Baby boomers, angels or devils?

Beltane                                           Waxing Planting Moon

Baby boomers, angels or devils?  As part of the bleeding edge of the boomer generation, born in 1947, and step-parent to a Gen-Xer who often articulated his frustration with us all, I have had the full boomer experience plus listened to and read many critiques:  self-involved, cowards, greedy, idealistic (in a pejorative sense), hypocritical.  You might summarize it by this phrase:  Not the Greatest Generation.

Were there the yuppies who only provided the then current manifestation of suburban oxford cloth striving?  Of course.  Were their Vietnam War era protesters who were cowards?  Sure.  Did many who critiqued Emerson’s notion of the establishment end up part of it and indistinguishable from those there before them? Had to be.  I’m sure if we did a generational breakdown of the folks involved in the latest banking scandals we would find many boomers among them.  Greedy?  Hell, yeah. Clinton and Bush were our Boomer presidents.  Uh oh.  Did many boomers have dreams of a back to the land paradise that devolved into something much less?  Oh, yes.  I had the Peaceable Kingdom, for example.

All these critiques are valid.  And they would be valid for any generation.  They only express the ongoing critique of American culture as materialist.  It is a critique based in fact.

History will be kinder to the Baby Boomers than the keyhole history used to validate sweeping criticisms.  Why?  Because as a generation we sacrificed ourselves and our lives over and over again.  We provided allies to and were a direct part of the Civil Rights struggle.  When our country interfered in a millennia old civil war in Southeast Asia, using as a rationale a bankrupt understanding of communism, we stood against it.  When women began to push back against the leftists of the day and the whole patriarchal culture, we again provided allies and were a direct part of the struggle.  While many of us blended back into the cultural establishment we had critiqued, which is no surprise, many of us stayed out.  We joined the Peace Corps.  We worked in community organizing, community based economic development, community health clinics.  We stood in solidarity with working people and were working people.  We supported the poor and were poor.

We put our own beliefs and our own received values again and again into the alembic of radical critique.  We changed our hearts, transvaluated our values and moved on to the next struggle.  Yes, we were then and are now guilty of idealism, of believing we need a more just, verdant and peaceful world, as the NPR sponsor says.  Our lives have not been easy, they have often been painful estranged lives, wandering from one inner journey to another, searching always searching, traveling this ancientrail, then another.  This is the stuff of epochal change, of shifting the zeitgeist.

Has that change always gone in the direction we intended or hoped?  Never does.  Has much of the change we sought produced the conservation reaction we saw in Reagan, the Moral Majority, the Christian Right?  Yes, but always remember Alinsky, the action is in the reaction.  The view of history is long.  Once the reactions have settled down, as they may be beginning to now, it will become more obvious that baby boomers paid with the coin of their own lives to gain both victories and defeats.

We rode and shaped a shift from a manufacturing based economy to a knowledge based economy, from a white majoritarian male world to a world with an appreciation for difference, a world in which women have surged ahead, a world in which war no longer stands for glory and is questioned at every turn,  a world in which the world matters.  These are not bad things.  They are good things.  Very good things.

Were we responsible for them?  No.  Did we act as the agents of the change? Yes, we did.  We shaped and were shaped by the chaotic, violent, bigoted world into which we were born.  When the last boomer is dead, our legacy will be a different set of problems from the ones we inherited.  That’s the way culture and history works.


2 Responses to Baby boomers, angels or devils?

  1. Your ascertions that history will vindicate your generation is rooted in the validation that “Boomers” are now starting to seek on behalf of their own legacy. Yes, you marched with Dr. King and followed JFK into the Peace Corps, but where is that passion today? Just as soon as your forebears were gone, the majority of your generation faded into a conservative revolt to the percieved socialism of the LBJ and FDR eras. You personally may have followed the road not taken, but any attempt to justify your generation as a whole is ultimately a foolish endeavar.

    In the process of protesting, rallying, or sitting-in, you also inadvertantly pushed a culture of un-protected sex, indiscriminate drug-use, and ended with a devil may care attitude toward veterans returning from Vietnam (many of whom were drafted without choice). You say you risked your lives, but you villified the soldiers returning from Vietnam who truly put their lives on the line. Were some of you “allies” with feminists, civil rights leaders, or anti-war activists? Yes you were, but only when it suited the co-dependent needs of your youth, i.e. your need to rebel. Dr. King advocated for civil rights beginning in the mid-fifties, long before you came to the show. Hubert Humphrey spoke against racial segregation in 1948. Were you even born by then? Eleanor Roosevelt push feminine rights in the 1930’s when the nation was caught in the Great Depression. Where were you then? I appreciate rock n’ roll, but you can keep the drugs and the casual sex. I apprexciate the personal computer, but my generation brought about its true potential.

    I truly have no desire to live in the past, whether it be positive or negative, but as the ‘boomers’ retire, the state of America left in its wake is a mess my generation will be forced to clean up and that includes ensuring the viability of YOUR golden years. With that said, a bit more respect may be in order.

  2. It’s clear that there will continue to be disagreement about the legacy of the Baby Boom. That makes sense and cnerlien has a right to his/her view.

    The state of America today will require all the energy and creativity the youth and young adults have. I agree.

    This is the kind of thing that gets settled a hundred years from now. I have my point of view, others have their own.

    Glad to offer a space for the debate.