Beltane\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waxing Planting Moon<\/p>\n
Baby boomers, angels or devils?\u00a0 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:\u00a0 self-involved, cowards, greedy, idealistic (in a pejorative sense), hypocritical.\u00a0 You might summarize it by this phrase:\u00a0 Not the Greatest Generation.<\/p>\n
Were there the yuppies who only provided the then current manifestation of suburban oxford cloth striving?\u00a0 Of course.\u00a0 Were their Vietnam War era protesters who were cowards?\u00a0 Sure.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Greedy?\u00a0 Hell, yeah. Clinton and Bush were our Boomer presidents.\u00a0 Uh oh.\u00a0 Did many boomers have dreams of a back to the land paradise that devolved into something much less?\u00a0 Oh, yes.\u00a0 I had the Peaceable Kingdom, for example.<\/p>\n
All these critiques are valid.\u00a0 And they would be valid for any generation.\u00a0 They only express the ongoing critique of American culture as materialist.\u00a0 It is a critique based in fact.<\/p>\n
History will be kinder to the Baby Boomers than the keyhole history used to validate sweeping criticisms.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because as a generation we sacrificed ourselves and our lives over and over again.\u00a0 We provided allies to and were a direct part of the Civil Rights struggle.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 While many of us blended back into the cultural establishment we had critiqued, which is no surprise, many of us stayed out.\u00a0 We joined the Peace Corps.\u00a0 We worked in community organizing, community based economic development, community health clinics.\u00a0 We stood in solidarity with working people and were working people.\u00a0 We supported the poor and were poor.<\/p>\n
We put our own beliefs and our own received values again and again into the alembic of radical critique.\u00a0 We changed our hearts, transvaluated our values and moved on to the next struggle.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This is the stuff of epochal change, of shifting the zeitgeist.<\/p>\n
Has that change always gone in the direction we intended or hoped?\u00a0 Never does.\u00a0 Has much of the change we sought produced the conservation reaction we saw in Reagan, the Moral Majority, the Christian Right?\u00a0 Yes, but always remember Alinsky, the action is in the reaction.\u00a0 The view of history is long.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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,\u00a0 a world in which the world matters.\u00a0 These are not bad things.\u00a0 They are good things.\u00a0 Very good things.<\/p>\n
Were we responsible for them?\u00a0 No.\u00a0 Did we act as the agents of the change? Yes, we did.\u00a0 We shaped and were shaped by the chaotic, violent, bigoted world into which we were born.\u00a0 When the last boomer is dead, our legacy will be a different set of problems from the ones we inherited.\u00a0 That’s the way culture and history works.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Beltane\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waxing Planting Moon Baby boomers, angels or devils?\u00a0 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:\u00a0 self-involved, cowards, greedy, idealistic (in a … Continue reading Baby boomers, angels or devils?<\/span>