Boomers: The Real Greatest Generation http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/17/AR2006021702491.html It makes the headlines nearly every day, and the tone is usually resentful: Beware of those soon-to-retire baby boomers, all 80 million of them, who are about to place a huge burden on the rest of us. The first of this whiny, entitled generation are turning 60 this year, and they'll be demanding even more special treatment in old age than they've gotten the rest of their lives. But imagine if the generation getting ready to retire wasn't the baby boomers, but the World War II generation -- or the Greatest Generation, as it's popularly lionized. No one would be calling those Americans a burden or a drag. If they were retiring today, we'd be writing columns full of praise for their sacrifice and discussing what our nation owes them and how it's our moral duty to support them. Why the different attitudes toward these two generations? Why is one idealized as heroic and giving, while the other is disdained as self-indulgent and taking? It's time to reassess. The true test of a generation should be what it's done to make America better. And in that regard, boomers have an important story to tell. It's a story about a more inclusive and tolerant America, about women's equality and men's growing respect for it, about an appreciation for cultural diversity too long denied, about a society that no longer turns a blind eye to prejudice or pollution. The boomers' problem is not that they haven't accomplished a great deal; it's that we take their accomplishments for granted and don't give them any credit. But if we look more closely at the legacies of both the boomers and their parents, we might see that the boomers are a far more consequential group than many admit. We might see, in fact, that they have advanced American values in ways the Greatest Generation refused to do. Today, no one questions what the World War II generation gave to America, and that's as it should be. Its members sacrificed their lives and futures to defend our country. They were heroes then, and they deserve our continuing gratitude. But the reality few acknowledge is that, mission accomplished, they returned home to preside, by and large without complaint, over an American society vastly inferior to the one we know today. Our view of the 1950s is clouded by nostalgia. We have a Norman Rockwell image of that era, one of tightknit neighborhoods and white picket fences. But for too many Americans, this was no golden age. In the storied years of the 1950s, we told women to stay home, blacks to stay separate, gays to stay closeted, Jews to stay inconspicuous, and those who didn't conform or prayed to a different God to feel ashamed and stay silent. Greatest Generation blacks who fought Hitler were forced to sit behind German POWs at USO concerts, and when they returned home the new suburban neighborhoods -- emblems of the American Dream -- were closed to them. Even baseball great Willie Mays couldn't find a house to buy when the Giants moved from New York to San Francisco in 1957 -- until the mayor intervened. Just as Jews anglicized names and decorated Christmas trees to fit in, blacks tried to straighten their hair and bleach their skin by using fiery, painful chemical products with names such as Black-No-More. For them there was nothing warm or nurturing about that era. It was a time when men with beards seemed subversive and women in pants were questioned by police, and when the Organization Man ruled the workplace. Children thought to be gay were sent off for psychiatric treatment and even electroshock therapy. As for those who spoke up for the environment, they were irritants in a nation that was on the march and viewed smog alerts and clouds of soot as simply the price of progress. Women of that era found themselves trapped in an apron. Want ads were segregated by sex -- a practice The Washington Post didn't end until 1971 -- and it wasn't unusual for a description of the perfect "girl" to be "5-foot-5 to 5-foot-7 in heels." Judges ridiculed female attorneys as "lawyerettes" in court. A woman's job didn't count for much, as credit bureaus typically denied women their economic independence. The Greatest Generation largely accepted and defended this status quo. Even in the 1990s, polls showed Greatest Generation majorities continuing to resist racial intermarriage, working mothers and laws to protect gays from discrimination. Through the late 1980s, a majority of white respondents in national polls even said they would vote for a law allowing a homeowner to refuse to sell his home to a black buyer. In other words, if most Greatest Generation Americans had their way, American life