The Myth of the Boomer Bogeyman

 

How often the youngsters use the Boomer—sometimes, BOOMER!—when airing their grievances. Maybe they’ve created a keyboard shortcut to spit out “Boomer” with two strokes instead of six. Shift-plus-something or other. Perhaps one of them can show this Boomer how to work this consarn machine.

What you hear these days, and you hear it all the time, is that the Boomers are the root of all our ills. In January, when Neil Young demanded that Spotify defenestrate Joe Rogan or else lose the Young catalog, writer Declan Leary said Young made his announcement with “Boomer sincerity.” Maybe there is a unique Boomer form of sincerity, and maybe Young has it, but one thing Young is not is a Boomer. He was born in 1945. Neil Young belongs to the so-called Silent Generation.

“Boomer” is now an epithet for anything one does not like about the 1960s. In other words, “Boomer” now has practically no meaning whatsoever, assuming it ever did.

Creators and Consumers

The real issue is the decade of the 1960s. Someone must get the blame for the ’60s! But it isn’t the Boomers. To be sure, the first wave of the Baby Boom were the first consumers of the 1960s. But they did not create the ’60s. Those ghastly people were almost all born in the Silent Generation era and even all the way back to the Lost Generation, another essentially meaningless term.

In his otherwise masterful book, The Age of Entitlement, Christopher Caldwell argues that back in the Reagan ’80s, Boomers used resources taken from future generations to fund a “vision of an easy and indulgent lifestyle.” He says they outsourced labor and opened the door to massive immigration in order to make this easy life happen. But did Boomers play any part in that?

I am a Boomer, and I voted for Reagan, but I have no memory of voting for him in order to impose my bills on future generations. I voted for him to kill the Soviet Union, which he did, to cut taxes, which he did, and to reduce the size of government, which he didn’t. Caldwell argues Reagan made an unspoken bargain that would save the Great Society entitlement programs in exchange for lower taxes and increased defense spending that drove up the deficit and the debt, and massively increased the size of the federal government.

If the Boomers didn’t do this, then who did? Reagan’s commerce secretary, Malcolm Baldridge, was born in 1922. Donald Regan, then-secretary of the treasury, was born in 1918. The chairmen of Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers were born in 1927, 1939, and 1923, respectively. One Boomer was there, David Stockman. He was born in 1946, but he opposed what Reagan was doing.

Abbie Hoffman.

Helen Andrews wrote a whole book bashing Boomers. Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster argues that Boomers are “proud of what they did” and that their generation chalked up a number of successes. To whom did she turn? Three ’60s-era gasbags: Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, and David Crosby. Hayden said, “We ended a war, toppled two presidents, and desegregated the South.” Crosby said, “We were right about the war. We were right about the environment. We were right about civil rights and women’s issues.” Hoffman said, “We were young. We were reckless, arrogant, silly, headstrong—and we are right.”

The problem is that none of them—not Hoffman, Hayden, or Crosby—are Boomers. Hoffman was born in 1936, Crosby in 1941, and Hayden in 1939.

This is one of the fundamental flaws in this whole anti-Boomer mythology. The social, political, and cultural markers of the 1960s—usually blamed on the Boomers—came from those born before 1946 and, in many cases, long before.

Smut and the Sexual Revolution

Consider pornography. Andrews argues Boomer complicity in the spread of the porn industry. Certainly, Boomers consumed porn—usually a Playboy found in their dad’s stash somewhere in the basement. More than likely their inadvertent supplier dads were of the Greatest Generation, as was Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, who was born in 1926. Without a doubt, the Boomer kids liked what they saw. But they were consumers, not creators.

Andrews cites the Fanny Hill case from 1966, where the Supreme Court decided a book could not be banned if it had any literary merit. This opened the door to much of the nastiness that came after. But Boomers played no part in this case. It was decided by two Supreme Court justices born in the late 19th century and three born in the early years of the 20th. The lawyer who brought the case was born in 1915, and the defendant was born in 1922. Not one of them were even remotely Boomers.

