Tom Brokaw dubbed my parents’ generation “The Greatest Generation” as a way to make up for how badly their kids trashed them in the late ’60s and 1970s. But if you want to know how great, and wonderful and what sheer perfection Boomers think they themselves are, you need only ask them. Take this article from Philadelphia magazine (please), Exhibit 1,237,322 in Boomer Triumphalism. No, this is not — I don’t think! — a parody:
We’re tired, anyway — tired from having changed the world.
We did, you know. We took the stark button-down black-and-white world we were born into and Kodachromed it, tie-dyed it, made it a rainbow of races and genders and candy-colored Spandex bike shorts. You think our force lay in numbers, but you’re wrong. It lay in the vision we had. You can’t comprehend that, because you’re [Gen X] so low-key, so small-scale, so It’s about intimacy. No. It’s not. Thomas Jefferson had it right: It’s about happiness.
AdvertisementIf you’ve ever had an honest conversation with your mom or dad, you have us to thank for it. If you get time off from work to take care of a new baby or a sick relative, you’re welcome for that. Getting a tax rebate for making your house more energy-efficient? Bike lanes, pocket parks, hate-crime laws, legalized pot, death-penalty moratoriums, organic food, space telescopes, genome-decoding — don’t you see what we were doing? We were taking the American dream to the max, pushing to its limits the pursuit of freaking happiness.
And then the party’s over, everybody wakes up with a massive hangover, and the check must be paid, as Mark Steyn wrote last year:
Like America’s political class, I have also been thinking about America circa 2020. Indeed, I’ve written a book on the subject. My prognosis is not as rosy as the Boehner-Obama deal, as attentive readers might just be able to deduce from the subtle clues in the title: “After America: Get Ready For Armageddon”. Oh, don’t worry, I’m not one of these “declinists”. I’m way beyond that, and in the express lane to total societal collapse. The fecklessness of Washington is an existential threat not only to the solvency of the republic but to the entire global order. If Ireland goes under, it’s lights out on Galway Bay. When America goes under, it drags the rest of the developed world down with it.
When I go around the country saying stuff like this, a lot of folks agree. Somewhere or other, they’ve a vague memory of having seen a newspaper story accompanied by a Congressional Budget Office graph with the line disappearing off the top of the page and running up the wall and into the rafters circa mid-century. So they usually say, “Well, fortunately, I won’t live to see it.” And I always reply that, unless you’re a centenarian with priority boarding for the Obamacare death panel, you will live to see it. Forget about mid-century. We’ve got until mid-decade to turn this thing around.
Otherwise, by 2020 just the interest payments on the debt will be larger than the U.S. military budget. That’s not paying down the debt, but merely staying current on the servicing – like when you get your MasterCard statement, and you can’t afford to pay off any of what you borrowed but you can just about cover the monthly interest charge. Except in this case the interest charge for U.S. taxpayers will be greater than the military budgets of China, Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, Italy, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Spain, Turkey and Israel combined.
When interest payments consume about 20 percent of federal revenue, that means a fifth of your taxes are entirely wasted. Pious celebrities often simper that they’d be willing to pay more in taxes for better government services. But a fifth of what you pay won’t be going to government services at all, unless by “government services” you mean the People’s Liberation Army of China, which will be entirely funded by U.S. taxpayers by about 2015. When the Visigoths laid siege to Rome in 408, the imperial Senate hastily bought off the barbarian king Alaric with 5,000 pounds of gold and 30,000 pounds of silver. But they didn’t budget for Roman taxpayers picking up the tab for the entire Visigoth military as a permanent feature of life.
And even those numbers pre-suppose interest rates will remain at their present historic low. Last week, the firm of Macroeconomic Advisors, one of the Obama administration’s favorite economic analysts, predicted that interest rates on 10-year Treasury notes would be just shy of nine percent by 2021. If that number is right, there are two possibilities: The Chinese will be able to quintuple the size of their armed forces and stick us with the tab. Or we’ll be living in a Mad Max theme park. I’d bet on the latter myself.
Or as Steyn wrote a few years earlier, “What’s the point of creating a secular utopia if it’s only for one generation?”
(Headline by Lileks; Philadelphia magazine story found by Kathy Shaidle, who writes, “Baby Boomers: this is why we hate you and can’t wait until you all die.” The clock is ticking…)
Ah yes, the “vision thing” — so to speak.
I am simply so low key and small scale, it passed me right by.
Between all the bike lanes and the organic food, you’d think we could just learn to be more sensible and appreciative of the enormous sacrifices made in this most noble quest for a healthier America and a groovy-er stack-o-entitlements, er, uh, baby.
Never mind the encircling tyranny, here’s the pursuit of “freaking happiness.”
Thanks. Thanks again.
Well, honestly, if you’re trying to take credit for either the civil rights movement or rock and roll, get over yourselves. You weren’t the ones to do it. When Elvis went on the Ed Sullivan Show, your oldest were all of 11. When Martin Luther King announced “I have a dream…”, your oldest were all of 18. You didn’t do it. You watched on the television.
