Final Thoughts on the Baby Boom: You get what you pay for

I smile as all these Boomers looking to escape their lives and embrace a third or fourth act.  That is a lie.  I find myself wanting to throat-punch them, but I ought to be a detached enough observer to meet them with a smile so I try to "fake it until I make it."

Their first act was the hippy phase.  They spawned Gen X during this time.  Now we all question our sanity regarding the decision to have children from time to time but most of us go out of our way to 1) hide this fact from our children and 2) blame ourselves and our own character for failing to rise to the task. 

Boomers emotions about parenthood came out sideways

This was probably the experience of most Boomers as they raised Gen X and their own internal venting at parenthood and the demands of children can be seen in the movies which they wrote, produced, and paid good money to see.  The problem arose from their ideology of child rearing, which was notable in believing children did not need to be protected from their own venting.  So many of us watched Rosemary's Baby, Firestarter, Poltergeist, Children of the Corn and a plethora of lesser movies featuring demonic children when we ourselves were children. 

Exhibit A) Our parents our very busy living their own lives and leave us as the latchkey kids.  Exhibit B) Children are portrayed as demons in movies.  Exhibit C) They seem very anxious to see me find my own games to play and things to do so long as it away from them.  The lesson we learned, this is what adults see when they look at us.  The truth was more complicated, they were young and often in difficult financial straits as they and the nation recovered from the inflation of the seventies and early eighties.

The hippie ideology was discarded as Boomers got richer and older and the opportunities of money and maturity become available to them.  They became "yuppies," gave birth to Gen Y, and changed their parenting practice.  Tipper Gore led the public charge for protecting children from adult music lyrics.  No doubt the campaign that followed only slowed the cultural trend but it did reflect the attitude change among parents, an attitude that may have only impacted media on the margins but denoted a change in how parents thought about and, as a result, treated their children. 

More movies were increasingly made specifically for children so the change in theme was marked.  There began talk of cleaning up prime time television.  Supervised after school activities were organized and paid for.   Being a generation Y kid had its own dangers however.  In the seventies and early eighties a child who was just a little too feral would just blame himself for his father's drinking and go explore the Playboy collection the farmer next door kept hidden in the barn.  Millennials, if they persisted in being too feral, too non-compliant, would find themselves medicated for their disorder.  

Child impeding your freedom?  There is a pill for that.

From one extreme to another, first children were treated as threat to freedom, later children were made the center of the universe with the impact that adolescence was extended into a person's twenties.  God forbid they have to buy their own health insurance until age 26!  Now some Boomers are asking themselves how to get their kids to stop asking them for money.  Well, when you tell someone they are the center of the universe and deserving of the best from early childhood, they tend to believe you.

Must Miss TV

The irony should not be lost, however, to hear how the most self-absorbed generation is complaining about how self-absorbed their children are.  Really?  I remember what the Boomers were like in midlife.  If it were possible to set up a scale of generational self-absorption, could anything top "thirtysomething"?  

Kidding aside, there is a subtle difference that should be emphasized.  The Boomers were self-absorbed with themselves as a cohort, in part because so few of them as individuals actually took part in the great accomplishments attributed to the generation.  Only so many were at Woodstock, or actually marched with Martin Luther King Jr.  There sense of greatness is a kind of Boomer Exceptionalism that, like American Exceptionalism, credits the individual with a portion of the accomplishments of a few.   

To the extent Millennials are self-absorbed, they are absorbed in their own existential experience of the present and I find they are largely aware of the fact and even seek to push back against that impulse.  Only time will tell but it strikes me as entirely possible that millennials could "flip" and become quite the cohesive cohort.   If I would voice any concern it would be how quickly they feel stuck in the limited options presented before them.  They are too easily made "helpless" and believe the choices offered to them are the only options available.  They've rarely had to make their own games, organize their own teams, pick, let alone win their own fights.  Like the Greatest Generation, I expect once adequately inspired, they will be great at following orders and working as a team.  Resistance to their hegemony will not be futile but it may feel like it for a time. 

How Boomers viewed the GI generation when they were "in the way"

and after they were safely marginalized.