Andrews partially blames Steve Jobs for spreading online pornography because he created a global tech brand, including the iPhone, where even kids can access hardcore porn. She does give Jobs credit for making Macs relatively child-friendly with more robust parental controls. She considers that to be anti-Boomerish, though. I don’t know why. But Jobs did not invent the Internet. Donald Davies, born in 1924, did that, along with Paul Baran, born in 1926. Free-streaming porn was created in the mid-aughts by a trio of Canadian GenXers inspired by YouTube, also founded by GenXers. No Boomers around here.

Consider the sexual revolution. Perhaps the most significant disruptor of Western Civilization was the birth-control pill, first developed by Gregory Pincus (b. 1903), and synthesized by Carl Djerassi (b. 1923). Even the term “sexual revolution” was coined by psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who was born in the 19th century. During the 1968 student riots in Paris and Berlin, students threw copies of his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism at the cops. Reich invented the Orgone Accumulator, later mocked by Woody Allen as the “Orgasmatron” in his movie “Sleeper,” wherein adherents sit inside and gather sexual energy. This was an utterly ’60s thing, but it was not a Boomer thing. Norman Mailer (b. 1923) sat in one. After Reich went to prison for his fraudulent claims about the Orgone Accumulator, Mailer built them in his garage. Saul Bellow (b. 1915) sat in one every day.

Andrews says, “Boomers didn’t just shake up the nuclear family. They broke it.” Certainly, the war on marriage and family blossomed in the 1960s. But the kids born between 1946 and 1964 did not cause the breakdown of the family: they were its first victims.

One of the most influential books that tore marriage asunder was The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, who was born way back in 1921. She convinced women—overeducated, bored, stuck in the suburbs without a car, the high point of their day hubby strolling through the door at 6:00 demanding his dinner—something was wrong. Friedan’s bestseller came out in 1963, when she was 42.

Jessie Bernard was among the most influential anti-marriage writers of the time (now largely forgotten), whose work has been cited in hundreds of scholarly works. She was considered a pioneer in sociological research on marriage, which she argued was created by men to the detriment of women’s happiness. Bernard was born in 1903.

Boomers didn’t even create no-fault divorce. Ronald Reagan, born in 1911, did that in 1969 as governor of California when the front edge of the Boom turned 22. This pernicious idea had swept through all 50 states within a few years, long before Boomers had any electoral or legislative influence.

Popular Culture

There is this image of Boomers forever entranced by the popular culture they grew up with and forever foisting it upon everyone else. This is undoubtedly true. But it was a popular culture they largely did not create. None of the members of the Beatles were products of the Boom. Neither were any of the Rolling Stones. Hardly any of the performers at Woodstock were Boomers. Ditto for Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Roger Daltrey, Jerry Garcia, Grace Slick, Paul Simon, Neil Young, and Steven Stills.

What about movies? Among the most influential movies of the day were “Easy Rider” and “The Graduate.” These quintessential Boomer movies are arguably the movies that changed the focus of Hollywood to an obsession with young ticket-buyers. Well, “The Graduate” was written by Mike Nichols, born in 1931, and Buck Henry, born in 1930, based on a novel by Charles Webb, who was born in 1939. It starred Dustin Hoffman, who was born in 1937. Even ingenue Katharine Ross, who played Mrs. Robinson’s daughter Elaine, was born before the Boom in 1940. “Easy Rider” was the fourth-highest-grossing movie of 1969 and is considered a Boomer classic. It was directed by Dennis Hopper, born in 1936, and starred Peter Fonda, born in 1940, and Jack Nicholson, born in 1937.

One of the truisms endlessly repeated by Boomer critics is that the Boomers inherited a remarkable economy and then proceeded to ruin it. Helen Andrews claims that Millennials cannot buy houses because the Boomers hoard property and cash. And maybe this is true. But, as it happens, the Boomers said precisely the same thing about the Silent Generation.

Writing in Terry Teachout’s 1990 book Beyond the Boom, conservative social critic Maggie Gallagher said she had “house lust.” Gallagher was miffed that young people could not afford houses because the earlier generation drove up prices in her then Brooklyn neighborhood. She said the Silents “came of age during the greatest continuous period of affluence in American history, got college educations, bought houses, could afford children and full-time mothers,” etc. In other words, arguments identical to Andrews’ complaints about Gallagher’s generation.

