Boomers

A couple of years ago, I went to breakfast  while I was on the road and ran into a former Marine who was also a pilot with my former employer. We got to talking about the state of the company and the pending pilot furloughs (I was let go the following January). It was funny, I never mentioned politics or the state of national affairs, but he said something that I had been feeling very strongly about for the past few months. He called Baby Boomers (our generation) a bunch of narcissists. The first thing I thought was “wow buddy, you just hit that one out of the park”. Just about everything that has happened to our society over the past forty years could be traced back to the boomers.

I’ll start with the Vietnam era and move on from there. These were the same people who protested the war. They were all about peace, love, and joy. They could not accept a war of aggression against a peace loving people who had done nothing to raise a hand against the U.S. of A. Yet here they were, folks with such open minds, tolerance and understanding, spitting on their fellow Americans, calling them baby killers and other epithets, all because they either answered a call to duty and served their country, or were unfortunate enough to have their draft number come up. They along with the mainstream media were instrumental in turning American opinion against the war. To make a long story short, Congressional funding dried up, support for the South Vietnamese government dried up, which led to its fall and the rise of regimes like the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the same people responsible nearly two million deaths of their fellow countrymen. Where was this group in calling for intervention into what became one of the most horrific genocidal episodes in human history?

Death to Disco. I’d just as soon forget that this era ever happened. The seventies was called “the decade that taste forgot” for good reason.  It was more than just that. The boomers went from bad to worse. 1960’s ideas like “if it feels good, do it” and free love were transformed.  The love-ins gave way to casual sex with complete strangers (i.e. one night stands), psychedelic drugs used to help one achieve a higher level of consciousness gave way to recreational/leisure drugs like cocaine (the choice of beautiful people). All in all, boomers became a hedonistic group who cared about nothing else but their own needs and pleasure.

I’m going to lump the ‘80’s and ‘90’s together. The focus here for the boomers was to make as much money as possible. In the ‘80’s, you had movies like Wall Street and Gordon Gecko extolling the virtues of greed. Couple that with real life characters like junk bond king Michael Milliken and you get a hint of how the focus had changed but not the underlying desire. The 90’s saw the tech bubble come and go, and with it the hopes and fortunes of those who had leveraged whatever they had with the expectation of hitting the big time or getting in on the ground floor of the next big thing. The “bottom line” truly was the bottom line.

As we begin the second decade of the new millennium, we find ourselves about to go over a precipice that could lead to this country’s ruin. The national debt clock is at nearly 16 trillion dollars and spiraling upwards, Congress and the White House have stuck us with a health care system that could break the bank and we barely keep dodging a cap and trade environmental nightmare that could hamstring U.S. industries and forestall any chance this country has of pulling off an economic recovery. The current economic downturn has erased about a third of the accumulated wealth that the boomers planned on for their retirement. As a late stage boomer, I’ve had my stash affected too, but I have the luxury of being able to work at least another 15 years to make up lost ground.

I’d love to say that I feel sorry for these folks, but they are the ones who led us astray over the past forty years. They have through avarice, arrogance, neglect, incompetence, and ignorance caused more problems that future generations are going to have to undo, not to mention the fact that my contemporaries and I will be forever lumped in with them because of when we were born. These children of the Greatest Generation, whose sacrifices over the course of two wars (World War II and Korea), whose hard work and industry helped propel this country into its position of a perpetual economic juggernaut, have been squandering the family inheritance. Their motto used to be “trust no one over thirty”, but given the times we live in, I have a new one. Trust no one over fifty.