Before the Boomers lauded their parents as the "Greatest Generation" they were attacking them as the source of oppression and colonialism, both at home and abroad.  Some of that criticism was warranted, it is the change of attitude that I find interesting.  In the years of attack, the generation that won the Second World War was portrayed as Archie Bunker.  Once cultural and political power was assumed, Boomers than swapped that image for one closer to Captain John Miller's in Saving Private Ryan. 

There is no secret Boomer conspiracy.  None of these developments were preplanned.  It all happened at the level of emergent order as people of a similar age and life experience react, uncritically, to the world around them. In the real world, however, the WW2 hero and 1964's old white man reactionary were the same person.

The source of my surprise is how I can still hear Boomers complaining about and discounting either their parents' experiences, (and that refrain was getting old in the seventies), or those who have followed them.  Just this month I heard a Boomer talking about how great the "Greatest Generation" had it.  Really?  Last time I checked a good percentage of them grew up hungry and had to work to support their families.  Even those that were well fed, knew deprivation of various sorts unknown to any generation since.  Vietnam was a tragedy but the casualties were 20% of that of World War II.   Yes, it sucks not winning and all, go tell how bad it was to the veterans of the Korean War.  Even the few cultural reflections of the Korean War that took place were used as a sideways way to talk about Vietnam.

Every time a Boomer complains about generations X or Y, however, I just remind them that we are largely the children of Boomers and ask, "Was it nature or nurture that made the problem you deride?

Boomer's Don Henley and Glenn Frey seemed to have a succinct description of the Boomer mindset as early as 1973,

Now it seems to me, some fine things
have been laid upon your table
But you only want the ones that you can't get

It is a treadmill, and to their credit many a Boomer has stepped off of it at one stage of their journey or another.  Good for them.  Hopefully we will all mature as much as we age.  Many Boomers, however, are still the knee-jerk pontificators of their own myths that they were in adolescence.   Generational exceptionalism is cute when you are twenty but at sixty or seventy in makes you a reactionary boor.  Those are the Boomers looking for a third or fourth act and getting their boob jobs, leaving their third wives because they feel unfulfilled, chasing another adventure while lamenting feeling estranged from their childhood home, grandchildren or the absence of settled roots.  Still chasing a new trinket to satisfy a hunger based in a promise which is a phantasm: that freedom is found in freedom from constraints.

That poet of the silent generation was closer to the mark,

"Freedom's just another word
for 'nothing left to lose.'
Freedom ain't worth nothin'
 but its free."

Freedom is not found in freedom from constraints but rather through self-discipline.  The disciplined individual can disagree vehemently with another on a policy issue and not hate them as an individual.  That too is a consequence of a discipline that recognizes the question is almost never an issue of pure good versus evil.  Staying committed to a community and a home, scrimping dollars and living on less, that will allow us, fate willing, to have our home paid off in less than twenty years from the date we purchased it and before the oldest goes to college.  During the majority of the time this will be accomplished with one spouse working while the other homeschools three children.  That is parental freedom and will be  financial freedom, both born through discipline.  My family is not alone in this respect and it is not because we are not facing challenges.We are, however, willing to pay a cost for the freedom we desire.

Gen X learned of natural consequences the fun way.

As a member of generation X, I am fortunate.  There were few expectations from either Boomer or Millennial.  We were not taught to expect a utopian future, but a nuclear cloud, so every day appears as a gift.  from the crib we've been told by the actuaries that the social safety net will be unable to provide for us.  We met this information with the knowledge that no one was going to take care of us, so we had better do it ourselves.  Our parents let us play in the street way back when we were cute.  No one is going to bail us out as our skin sags and our ideas, such as they are, are eclipsed by the larger, hipper, and better organized Generation Y.

Is my generation without its vices?  Of course not, but believing our own press releases about ourselves is not one of them.  Like the Silent Generation support for the Boomers, the best we can hope to do is influence the cultural program of the rising Millennials.  Frequently omitted from public consciousness and cultural power, our vices, along with our virtues, are more private.

As of today, I resolve to drop generational generalization, at least so far as it applies to my gripes with Baby Boomers.  Where individuals, organizations or movements need to be critiqued or resisted, of course I will still act unto my best understanding of virtue, but let me bury the Baby Boom complaint right here.  Acceptance of the present is as much discipline as it is interior state of mind.  Hopefully the latter can follow from the former.

If I become "that guy," please slap me.