Did the Boomers inherit a booming economy and then ruin it? Consider that the Boomers entered the workplace between 1964 and 1982. The unemployment rate in 1969 was 6.9 percent. In 1970, the federal government enacted the Emergency Employment Act, which instituted wage and price controls. There were repeated recessions. They even invented a new term—“stagflation”—for the combination of slow growth, high inflation, and high unemployment. Remember long gas lines where you could only buy gas on certain days? What about Jimmy Carter’s “malaise speech?” Gas lines and malaise happened when the ’46ers turned 34, and the mid-Boom had just entered the workforce. The late Boom was still popping pimples.

Betty Friedan.

And who exactly was running the economy when the Boomers were in college, in their 20s, and even their 30s? Who delivered this supposedly amazing economy that the Boomers were supposed to have ruined? Largely the “Greatest Generation.” In 1968, General Motors, Exxon Mobil, Ford Motor, General Electric, and Chrysler were the top-five companies. Boomers were nowhere near the C-Suites of those companies. Nixon’s team of economic advisers were all born between 1905 and 1927. Jimmy Carter’s economic advisers were born between 1907 and 1931. (OK, he had one youngster who was born in 1940.)

Critics say Boomers forced women into the workplace. Yet it was Silent Generation feminists like Betty Friedan and Kate Millet, author of the landmark 1970 book Sexual Politics, who began the drumbeat for women to leave the home. Friedan was born in 1921, Millet in 1934.

What’s more, women had already begun migrating to the workplace. That trend had been rising steadily since the front edge Boomers were toddlers. In 1948, 17 million women worked. That grew to 29 million in 1968, when the first Baby Boomers were just leaving their teens. Granted, Boomers did nothing to stop the trajectory. If anything, they leaned into it. But they were only following the lead set by their parents and grandparents.

And what about politics? The Boomers are said to have been a revolutionary generation. Certainly, they provided the ground troops for much that happened on college campuses from 1968 to 1972. Understand, though, that the ’46ers entered college in 1964, which were then still fairly conservative. That was the year Goldwater ran against Johnson. And who were the political heroes of the New Left? There was the aforementioned Tom Hayden, who drafted the highly influential “Port Huron Statement.” There was Mario Savio, leader of the Free Speech Movement, founded at Berkeley because the administration would not allow on-campus political activity. He was born in 1942.

Not one of the Chicago Seven was born in the Boom. One of them, David Dellinger, was born in 1915.

Certainly, leftist young people helped take over the Democratic Party in 1972, and it has only become crazier since that time. But remember, Richard Nixon, that great devil, won 52 percent of the youth vote in 1972.

Absurd and Lazy

And this leads us to a central fallacy of those who would paint the Boom with one brush. The collapse of American society doesn’t have a single cause, much less an epicenter. Sure, many from the Boom marched against the war in Vietnam (though they stopped when Nixon ended the draft), but the Boom happily marched off to Vietnam, too. What’s more, the war in Vietnam had majority support across all age groups for almost all of the war.

This naming of generations is absurd and lazy. It seems to have started with Gertrude Stein’s off-hand quip to Hemingway about his “génération perdue.” Next came the Greatest Generation, a moniker coined by—good grief!—TV newsman Tom Brokaw. Then came the Silent Generation, which Time may or may not have coined in 1951.

There was a vast difference between the early, mid, and late Boom. I was born in mid-Boom, and I have never had much in common with those born 10 years before. Oh, sure: those of us in mid-Boom were envious of the college kids. In 1972, when Nixon began to bomb the supply lines from North Vietnam, my sophomore class in high school wore black armbands—along with the cool, 20-something Boomer teachers. In college, a few years later, we marched against the Shah of Iran. Ever heard of SAVAK? Look them up.

But the proposition that there is any meaningful commonality among those born in the 18 years from 1946 to 1964 is ludicrous. It is to believe my socially conservative Catholic wife, born in 1964, has anything in common with Rolling Stone founder, Jann Wenner, born in 1946. It is a proposition of marketers.

