Baby Boomer Blues (KingShamus)

Matt over at the Conservative Hideout has some thoughts on the so-called 'Worst Generation'.

My parent’s generation spent the wealth that was so painfully earned by their parents.  Then, they created failed program after failed program, all paid for with trillions of borrowed dollars.  And when the programs were clearly failures, and, in fact, made things worse, they plodded on.  The kept following the leftist narrative, and never-ever cut their own benefits, no matter how unsustainable they were.  They also rejected the spirit of their parents, who had endured the great depression, and survived WW II.  Their parents had sacrificed, but the boomers wanted what they wanted, and they wanted it immediately.

Read the whole piece, ya'all.

While I agree with much of Matt's sentiments, I think the Baby Boomers sometimes get a bad rap.  After all, they didn't come up with Social Security.  That was second-gen progressive Franklin Roosevelt's idea.  The Great Society programs--Medicare, Aid To Families With Dependent Children--were dreamed up by Lyndon Johnson.

No, the Boomers didn't create a lot of the now-crumbling social spending architecture that threatens to destroy America.  What many folks in the post WWII generation did was assume that the nationalized Ponzi schemes and subsidization of personal failure they inherited from older generations were going to continue without consequence.  With that monumentally absurd analysis in place, the New Left movements that arose in the Baby Boom generation set about creating ideologies and rationalizations that reinforced their flawed assumptions.

Look at one example.  Conservatives assert that welfare is destroying the American family.  Baby Boom feminists (and their intellectual progeny) argue that the traditional family is outdated and sexist.  The nuclear familial arrangement, with its coercion and fundamental unfairness towards women, is not worth being concerned about.  The dissolution of that unfair institution is not only necessary, it should be welcomed.  Welfare might be hurting marriage and the old family arrangements, but it's just doing the needed work to get society to the post-traditonal family that feminists crave.

While some elements of the Boomer left were busy cementing themselves into soft socialism and cultural Marxism, many others entered into the media.  Take a gander at who sets the agenda in much of the MSM.  Arthur 'Pinch' Sulzberger, the head of the New York Times, was born in 1951.  Steve Capus, president of NBC News, was born in 1963.  The editor of the Washington Post is Marcus Brauchli, who was born in 1961.   

These folks--and many others in the legacy media--are all part of the post-war Baby Boom.  How many times have you watched some gauzy nostalgia-laden montage of 60's and 70's era protests/concerts/hippie love-ins/Timothy Leary yammerings?  The reason why these dreadful creations are so ubiquitous is because the Boomers who look back at that time so fondly are the ones who make up the majority of American news organizations.  Further, most of the contemporary coverage of the baby boom social movements are almost always positive.  The excesses of dudes like Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman or Bill Ayers are generally airbrushed away.  Even better?  The self-congratulation to actual accomplishment ratio is usually quite skewed.  "Hooray for us, we stopped the Vietnam War and stuff.  Also, we listened to the Velvet Underground, so yeah..."  Yikes.

Because Baby Boomers--especially lefty boomers--dominate the media, they paint a distorted picture of 60's/70's youth.  If you just watched CNN or read Time Magazine, you'd think every teenager in America from 1966 to 1978 was an idealistic acid-gobbling Vietnam War protester who lived on commune in Southern California with her Native American spirit guide, seven sex partners and five children named after various wildflowers while David Crosby constructed ever more elaborate water bongs and Gloria Steinem ritualistically burned her bra.  The reality is that boomers during their formative years inhabited a broad continuum, from stern straight-laced traditionalists to wild-eyed liberal doucherockets, and that many of these neat categorizations we're fed just don't add up.

What is the worst sin of the Baby Boomers?  The knee-jerk leftism to which some of them continue to bitterly cling is annoying as hell.  The unreal self-descriptions and constant back-patting is tiresome.  The thing is that none of them would be particularly fatal.  They'd just be aggravating.

The most egregious error committed by the Boomers isn't any of that crap.  According to Stanley Kurtz, via the great Pundette, the issue for the 'Worst Generation' is the fact that they didn't make babies.

In 2005, I reviewed some of the first books on the subject and concluded that a demographically induced economic crisis could spark a revival of religious traditionalism, a far more radical decomposition of the family, or both.

At the time, it looked as if a possible demographically-induced economic crisis was at least a couple of decades away. We seem to be running ahead of schedule. To a large extent, the economic troubles here and in Europe already factor in the unsustainable entitlements of the future.

Although an economic crisis is imminent, and the underlying cause demographic, I haven’t noticed many calls for increased child-bearing. That is in striking contrast to the world-wide movement in response to the less proximate and more theoretical global warming crisis. It’s a measure of how unthinkable changes in our post-sixties life-styles still are. Yet it doesn’t mean change won’t happen, if and when a demographic-economic crisis truly strikes.

It probably doesn't matter all that much that a lot of Boomer peeps smoked a gazillion pounds of OG Kush looking for a cheap buzz or a spiritual experience or whatever.  The tendency for elf-esteem boosting hagiography of 60's and 70's accomplishments doesn't explain our present difficulties.  The leftist leaning of many in that generation by itself doesn't damn the post-war generation.

The fact that they couldn't be bothered to squeeze out a few more kids here and there is the lasting destructive legacy of the baby boom demographic.  In many cases, it wasn't purposeful.  Their intentions were often noble, or at least not totally self-serving anyway.  Often there were perfectly rational rationalizations for their reproductive decisions.  Career moves, financial choices, a concern for the environment, bad relationships, high divorce rates; all those things tend to slow down the baby-making.  More, all of these factors could've happened to any generation. 

I really don't think baby boomers sat down as an entire generational cohort and decided to stop making kids as much as their parents did.  I also don't think they all planned a demographic collapse that would threaten the entire economic future of the America.  There were definitely more than a few Boomers who were worried about overpopulation, but for the most part it was a host of decisions and life events that slowed the Boomer breeding.

The problem here is, like so many other good (or at least not-evil) intentions, America has managed to pave a road right into the abyss with miles of supposedly good plans and allegedly smart ideas.  The Boom generation didn't mean for this to happen.  Nonetheless, we find ourselves in dire circumstances due to some very misguided decisions.   

Comments

[baldilocks]

Guilty as charged. :(

[kingshamus]

Me and you both, Baldi.

[sonnyspats]

Did you know that Bill Moyers of PBS fame wrote a large part of the blue print for Johnsons Great Society?

[sonnyspats]

I just don't see a corelation between our current financial crisis and the dwindeling population numbers .

[baldilocks]

Much of our debt is due to what is owed to social welfare programs--Social Security, Medicare, etc. The funding of social welfare programs is contingent upon getting those funds from succeeding generations of workers. If there are no succeeding generations or too few...

[sonnyspats]

Ah! I remember my first concept of Social Security. It was that the government could not touch it and it was like put in a bank where it was drawing interest until it was time to retire. I need to research that because I thought SS was first structured that way.

[ErikZ]

Yes. Now it's just a tax that goes to the 65+ set.

And a few other types of people. I haven't looked into it.