It’s true that ours was an almost uniquely privileged cohort, whelped and raised in an era of unrivaled American power and hegemony, and coming to maturity in an era of (by contemporary measures) affordable education and housing and of—at least for those of us who slid through college and got our tickets punched—reasonably remunerative jobs. Hell, I was grandfathered into one of those “defined benefits” pensions, and while I’m not exactly sipping champagne from ladies’ slippers, I’m unlikely to end my days in a residence hotel in the San Francisco Tenderloin drying my socks on the radiator.
And yeah, sex, drugs and rock & roll. Good times!
I can understand the bitterness of the subsequent cohorts, and certainly the contrast between my generation’s youthful rhetoric and its performance once it got its hands on the steering wheel is uncomfortable to contemplate. I keep in touch with an old friend’s daughter and her girlfriends, all presently within a year of forty, and these are disposed to be Boomer-censorious. I have observed to them that we many, we happy many, we band of Boomers did not actually ruin the world all by ourselves. No indeed, we piled our rubble upon the ruins accumulated by the so-called “Greatest Generation”—the Nixons, the Reagans, the Bush (not
es: Junior was, alas, one of ours). We stood upon the shoulders of moral midgets.
As I blunder about on social media, specifically the Book of Face, I encounter with dreary regularity posts from my contemporaries extolling the Good Old Days of their formative years. Ah, that land of lost content! The golden, edenic years of childhood! They frequently say “We respected our parents, and we didn’t use foul language,” and I think “Are you out of your fucking
minds?? FFS, I was
there!”I have this cued up as a response:
cordially,
Oh yeah, you're doomed