Jonathan Pontell recognized this essential Boomer dichotomy when he postulated “Generation Jones” for those born after 1954. These Jonesers missed the Vietnam War and much else so closely identified with the ’60s Boomers. Pontell said that Generation Jones fills “the space between Woodstock and Lollapalooza, between ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out’ and ‘Just Say No,’ and between Dylan going electric and Nirvana going unplugged.” Generation Jones never caught on, but the distinctions Pontell makes are pretty correct. You might say it is the difference between the demographic and what marketers call the “psychographic.” And this gets back to whether you accept all the ’60s nonsense.

Undoubtedly, something happened in the 1960s. Without a doubt, a considerable cohort of the Baby Boom joined up with the craziness. But then, so has some portion of every successive generation. The Sexual Revolution wasn’t cooked up by kids born in 1946. They liked it; they joined it; even in retirement, if reports are accurate, the Sexual Revolution rolls on for front-edge Boomers. But it was not their idea. Rock was not their idea. Heck, folk music was not their idea. Radical feminism was not their idea. They were the first enthusiastic consumers of it all, but they did not invent any of it.

I hate to put it this way, but we were the first victims. We were Patient Zero.

As one social critic noted, the vital thing to understand about the 1960s is this: It wasn’t the age of Mick Jagger, Abbie Hoffman, and Neil Young. He says it is not relevant that the ’60s came from the Silent or even the Greatest Generation. What’s relevant is that cultural transmission changed from vertical transmission (father to son) to horizontal transmission: sibling to sibling, Boomer to Boomer. Given that most of the cultural change visited upon the 1960s first came from Silents, maybe a better way to put it is that cultural transmission came from older brother to younger brother, from cool uncle to eager nephew. All of this could very well be true.

Even so, folks should ease off the keyboard shortcut blaming everything on the Boomer Bogeyman. He is a mythical creature.

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There are 48 comments.

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  1. Stina Inactive
    Stina
    @CM

    A great deal of the angst is the feeling the boomers were handed the world and millenials were given a disaster. The 50s was something like the Golden Age for America. Every single millennial came of age and entered adulthood around the housing crisis.

    I don’t know what the financial policy was in the 60s, but I know the current policy that embraces a constant rate of inflation as “good” policy and refuses to allow for deflation even by only a couple % points is not helpful in attempting to gain a foothold in the economy. Assets > Cash, but the cash is never strong enough to buy the asset. That’s the world millenials aged up in. And while they have embraced and metastasized some of the worst traits of their parents, they know things aren’t right but lack an education (generously provided by boomers) to put a finger on it.

    I worked around boomers for most of high school and college. The Villages is boomer-dom. I know “not everyone is like that”, but the trends are “what is right for me and screw my kids”. There is no inheritance, no foundation, no past on wisdom or knowledge (something Lockheed Martin struggled with correcting but was not entirely successful… the DOD even had programs and studies to figure out knowledge transfer from boomers to millenials).

    If millenials behave like it’s Year 0, it’s because they were largely cut off of their heritage. And lest we look too hard, the educators in universities are boomers. So not just cut off, but purposely made hostile towards it.

    • #31
  2. Stina Inactive
    Stina
    @CM

    You know I take it back. Gen X and Z started the “ok boomer” and it might be because they are the ones that have to deal with the disaster of the millennial generation.

    And boomers largely don’t care because they are on their way out. Younger boomers care, but the earliest ones make comments like “it won’t effect me”.

    • #32
  3. RyanFalcone Member
    RyanFalcone
    @RyanFalcone

    I get peeved at all this silliness. Frankly, The Greatest Generation is vastly overrated. They were horrible parents and their failures get dumped onto the Boomers and as the OP mentions, it generally isn’t fair. Yet, the Boomers aren’t anything to be proud of. Sure, the OP is correct in saying that the problems pre-dated the Boomers but from the late 1800’s on, there were always degenerates, deviants and delinquents among us trying to lead us astray but it was the Boomers who embraced them as no previous generation had. There are many reasons why this was and blaming the Boomers themselves is silliness. Personally, I’m Gen X. We got blasted as being utterly worthless throughout the 90’s and for good reason. There did seem to be a slight tinge of compassion in the criticism though as most understood that our parents were repulsively bad but we are just seeing a continuum of consequence from our culture’s progressive destruction. This whole attitude of bashing other generations seems to be like one snowflake blaming another for causing the avalanche.