And if those “button-down black-and-white” days were so icky and terrible, why is one of the most popular shows on television, including amongst baby-boomers, a show whose most salient feature is its highlighting the tastes and styles of that era?
This from those who gave us pet rocks and disco. Now, technically, I’m a boomer but all I got out of being born in the last years of the grouping was a world of bad hair, bad clothes, bad music, bad politics, bad economics, and bad crime. Then we graduated high school, Reagan was elected and there was morning in America.
Now, make no mistake, the early Boomers did change some things. As a kid who worked for me back in the early nineties put it, “The Boomers grew up and made everything they did illegal for their kids to do.” Also, they did user in the global trade by their unwillingness to put in an honest days work down a the Ford factory opening markets to quality products from foreign automakers.
To the Boomers who spent Woodstock hip deep in mud of a Southeast Asian flavor, thanks for doing your duty. To those who wallowed like swine in upstate New York, we really aren’t interested in paying for the health consequences of all that acid you dropped or STDs you spread during the summer of love.
Do you want some cheese with all that whine?
Space telescope? Genome decoding? Those are things most of the Boomers fought like hell to prevent from happening. Boomers were very anti-technology, until they discovered that technology could provide them with a never-ending stream of mindless entertainment.
I was there when the Hubble Space Telescope was built and launched. And I can tell you that there weren’t many Boomers around. That work was done by WWII and Silent Generation guys at the tail ends of their careers, and X’ers at the beginnings of theirs. Considering the very meager resources we had to work with (space telescopes don’t give anyone free money, so they’re not popular), I think we did a hell of a job.
Nice Sideshow Bob reference.
I was born in 1960. I grew up during the tumult. I did not participate. I live with the consequences, good and bad. No, I don’t have to wear an uncomfortable gray suit and ugly horn-rimmed glasses to work – especially on Casual Friday. My music is more interesting than “How Much Is That Doggie In The Window” or “Mambo Italiano.” On the other hand, it’s much harder to raise good kids because society encourages them to be bad. I’ve got lots of freedom, but on the other hand nobody cares what I do with it, which means nothing I do matters.
My story is your story, friend. I hope we still have a chance to write a better ending for that story.
It would be ironic if you could simply take the liberal baby boomers out there, toss in the medical treatment review panels created by ObamaCare® and the future control over their access to treatment Gen X and younger ‘death panel’ members will have and create basically a Logan’s Run-type society, albeit with 70 being the new 30.
(In the same vein, but on a slightly more serious note, you know that if ObamaCare® does survive, like liberal companies demanding and getting exemptions from the law from the administration, liberal senior citizen boomers will be among the first ones on line a decade or so from now demanding exemptions from the ‘death panels’, because it’s obvious they’re way too important not to get life-saving medical treatment despite their advancing years. And those will the right connections will get those free passes, while others are simply told to go home and die.)
There is so much wrong in this article it is hard to know where to begin. Blame the BBs for the cultural suicide that has been happening in Western Civilization for well over a century? The entitlement state was started before the first BB was born. You really cannot even blame The Greatest Generation since most of them were not of voting age at that time. What is surprising is the implication that teenagers in the late 60′s were supposed to have an in depth understanding of the multi-generational forces at work at that time. The BBs were a people raised in fat times with good expectations. But look at the programming…Rebel Without a Cause, Blackboard Jungle, On The Beach, Duck n Cover, Essay On Civil Disobediance, “What are you rebelling against?”, “What have you got?”. They also heard of The Lost Generation; what was that about? Then there was that running sore, Viet Nam. For anyone paying attention that little police action had been going on for years. Why didn’t John Wayne end that small war in a couple of years? So, a kid could grow up and then find out his fate was to be cannnon fodder for a feckless politically correct policy. The policy was a “war” that was never fought to win. Maybe the end of the alphabet or new century generations would have found a way to wrap their heads around that without getting jaded.
Yeah, the Baby Boomers were wild and self-indulgent. It is good to know that those that came later are perfect little sacrificing angels. But if you are worried about the economic crash that is bound to come let me give you this little bit of information. The Baby Boomers have paid far more into this Ponzi scheme that they did not create and will certainly have the most to lose when it does crash.
Black Bart
The idea that the BB’s are not responisble for the thing going over the cliff is stupid. Clearly you are still blaming others – a good sign that you are a BB
The train began to run out of control with the great society. It might even be reversed now but for the leftist BB’s that control the media, hollywood, and the burocracy
i’d say grow up but clearly its too late
Let’s see, The Great Society, I am sure there were no Boomers of voting age then. Unless you are talking about the band. Actually the band was pretty good. Maybe if you try thinking about it for a little while you will realise the Boomers did not attain real power, except as a mass market, until they were in their 30′s. Even then they just began to enter the halls of power.
You can blame whoever your young heart desires. I was merely attempting to explain that this decline began well before the first Boomer was born.