Boomer Bust

It's not all their fault:

It’s useful to attempt to categorize generations when you’re trying to make sense out of how our culture has evolved and how people born in different eras faced different challenges. But their utility dwindles the moment we forget that all of these classifications are arbitrary. It’s fair enough to select 1946 as the year to commence a new generation. A horrific war had just ended, and returning veterans came home to marry and start families. They had a lot of children in those years immediately following the war. Babies born in 1946 are going to turn 80 next year, and right behind them are approximately 75 million more boomers. The youngest among them turned 60 last year. And these impressive numbers seem to lie at the crux of the beef with boomers. There are too many of them, they had easy lives, they dominate politics, and now they’re old and hanging on to all the wealth and entitlements. And, by the way, they gave us the national debt and climate change, among other catastrophes. The problem I have with Gibney’s book is not his dry humor, which I appreciate, nor his opportunistic decision to develop a polarizing argument in order to sell more books. The problem is that he picked the safest target in the world. Gibney could have written a book, rich with data and unambiguous in its condemnation of any other group, and he would have been castigated and ignored. If his target had been blacks, transsexuals, Muslims, or Jews, he would have committed career suicide. But boomers, who are old and overwhelmingly white, are fair game. But this is still playing with fire. It validates anti-white racism, pairs it with generational resentment, and encourages further polarization. It paves the way for escalating scapegoating, particularly if the economy falters. If Americans are ever reduced to truly desperate conditions, it will provide intellectual ammunition for much worse. An easily forgettable but all-too-accurate counterargument to Gibney’s boomer bashing is that the challenges facing America’s younger generations are both nobody’s fault and everybody’s fault. The causes are circumstantial, driven by an economic and cultural historical momentum that individuals and groups, and generations can influence but can’t possibly stop.

Generation gaps breed their own form of contempt...