    • #33
  4. Ansonia Member
    Ansonia
    @Ansonia

    Stina (View Comment):

    You know I take it back. Gen X and Z started the “ok boomer” and it might be because they are the ones that have to deal with the disaster of the millennial generation.

    And boomers largely don’t care because they are on their way out. Younger boomers care, but the earliest ones make comments like “it won’t effect me”.

    I heard exactly that from a fellow boomer at a party this past Saturday.

    • #34
  5. TBA Coolidge
    TBA
    @RobtGilsdorf

    RyanFalcone (View Comment):

    I get peeved at all this silliness. Frankly, The Greatest Generation is vastly overrated. They were horrible parents and their failures get dumped onto the Boomers and as the OP mentions, it generally isn’t fair. Yet, the Boomers aren’t anything to be proud of. Sure, the OP is correct in saying that the problems pre-dated the Boomers but from the late 1800’s on, there were always degenerates, deviants and delinquents among us trying to lead us astray but it was the Boomers who embraced them as no previous generation had. There are many reasons why this was and blaming the Boomers themselves is silliness. Personally, I’m Gen X. We got blasted as being utterly worthless throughout the 90’s and for good reason. There did seem to be a slight tinge of compassion in the criticism though as most understood that our parents were repulsively bad but we are just seeing a continuum of consequence from our culture’s progressive destruction. This whole attitude of bashing other generations seems to be like one snowflake blaming another for causing the avalanche.

    Hear hear! 

    Honestly, it’s a mistake to be proud of one’s generation – their deeds are not your deeds. Same with race and sexual preference. 

    Pride – properly leavened with humility – is for one’s own accomplishments or those of one’s family. 

    • #35
  6. Ansonia Member
    Ansonia
    @Ansonia

    Re: Comment 33, Ryan Falcone

    Ryan, I want to get back to reading “A Conservative History of the American Left, by Michael J. Flynn, so that I can send my copy of that enthralling and eye opening book to my “Okay, Boomer”-attitude son for Father’s Day. Why ?

    Because, throughout our history, the same bad ideas have always been with us. What changes are the circumstances that determine how much, and for how long, those bad ideas have influence,  the circumstances under which our stupid attacks occur. Do circumstances, at a certain time, more protect us from, or expose us to, the consequences of some attempted implementation of a good or bad idea ? That’s the question.

    Circumstances around 1845 in Massachusetts were such that if you, an idealistic young person, joined some crazy communal farm in early spring, and then sat around waxing philosophical instead of getting crops in the ground, or  if you were too busy attending different abolitionist meetings to get enough of the harvest in during the late summer or early fall, you might be starving, literally, come early winter.
    Around Thanksgiving, your neighbors might be prodded by their minister to show up at your communal farm. With their sour faces full of “We told you so.”, and alluding, for your edification, to Bible verses they thought best illustrated how you got yourself into such a situation (Proverbs 6: 6-8, for instance) they might reluctantly give to, say, all 40 of you communitarian types two scrawny turkeys to share, so that you all could eat a morsel prior to packing up your belongings to head to the poorhouse, or the lunatic asylum, or to the homes of relatives who profoundly wished they weren’t, since whoever among you actually owned the farm was now forced to sell it. These neighbors, who hadn’t been having many philosophical discussions during seasons that required survival work, and who were now bearing gifts of turkeys grudgingly, were the most “public assistance” you were going to get.  They expected you to be grateful, by the way, since they didn’t have to help.

    At age 17, in the summer of 1974, I was living at a commune in Massachusetts. During my time in the 1970’s version of Transcendentalist Land, almost nobody liked to work in the large garden there. It went neglected; produced little. That little often went unpicked. But a lot of us were also on food stamps or got on them a short while later.