would have remained frozen in the '50s. They were not the agents of change that built the far more inclusive, tolerant, free and equal America we have today. That task fell to the boomers, who almost immediately started breaking down the restrictive codes and repressive convictions of the Greatest Generation's era. From the moment pollsters began recording their attitudes in the 1960s, boomers stood diametrically opposed to their elders on the core issues of race, women, religious pluralism, homosexuality and environmental protection. They saw an America that was not living up to its ideals, and they set about to change it. But this is a story that rarely gets told. In part that's because the media prefer the dramatic or the epic, which leaves out a great deal of social change. In part it's because we remain fixated on the '60s, as if boomer history ended there. Yet nearly four decades have passed since the '60s ended, and the ways in which America has changed are so far-reaching and fundamental that they have transformed how we live as profoundly as any war or New Deal. Today, we see minorities and women contributing to society in ways that would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago. Diversity and pluralism are now moral values, bigotry and sexual harassment no longer get a free pass, and ethnic boundaries once considered impermeable are breaking down in media, society and personal relationships. Half of all teens now report dating across racial and ethnic lines -- and 90 percent say their parents have no problem with it. Discrimination against gays? Increasingly prohibited. Domestic partner benefits? Increasingly accepted. Men sharing housework and child care duties? No more raised eyebrows. Toxic runoffs and belching smokestacks? No longer tolerated. The command and control workplace? On its way out. So natural and comfortable are these new norms that most of us take them for granted, as if it's always been this way. Because we live in a changed America, we tend to forget what it was like before boomers agitated for change. Boomer-bashing has become a virtual cottage industry. They're labeled "the worst generation." They're accused of infantilism and self-promotion. One Web site described them as "a plague of self-centered locusts." Part of what drives this vitriol is an implied criticism that boomers are soft and overindulged because they never sacrificed in a Great War or Depression. But millions of boomers fought bravely in a war their parents handed them, and millions more risked arrest, uncertainty and ostracism for protesting what they believed to be the pointlessness and duplicity of that war. There's no reason to believe that boomers wouldn't have fought Hitler as nobly as their parents did, and boomer antiwar protesters said as much at the time, distinguishing between what they saw as the just and necessary war against fascism and the misguided, deceptive and morally ambiguous war in Vietnam. As for the well-worn condemnation of boomer materialism, the truth is that materialism is nothing new in America, and boomers are far from the first and only generation to face this charge: It was conspicuous consumption in the 1920s and keeping up with the Joneses in the '50s. Boomers certainly haven't solved all of society's problems, and they've created a few as well. But if we held the World War II generation to the same standard, the word "greatest" would never come to mind. Even if we're not a perfect America today, in so many ways we're a better America. And for that, we owe the baby boomers our thanks.
The Baby Boom Generation is also responsible for this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...america-over-the-last-50-years/?noredirect=on
How the Boomers Saved Everything Yes, we’re spoiled rotten. We’re self-absorbed. And it seems like we’ll never shut up. But the boomers made a better world for everyone else. You’re welcome We're the largest, richest, best-educated generation of Americans, the favored children of a strong, confident and prosperous country. Or, as other generations call us, spoiled brats. Born between 1946 and 1964, the 76 million boomers reaped all the benefits of the postwar period's extraordinary economic growth. We were dizzy with our aspirations. We'd be rock stars. We'd be spiritual avatars. We'd be social activists. We'd be billionaires. No, better yet, we'd be all those things at the same time. (Steve Jobs came close.) Every time opportunity knocked, we let it in, even when it should have been locked out for decency's sake. And behold the boomers' remarkable experiments with prosperity — the dot-com bubble, the housing bubble, the enormous financial bubble that's still got the nation trying to