Arts & Ammo

Boomers In Charge

Baby Boomers want it all: abundant energy without energy production, high home equity and low mortgage payments, government services paid for by taxes on somebody else. Victor David Hanson says that the great divide in the country is not conservative versus liberal, but the result of generational chaos.

Those who came of age in the 1960s now hold the reins of power and influence – and we are starting to see why their values have worried almost everyone for nearly a half-century.

History has seen something like them before in the “blame them” years of Demosthenes’ Athens, the self-indulgence of Julio-Claudian Rome, the “after me, the deluge” generation of late 18th-century France, the Gilded Age, and the Roaring Twenties.

Boomers seem to take it as given that their generation is special, that a new enlightenment began in the 1960s, characterized by radical liberalism and ushered in by student demonstrations. They rejected all traditions as manifestations of an imperfect past, a past in which flawed leaders and political systems had failed to end poverty, war, and oppression. Boomers were the first to develop a social conscience.

But youthful altruism is more about youth and less about altruism. The boomers’ were able to sustain their self-indulgence, however, because they had the demographic wind at their backs and were fortunate not to encounter many of the harsh realities that frequently force young people into adulthood.

Sociologists have correctly diagnosed the perfect storm that created the “me” generation — sudden postwar affluence, sacrificing parents who did not wish us to suffer as they had in the Great Depression and World War II, and the rise of therapeutic education that encouraged self-indulgence.

One other factor needs to included: the easy ability to avoid or end pregnancy. The avoidance of biology truly set the boomer generation apart. It fueled a change in sexual attitudes and practices that made all social and religious restraints appear unnecessarily restrictive. The science that put a man on the moon and made your girlfriend temporarily infertile could surely be counted on to work other miracles as needed.

The cultural upheaval of the 1960s was about sex. Everything else was a detail.

Boomers like to take credit for the civil rights movement, but the real breakthroughs were accomplished in the early 1960s, before the boomers came of age, by morally serious blacks and middle-aged Republicans. Boomers borrowed the gravitas of their immediate predecessors.

The end of the draft, consequence-free sex, and continued prosperity enabled boomers to perpetuate their adolescence indefinitely. When AIDS made sex once again worrisome, the boomers resorted to the methodology of their college days. They joined hands, wore ribbons, and sang songs – incantations to conjure a scientific solution lest the party come to a premature end. Calls for restraint were rejected out of hand. Abstinence was stigmatized.

Now boomers are indisputably in charge and, in case you haven’t noticed, it’s still all about sex. The most divisive cultural issues are reminiscent of the late 60s: free access to abortion and the purported civil right (the language again borrowed from more serious times) to copulate with whomever you want. Anything that constrains sex or reminds us of its procreative nature belongs to the pre-1965 dark ages and will inevitably top the list of rules, customs, and laws that boomers seek to sweep aside.

May 29th, 2008 Posted by Fitzroy | Politics | no comments