Here we are in the baby boom cosmos. What have we wrought?
Updated Dec. 1, 2013 12:42 a.m. ET
The Baby Boom generation spans eighteen years. Already,
the earliest boomers have reached retirement age. Many are getting more
conservative as they get older. WSJ's Jason Bellini reports.
We are the generation that changed
everything. Of all the eras and epochs of Americans, ours is the one
that made the biggest impression—on ourselves. That's an important
accomplishment, because we're the generation that created the self, made
the firmament of the self, divided the light of the self from the
darkness of the self, and said, "Let there be self." If you were born
between 1946 and 1964, you may have noticed this yourself.
That's
not to say we're a selfish generation. Selfish means "too concerned
with the self," and we're not. Self isn't something we're just, you
know, concerned with. We are self.
Before
us, self was without form and void, like our parents in their dumpy
clothes and vague ideas. Then we came along. Now the personal is the
political. The personal is the socioeconomic. The personal is the
religious and the secular, science and the arts. The personal is
everything that creepeth upon the earth after his (and, let us hasten to
add, her) kind. If the baby boom has done one thing, it's to beget a
personal universe. (Our apologies for anyone who personally happens to
be a jerk.)
Self is like fish,
proverbially speaking. Give a man a fish and you've fed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and, if he turns into a dry-fly catch-and-release
angling fanatic up to his liver in icy water wearing ridiculous waders
and an absurd hat, pestering trout with 3-pound test line on a $1,000
graphite rod, and going on endlessly about Royal Coachman lures that he
tied himself using muskrat fur and partridge feathers…well, at least his
life partner is glad to have him out of the house.
So
here we are in the baby-boom cosmos, formed in our image, personally
tailored to our individual needs, and predetermined to be eternally
fresh and novel. And we saw that it was good. Or pretty good.
We should have had a cooler name, the
way the Lost Generation did. Except good luck to anybody who tries to
tell us to get lost. Anyway, it's too late now. We're stuck with being
forever described as exploding infants. And maybe it's time, now that
we've splattered ourselves all over the place, for the baby boom to look
back and think. "What made us who we are?" "And what caused us to act
the way we do?" "And WTF?" Because the truth is, if we hadn't decided to
be young forever, we'd be old.
The
youngest baby boomers, born in the last year when anybody thought it was
hip to like
Lyndon Johnson,
are turning 50. We'd be sad about getting old if we weren't too
busy remarrying younger wives, reviving careers that hit glass ceilings
when children arrived and renewing prescriptions for drugs that keep us
from being sad. And we'll never retire. We can't. The mortgage is
underwater. We're in debt up to the Rogaine for the kids' college
education. And it serves us right—we're the generation who insisted that
a passion for living should replace working for one.
Still,
it's an appropriate moment for us to weigh what we've wrought and tally
what we've added to and subtracted from existence. We've reached the
age of accountability. The world is our fault. We are the generation
that has an excuse for everything—one of our greatest contributions to
modern life—but the world is still our fault.
This
is every generation's fate. It's a matter of power and privilege and
demography. Whenever anything happens anywhere, somebody over 50 signs
the bill for it. And the baby boom, seated as we are at the head of
life's table, is hearing Generation X, Generation Y and the Millennials
all saying, "Check, please!"
To address
America's baby boom is to face big, broad problems. We number more than
75 million, and we're not only diverse but take a thorny pride in our
every deviation from the norm (even though we're in therapy for it). We
are all alike in that each of us thinks we're unusual.
Fortunately, we are all alike in our
approach to big, broad problems too. We won't face them. There's a
website for that, a support group to join, a class to take, alternative
medicine, regular exercise, a book that explains it all, a celebrity on
TV who's been through the same thing, or we can eliminate gluten from
our diet. History is full of generations that had too many problems. We
are the first generation to have too many answers.
Not
a problem. Consider the people who have faced up squarely to the
deepest and most perplexing conundrums of existence.
Leo Tolstoy,
for example. He tackled every one of them. Why are we here? What
kind of life should we lead? The nature of evil. The character of love.
The essence of identity. Salvation. Suffering. Death.
What
did it make him? Dead, for one thing. And off his rocker for the last
30 years of his life. Plus he was saddled with a thousand-page novel
about war, peace and everything else you can think of, which he couldn't
even look up on Wikipedia to get the skinny on because he hadn't
written it yet. What a life. If Leo Tolstoy had been one of us he could
have entered a triathlon, a baby-boom innovation of the middle 1970s. By
then we knew we couldn't run away from our problems. But if we added
cycling and swimming…
So, to the
problems of talking about the baby boom, let us turn our big, broad (yet
soon to be firmed up, thanks to the triathlon for seniors that we're
planning to enter) generational backsides.