get fiduciary gum out of its hair. And now the boomers run the world. The youngest members of the generation that decided to be young forever are turning 50. That's the age of maximum privilege and power. We're giving everybody orders. The oldest boomers are enrolled in Medicare, collecting Social Security and receiving tax-free Roth IRA disbursements. Plus, American life expectancy has increased by almost 12 years since the baby boom was born, so it doesn't just seem like we'll never go away. From President Obama, Rand Paul and Jeff Bezos at one end of our age cohort to Hillary Clinton, Rush Limbaugh and Cher at the other, we cannot be escaped or avoided (or shushed). But running the world means taking responsibility for it. The boomers have been good at taking things: Mom's car without permission, drugs, umbrage at the establishment, draft deferments, advantage of the sexual revolution, and credit for the civil rights and women's liberation movements that rightly belongs to prior generations. The one thing that can be left in plain sight without us putting our sticky mitts on it is responsibility. Ask our therapists. Or the parents we haven't visited at the extended-care facility. The world is being run by irresponsible spoiled brats. And yet the world started to get better as soon as the boomers took over. That was in the late 1970s, when we were old enough for our deepest beliefs, our most cherished values and our unique vision of the future to have a profound and permanent effect on American life. To be precise, we took over on July 28, 1978, the day Animal House was released. Things have been more fun since we elected Senator Blutarsky. Sometimes too much fun. The boomers can be scolded for promiscuous sex, profligate use of illegal intoxicants, and other behavior that didn't turn out to be healthy. But somebody had to do the research. Somebody had to be the guinea pig. And, running around in the sex-drugs-and-rock 'n' roll wheel, we had a good time while it lasted. This is how we brought down the Berlin Wall. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev get the kudos, but we were the ones who tagged the Wall with all that awesome graffiti. When people our age on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall saw how much fun people our age on the right side of the Berlin Wall were having, it was all over with the Communist bloc. Today the Soviet Union is just a collection of countries with too many K's and Z's in their names, and China is the kind of dictatorship whose idea of world conquest is domination of the global smartphone manufacturing sector. We're the generation that laughed off totalitarianism. Little wonder that we've created a political system best known for producing comedy. A Rasmussen poll from a few years ago found that 32 percent of Americans under 40 think that satirical TV programs such as The Daily Show With Jon Stewart are replacing traditional news outlets. You can't really blame them, considering the news that Senator Blutarsky and his colleagues generate. And yet, although partisan polarization may have Washington deadlocked, there are worse things than a deadlocked Washington — such as a unified Washington marching boldly forward toward disaster in Vietnam when the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed in 1964 (with a vote of 416-0 in the House, 88-2 in the Senate). Anyway, we're not "polarized." We're just bickering on the Capitol Hill playground. We love to argue. Half the boomers want more social services, to be paid for by other people. And half the boomers are those other people. At our age, we can't always remember which half we're in. For me, it depends on the day. Some days I'm a Part D prescription drug beneficiary; some days it's April 15. We're also the generation that laughed off the kind of casual bigotry once widely acceptable in American life. To see how far we've come, compare All in the Family with Modern Family, two popular TV shows about intergenerational relations in a changing world. The 1970s sitcom was considered groundbreaking because it got laughs from Greatest Generation patriarch Archie Bunker's unreconstructed racism and sexism. The current show is considered groundbreaking because it gets laughs from boomer patriarch Jay Pritchett's bemused confusion about gay marriage, blended families and … actually, Modern Family is not considered groundbreaking. It's just considered funny. Boomers didn't exactly create a race-blind society, but the kids we've raised might. This dawned on me when my daughter was 9. She came home from school asking about adoption; she didn't quite understand what it meant. My wife and I explained and said, "You've got friends who are adopted." "I