    While Boomers didn’t come up with the bad ideas that so often enchanted them, I think we were a generation more prevented than previous generations had been from experiencing, quickly, the harsher consequences of our own stupidity and delusions. So, certain bad ideas had an influence on us longer; and, when finally discarded, those ideas failed to leave us burnt enough to be wary about trying to implement the next seemingly new, but actually old, bad idea that attracted us.

    • #36
  7. TBA Coolidge
    TBA
    @RobtGilsdorf

    Tex929rr (View Comment):

    TBA (View Comment):

    Anti-boomer sentiment is just another rationale for a have-not’s rage and resentment. Whether you think the guy who has the job you don’t sold out to ‘the Man’, only got it because he’s [minority], got it through connections (Jewish, Masonic, Harvard, Good Ol’ Boy), or through being white or being in a privileged generation, you can avoid thinking unpleasant thoughts like, ‘maybe I’m at the bottom because I’m a newbie’, or, ‘maybe I’m at the bottom because I’m just not that smart and not that skilled’.

    One of the things that mystifies me is the idea that we Boomers had unprecedented and now extinct advantages in education, employment, and housing. I’m probably opening up a can of worms here, but Mrs Tex and I both started our careers in the military. Every single program that benefitted us and led to success in later jobs is still in existence. ROTC scholarships, Airman commissioning programs, VA loans. There are even extensive veteran benefit programs for which we never qualified (that came later). I don’t look down on Millennials that struggle for success, but only note that the ways we succeeded still exist. And until President Brandon, the odds of seeing the interest rates we dealt with in the early 80’s seemed very remote.
    And this from Pew: “Gen Z and Millennial voters favored Biden over Trump by margins of about 20 points”

    Don’t blame us, kids.

    Sources: Mortgage rates Voting

    When people got divorced back when, the phrase ‘lifestyle to which she is accustomed’ was used (not the exact phrase). 

    Young people used to know that they weren’t going to move out of their parents’ house into a comparable house at comparable pay. 

    Only we started sending them to college. I think that college graduates often assumed that they would at least match, if not exceed, their parents’ financial situation – after all, they’re so marketable with all their up-to-date knowledge. 

    Only that’s not how it works, and the stuff their parents have was accumulated over a lifetime. 

    Kids don’t see their parents struggle. So they don’t believe in it. 

    When they move out, they’re supposed to think, ‘oh, I guess it’s not that easy’. I suspect they are thinking, ‘hey, this isn’t fair!’ 

    • #37
  8. Autistic License Coolidge
    Autistic License
    @AutisticLicense

    I think Austin makes an important point:  the folks born in ’47 would have to have imbibed a lot of deference to experts and either overcome that or succumbed to it.  Think:  Woodrow Wilson, or FDR the All Encompassing.  For the 60’s mythology, The Man was always behind what was bad, and another Man, the Guru, was to be obeyed without question while he fought with The Man.

    • #38
  9. OldPhil Coolidge
    OldPhil
    @OldPhil

    Ansonia (View Comment):
    we were a generation

    Speak for yourself. You were individuals who did some dumb stuff.

    • #39
  10. Ansonia Member
    Ansonia
    @Ansonia

    OldPhil (View Comment):

    Ansonia (View Comment):
    we were a generation

    Speak for yourself. You were individuals who did some dumb stuff.

    There were a lot of us at the time, doing the same dumb stuff. That doesn’t mean—-and this is the thing—-that people of other times, put in those times—-put in those circumstances—-wouldn’t have been tempted in the same ways and wouldn’t have fallen for the same delusions.

    The I-would-have-been-better-back-then attitude the young sometimes seem to display reminds me of the professor who had to suggest to his students that, if they had been born into the Southern aristocracy in the antebellum South, they probably wouldn’t, all of them, have been among the few people who freed their slaves.

     

    • #40
  11. Bryan G. Stephens Thatcher
    Bryan G. Stephens
    @BryanGStephens

    I am so sick hearing about Boomers, Millennials etc. Who gives a flying flip?

    Boomers were the whole start of the “generation” thing. 

