not altogether embarrassed, but certainly not proud.

Just look at the “leaders” we’ve put forward over the past fourteen years to represent us—as president and vice president, as Cabinet and sub-Cabinet officials, as party front men on both sides of Capitol Hill. To put it charitably, euphemistically, they’ve given new meaning to the concept of leadership. I needn’t name names; you know who they are. And though some of them, and others like them, had already shed their diapers by 1946, Vietnam was their formative life experience, and they have been card-carrying practitioners of the Boomer ethos ever since.

These individuals aren’t the brightest or best, nor the most virtuous or competent, among us. Quite the opposite in most cases. But they’re clearly the most ambitious; as such, they define who we are and how history will remember (or forget) us.

Whatever we Boomers may have been or done in our individual capacities, on the big matters that legacies are made of we have been outclassed, out of our depth, unable to offer the strategic leadership that would leave something of value to posterity. Most importantly, we have shown ourselves singularly incapable of greatness.

Maybe there’s something to former NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw’s claim that the World War II generation was “the greatest generation any society has ever produced.” We’ll overlook the fact that they bequeathed the Cold War, nuclear weapons, and McCarthyism to the rest of us. What defined that generation (and supported the claim to greatness), Brokaw notes, was sacrifice, selflessness, modesty and, most of all, signal achievement.

By contrast, Boomers have, for the most part, never had to make significant sacrifices. We didn’t live through crippling depression, and we didn’t have to wage a grand, glorious, unifying war against regnant evil. Ours was a pointless, prolonged, desultory (and did I say pointless) war that divided the few who served from the many who didn’t and left a permanent scar on the psyche of a generation.

Boomers are anything but selfless and modest. In the main, we are totally selfish—self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-serving. Our most visible members are unrepentantly shameless self-promoters, intent on being someone rather than doing something. Given the choice between mingling with celebrities and bettering the human condition, we’ll take the former every time.

During our coming of age, when inexperience and unworldliness should have made us the most modest, we were the most impatient and intolerant. We had all the answers, even if we didn’t understand the questions.

Hypercritical then, we are hypocritical now. Those who refused to serve when it was our turn are now among the most strident, hawkish flag wavers around. And most of those who were vehemently anti-establishment then have now sold out to (or bought into) “the system.”

Most notably, there’s the matter of achievement. Remember the famous lines from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night? “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ‘em.” Given the improbability of being born great and the random infrequency of great events, true greatness is almost all about achievement.

So, have we Boomers achieved anything worthy of the ages? The answer, plain and simple, is no. We’ve been too busy getting ahead. Greatness requires vision, courage, and boldness, none of which we have to offer. We’re reformed malcontents turned myopic creatures of convention, perpetuators and exploiters of the status quo, technocrats posing as statesmen. Opportunism is our motive force, rhetoric our métier.

From us you’ve not gotten, and won’t get, sweeping new ideas, institutions, or initiatives that can live in perpetuity and inspire future generations. We still don’t have a clue how to get beyond the Cold War (much less how to extricate ourselves from the Iraq debacle with the country’s dignity intact), or how to achieve comprehensive health care, reform education, or rid politics of the corrupting influence of money. Surely you don’t expect us then to live up to the rhetoric of our youth and eliminate poverty, injustice, or war, craft an enduring post-millennial ideology, or create futuristic global institutions. What’s in it for us?

There’s a verse of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s that is relevant here:

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And departing, leave behind us,
Footprints on the sand of time.

How regrettable that my generation, oblivious to what it takes to achieve sublimity, seems destined to leave no imprint—no positive imprint, that is—on the sand of time.

Gregory D. Foster is a professor at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, National Defense University, Washington, D.C., where he previously has served as George C. Marshall Professor and J. Carlton Ward Distinguished Professor and Director of Research. The views expressed here are his own. He can be reached at fosterg@ndu.edu.

The Baby Boomers Suck!

This is just a collections of writings on how the Baby Boom generation is the worst generation in modern history.