do?" my daughter answered. "Suzie Duncan," we said. "Suzie was born in Ethiopia. The Duncans adopted her when she was a baby." The Duncans are pink, freckled, short people of Scots-Irish extraction. Suzie is tall and thin with a luminous anthracite complexion. My daughter said, "I thought Suzie looked different than her mom and dad." But boomers haven't made life perfect, the way we promised we would back in the 1960s. We promised we wouldn't fight any wars. We were fibbing — we've had seven or eight since Vietnam. However, we did make them smaller. The United States has suffered more than 5,800 combat deaths in the three decades of the post-Vietnam era. The number is painful, but it's also less — by almost a thousand — than the number of U.S. servicemen who died in just five weeks during the Battle of Iwo Jima. It would be nice to think the boomers did something to make the world less warlike. More likely, our voracious consumerism has just made the world richer. Gross world product — the total of all the goods and services produced on Earth — increased fivefold between 1975 and 2012, to almost $72 trillion. There's a theory that rich people don't like to fight huge wars — itchy uniforms and ugly shoes. China's economy is nearly 40 times larger than it was in 1978. Let's hope the theory's true. Our own standard of living hasn't climbed at that heady rate, the way the Greatest Generation's did. But we didn't get to start with nothing. In a world destroyed by the Depression and war, every Levittown bungalow looked like the Ritz-Carlton, and a $20 pay raise was a winning lottery ticket. American family income, adjusted for inflation, grew by about $25,000 between the late 1940s and the middle 1970s. Since then, it's grown by only about half that amount after adjusting for inflation and has in fact declined overall since 1999. For a so-called sandwich generation — pressed between the demands of kids who aren't yet independent and parents who are getting less so — we haven't put many bean sprouts in the pita pocket. But a lot more things now come standard with our standard of living, thanks to all the great stuff we've invented. In 1978 few people had a personal computer, and if they did, it took up half the house. There was no GPS in your car. The Greatest Generation was lost all the time. You had to go to the library to look things up, and then you couldn't because the Dewey Decimal System made it impossible to figure out whether Dewey ran for president against FDR, defeated the Spanish navy in the Battle of Manila Bay or invented the Dewey Decimal System. We may not have managed America's money well, but the boomers' demand for more and better gizmos has filled the nation with amazing playthings, from tiny talking computers to gigantic flat-screen TVs with roughly 2,000 channels to watch on them. We're the generation that will die with the most toys. Until that day finally comes, we'll still be riding our bicycles, jamming in garage bands, and wearing jeans and T-shirts. We're famously careful about the way we raise our kids, because somebody has to grow up. It won't be us. And what about those kids? Will Generation X and the Millennials do a better job running the world than the boomers have? Let's hope so. But first they'll have to move out of our basements.
You still don't get it. IT WAS THE POLITICIANS AND A SMALL NUMBER OF CORPORATE DECISION MAKERS. 0.00001%, or so, of the Boomers did that... so you disdain the entire generation? (Funny how I never heard later generations complain about getting to buy cheaper goods which were made overseas...) The Boomers paid the most income tax of any generation by a HUGE margin. IOW, their taxes and entrepreneurship BUILT this country. Don't hear younger generations appreciating that!
We should note that nearly all the Business Leaders today who are shipping Tech jobs jobs to Asia were born after 1964. They are not Boomers.
With all due respect, the real damage was done in the 1990’s in terms of off-shoring and those vultures were almost certainly boomers. Count Mitt Romney as a chief protagonist at Blaine Capital in fact.
So all of these Tech CEOs and Business Leaders today -- who are not boomers -- could stop the offshoring trend if they want... instead they accelerated it to a level far beyond what occurred in the 1990s.
Today I think that job dislocation is more likely to be caused by technology in general (tech replacing humans or a segment of workers being technology illiterate) versus literally outsourcing entire swaths of manufacturing and service overseas like occurred in the 1990’s. I think we might be somewhat in agreement, the change agent of the job dislocations having evolved over time. Just my observation.
