baby boomers, doves or dogs?

[Eddie Bettano]

 "The Worst Generation"
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

The next great generation? Y



__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com