    • #41
  12. TBA Coolidge
    TBA
    @RobtGilsdorf

    Bryan G. Stephens (View Comment):

    I am so sick hearing about Boomers, Millennials etc. Who gives a flying flip?

    Boomers were the whole start of the “generation” thing.

    Before print, older people would worry that younger people weren’t as moral and focused as they should be, but there was not a perception that they were a group apart. 

    The idea we seem to have reached is that every 10 – 25 years we need to invent a new ethos and the people that have it should write off everybody else. 

    This is the opposite of culture. 

    • #42
  13. Cassandro Coolidge
    Cassandro
    @Flicker

    Bryan G. Stephens (View Comment):

    I am so sick hearing about Boomers, Millennials etc. Who gives a flying flip?

    Boomers were the whole start of the “generation” thing.

    And the whole generation thing is misplaced.  Not only do people ascribe governing characteristics to the whole, and treat everyone’s individual motivations and thoughts as the same, but the ages even change.  If the borders are that soggy, any utility you can draw from the categorization is further decreased.  I was always a boomer.  But in the last ten or twenty years all of a sudden I’m intermittently a boomer.  At least boomers have a specific start date.

    • #43
  14. Cassandro Coolidge
    Cassandro
    @Flicker

    TBA (View Comment):

    Bryan G. Stephens (View Comment):

    I am so sick hearing about Boomers, Millennials etc. Who gives a flying flip?

    Boomers were the whole start of the “generation” thing.

    Before print, older people would worry that younger people weren’t as moral and focused as they should be, but there was not a perception that they were a group apart.

    The idea we seem to have reached is that every 10 – 25 years we need to invent a new ethos and the people that have it should write off everybody else.

    This is the opposite of culture.

    And it’s divisive, further segmenting the populace into groups pitted against one another.  As in “Okay, Boomer!”.

    • #44
  15. Austin Ruse Inactive
    Austin Ruse
    @AustinRuse

    Bryan G. Stephens (View Comment):

    I am so sick hearing about Boomers, Millennials etc. Who gives a flying flip?

    Boomers were the whole start of the “generation” thing.

    Perhaps, but even that they did not start. They did not name their own generation. Others did. 

    • #45
  16. Headedwest Coolidge
    Headedwest
    @Headedwest

    Bryan G. Stephens (View Comment):

    I am so sick hearing about Boomers, Millennials etc. Who gives a flying flip?

    Boomers were the whole start of the “generation” thing.

    You should note, however it turned out later, that the Boomers didn’t identify or name themselves. The postwar Baby Boom was the subject of countless news and opinion pieces; they raised population numbers, caused public school systems to expand, and motivated colleges to expand.

    There was a lot of attention paid to this population bubble moving through life.

    • #46
  17. RyanFalcone Member
    RyanFalcone
    @RyanFalcone

    Bryan G. Stephens (View Comment):

    I am so sick hearing about Boomers, Millennials etc. Who gives a flying flip?

    Boomers were the whole start of the “generation” thing.

    I’ve started wondering about this. I did some research and it seems to me that the roaring 20’s was the first time an entire generation seemed to consciously try to set themselves apart culturally. This was the same time that sports was beginning to boom, separating people geographically by rooting interest and there was also an explosion of new racial and class division. This was also the time period where progressives began to first assert dominance within many of our cultural institutions. What if all this crap was just created to destroy us from within?

    • #47
  18. Ansonia Member
    Ansonia
    @Ansonia

    RyanFalcone (View Comment):

    Bryan G. Stephens (View Comment):

    I am so sick hearing about Boomers, Millennials etc. Who gives a flying flip?

    Boomers were the whole start of the “generation” thing.

    I’ve started wondering about this. I did some research and it seems to me that the roaring 20’s was the first time an entire generation seemed to consciously try to set themselves apart culturally. This was the same time that sports was beginning to boom, separating people geographically by rooting interest and there was also an explosion of new racial and class division. This was also the time period where progressives began to first assert dominance within many of our cultural institutions. What if all this crap was just created to destroy us from within?

    In the roaring 20’s ? Who ?

    • #48
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