Have you thanked a Baby Boomer today? They are the real Greatest Generation. 27 amazing things baby boomers have done for humanity For far too long, people have been dissing the children of the "greatest generation". We need to hear more about their achievements. https://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/27_amazing_things_baby_boomers_have_done_for_humanity Was there ever a generation more filled with self-doubt, even self-loathing, than the baby-boomers? If you were born between 1945 and 1965, you are supposed to feel guilty for trashing the economy, for the demise of the family, for endemic cynicism and selfishness, for an addiction to government handouts and for flared trousers. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, a baby-boomer, confessed to a graduating class recently that his had been "the grasshopper generation, eating through just about everything like hungry locusts." Look, everybody makes mistakes. A bit of greed here and there shouldn’t obliterate all the good that baby-boomers have done for Gen X, Gen Y and whoever else happens to come along. It’s about time for some Boomer Pride. Here are 27 (there are lots more) ways that we (yes, I’m one of them) have improved the universe. * * * * * 1. You’re still here, right? Gen X and Gen Y didn’t live through the Cold War with its military strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction, its fallout shelters and a Doomsday Clock set at two minutes to midnight. While Iran may have nuclear weapons, no one (except Israel) is worrying about being bombed back to the Stone Age. Baby boomer statesmen in the US and the USSR found ways to defuse the mad arms race. How about a nice little thank-you? 2. Capital punishment is vanishing. Maybe not in China, Singapore and Saudi Arabia, but most Western countries have abolished the death penalty as an inhumane and vengeful punishment unworthy of a civilised society. Even in the United States, where it is still legal, only 43 people were executed last year, compared to about 130 in 1945. 3. No more polio. No more smallpox, measles, mumps, rubella or whooping cough, either. Most members of Gen X and Gen Y never heard of infantile paralysis, never shivered at photos of vast hospital wards filled with crippled children. There’s something to thank God and the boomers for. 4. No more beehive hair-dos. Boomer women embraced the simple and natural hairstyles pioneered by Vidal Sassoon. The women of the Greatest Generation had their heads tortured with spiky rollers, baked under driers, and teased and lacquered into shapes that could withstand hurricane-force winds. This was more truly a liberation than the Pill, a more radical return to nature than shedding corsets, and did more to get women into the workforce than maternity leave (just think of the time saved at the mirror each morning). Despite attempts to bring back Big Hair, wash-and-wear is hair to stay -- and it’s all thanks to the Boomer babes. 5. The rise of Africa. After two centuries as the Dark Continent, Africa is about to make a breakthrough. Some African economies have the highest growth rates in the world. Africa will provide most of the world’s population growth in the 21st century. With more education and more political stability, African nations will become big players on the world stage. 6. Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Beach Boys and the Bee Gees. Popular music will never be the same after the 70s. These musicians passed on an undying legacy with their lyrics, experimentation and harmonies. 7. Mobile phones. Wireless communication is not just for Gen Y to use as a texting toy. Mobile phones are making a huge difference in accelerating economic development in the Third World. 8. Marriage has turned a corner. Agreed, marriage is on the rocks after the legalisation of no-fault divorce, abortion, the rise of co-habitation and a push for the legalisation of gay marriage. But the fever has reached its peak: a number of scholars and policy makers have begun to articulate the real meaning of marriage and to demonstrate the contribution made by stable families. Even the “Greatest Generation” had its doubts about the family. It was up to Baby Boomers (some of them, anyway) to forge convincing arguments defending marriage as the fundamental institution of our society. 9. Shattering the glass ceiling. What employment opportunities were there for talented women before, during and after World War II? Sure, women (and men) should put families first, but if we really believe in the equality of the sexes, opportunities should exist for women to bring their unique gifts to public life. Now they can. 10. Communism is kaput. Somebody has to take credit for dismantling an inhuman system which was responsible for the deaths of 100 million people in 50 years. Since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, it’s obviously the baby boomers. 11. Living with disability. Paraplegics and quadriplegics are well cared for, can live relatively normal lives, and can be part of the work force. 12. The welfare state is on the skids. FDR created the New Deal in the 1930s. In the UK, Sir William Beveridge declared war on Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness in 1945. Baby boomers benefited from the welfare state, but they also proved that it stifled initiative, created a culture of dependence and was unsustainable. Everywhere it is being dismantled, privatised and starved. Good riddance. 13. Voyager 1. Launched in 1977, the space probe Voyager 1 is the first human-made object to leave the Solar System. This is a landmark in the history of civilisation comparable to Notre Dame de Paris or Michelangelo’s David. 14. The internet. Instant communication. Fingertip knowledge. Can you imagine life without this immense force for good? Remember the recent photo of a forced abortion in China? Within days it became the most popular topic on Weibo, China's Twitter. This shows that a simple farmer can now force change upon one of the world's most authoritarian regimes. 15. Tom Yam Goong. In every city in American, Australia or the UK, you are bound to find Thai restaurants. More than great meals and occasions for appalling puns, these are a sign of an increasingly cosmopolitan and culturally tolerant society. Another Thai-riffic step forward brought to you by Baby Boomers. 16. Locking in civil rights. Blacks in US still have it tough in many ways, mainly as a result of the welfare state, but the Jim Crow laws are gone and racism, formal or informal, is dead or dying. This was the signature cause of the Baby Boomers. "We shall overcome" has become "we overcame". 17. The democratization of computing. The power of computers has changed the world, but if it were only accessible through mainframes, our lives would be completely different. Baby boomer innovators like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs gave us the personal computer (and smart phones and tablets). 18. We wear seat belts. The seat belt was invented in 1885 but the world’s first mandatory buckle-up law wasn’t passed until 1970, in the Australian state of Victoria. Since then, hundreds of thousands of lives have been saved, despite complaints about government busybodies and lack of freedom. 19. No World War III, not even World War II.5. Korea, Vietnam, Biafra, the Congo, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Yugoslavia, Iraq… The list of wars since 1950 is long and bloody. But in World War II, 60 million people died, give or take 10 million. Somehow the baby-boomer generation managed to ward off the worst tragedy known to man. 20. We can work past 60. Nowadays turning 60 is no longer a professional death sentence. People can work as long as they like, keeping their experience and skills alive. It’s a small advance in human rights and human dignity. 21. Gary Larsen and Garry Trudeau. Why are the world’s greatest cartoonists both named Gar(r)y? Larsen’s widely imitated style, with his anthropomorphised animals and deconstructed cultural cliches was pure genius. And Trudeau’s anti-establishment narratives have become part of the establishment. See if you can improve on that. 22. At least we didn’t do tattoos. Admittedly, some baby boomers have weakened (the wife of Lord Steel, former leader of the UK’s Liberal Democrats acquired a jaguar tattoo for her 70th birthday recently) but most are standing firm against this hideous habit. 23. Steven Spielberg. Born in 1946, America’s most acclaimed director is the ultimate baby boomer. His stock in trade is clever cinematography and cultural candy: sentimentality, stereotypes, broken families and wistful nostalgia. But the world would be poorer without Jaws, E.T., Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Schindler's List, The Color Purple, and Saving Private Ryan. 24. We are comfortable in a global village. We now live in an interdependent world. Thanks to modern communications, we can know about what happens in Azerbaijan and Paraguay as soon as it happens. We can rejoice with them (sometimes) and grieve with them (more often) – and we realise keenly that our lives are intertwined through the media, trade and the environment. No longer are any of us tempted think that we are superior just because we live in a rich and self-sufficient country. 25. We’re man enough to say “I’m sorry”. Has there ever been a generation which has apologised more often and more profusely? It has become a compulsive gesture for some politicians – for the Crusades, for the Opium Wars, for the Holocaust, for Japanese internment, for eugenic policies, for the slave trade, for discrimination against Chinese, for medical experimentation, for racism and many more. It takes courage to say “I’m sorry”. 26. You’ve still got an environment, guys. It was the baby-boomer generation which rang alarm bells about the destruction of natural habitats, endangered species, and pollution of waterways. Silent Spring, published in 1962, was possibly the first book to warn people that the benefits of technology were double-edged and that we could not continue to enrich ourselves and impoverish the world around us. 27. We’ve screwed up social security so badly that no one will ever do it again (touch wood). Because birthrates have been low and entitlements have been high, the burden of non-taxpaying dependents in Western countries is growing unsustainably. Social security benefits are unfunded. Governments are running deficits year after year after year. The US debt clocked up by baby-boomers is – who knows really? – about $14 trillion. That was a mistake. We’re sorry. But at least we taught Gen X and Gen Y a lesson they’ll never forget.