But
a difficulty remains. Most groups of people who get tagged by history
as a "generation" can be described in an easy, offhand way: as folks
sort of the same age experiencing sort of the same things in sort of the
same place, like the cast of "Cheers" or "Seinfeld" or "Friends." I'm
pretty sure—as a result of taking Modern Literature in college—that
Ernest Hemingway,
F. Scott and
Zelda Fitzgerald,
James Joyce,
Gertrude Stein,
Ford Madox Ford,
Henry Miller
and
Ezra Pound
were roommates in a big apartment on the Left Bank in Paris in
the 1920s. (If not, I give this idea for a sitcom away for free to the
reader.)
But the baby boom has an exact
definition, a precise demography. We are the children who were born
during a period after World War II when the long-term trend in fertility
among American women was exceeded.
Still,
distinctions among varieties of baby boomers need to be made.
Geographical distinctions are peripatetically moot for us. Distinctions
according to race, class, gender or sexual orientation would be
offensive to baby-boom sensitivities. Furthermore, they'd be beside the
point, because the author—much as he endeavors to be as different from
everyone else as a member of the baby boom should be—finds himself to be
hopelessly ordinary in matters of race, class, gender identification
and which section of Playboy he turned to first when he was 16. But time
is a distinction we all have to endure. And there are temporal
variations in the baby boom.
The seniors
of this generation were born in the late 1940s. The author is of that
ilk. The seniors were on the bow wave of the baby boom's voyage of
exploration. But they were also closely tethered in the wake of
preceding generations. In effect the seniors were keelhauled by the
baby-boom experience and left a bit soggy and shaken. If we wound up as
financial advisers trying to wear tongue studs or Trotskyites trying to
organize Tea Party protests, or both, we are to be forgiven.
Hillary Clinton
and
Cheech Marin
are seniors.
The juniors were
born in the early 1950s. They were often younger siblings of the seniors
and came of age when parents were throwing in the towel during the
"What's the Matter with Kids These Days" feature match. The juniors
pursued the notions, whims and fancies of the baby boom with a greater
intensity. For them, drugs were no longer experimental; drugs were
proven. From the juniors we got the teeny-boppers, the groupies and the
more ragamuffin barefoot urchins of Haight-Ashbury. They hunted up some
shoes when they eventually made their way to Silicon Valley. (
Bill Gates
and
Steve Jobs
were both born in 1955.) But they never did find their neckties.
The
sophomores were born in the late 1950s. By the time they reached
adolescence, the baby-boom ethos had permeated society. Sophomores
gladly accepted sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll and the deep philosophical
underpinning thereof. But they'd seen enough of the baby boom in action
to realize that what works in general terms doesn't always work when the
bong sets fire to the beanbag chair. Circumstances had changed. In
college, many of the sophomores attended classes. Some even sneaked off
and got M.B.A.s.
The freshmen were born
in the early 1960s. They felt no visceral effects from the events that
formed the baby boom. To freshmen, the Vietnam War was just something
that was inexplicably on TV all the time, like
Ed McMahon.
Feminism had gone from a pressing social issue to a
Bea Arthur
comedy show that their parents liked, and, by the time the
freshmen were in college, feminism was an essay topic for the "Reading
Shakespeare in Cultural Context" course. Hint: Lady Macbeth hit that
glass ceiling hard.
Now the American
baby boom is the world's future. Everyone on the planet will turn into
us eventually, as soon as families get excessively happy and start
feeling too much affection for their kids. Unless, of course,
extravagant freedom, scant responsibility, plenty of money and a modicum
of peace lead to such a high rate of carbon emissions that we all fry
or drown. But you can't have everything. And you can have a profusion of
opportunity and, at the same time, a collapse of traditional social
standards.
Just look at Western Europe
and the wealthiest parts of Asia and Latin America. They're almost as
useless as we are—with abundant disposable income and ample leisure time
to devote to pointless activities that don't harm anybody much except
ourselves.
Baby-boom-like places all
seem to be engaged in bellicose national political deadlock the way we
are in America. There's much tut-tutting about bellicose national
political deadlock. But it's an improvement on bellicose national
political purpose.
It will take a while
to turn the whole world into baby boomers. For one thing, due to
declining birthrates, the rising generation won't be a boom like we were
with the same weight of numbers on their side. On the other hand, aging
populations in places such as Russia and China will let these babies
speak in booming voices.
Noxious
politics will disappear as all the world's political science classes
happily degenerate into hourlong shouting matches the way our old
Constitutional Law classes did. It's hard to remain truly noxious when
you like being obnoxious better.
Stupid
notions of central planning, nationalization and protectionist trade
barriers will fall by the wayside when everyone is paying as little
attention in Economics as I was.
And
sooner or later, the 1.29 billion people making $1.25 a day, the way we
were, selling "underground" newspapers on the street in Baltimore, are
going to figure out there's a better way. I just received an email from
Nigeria about a rather large amount of money needing to be transferred
to an American bank and requiring only modest assistance on my part.
There
will be no religious fanaticism. We're not a generation who listens to
anybody, God included. In our defense, I doubt God minds us not
bothering about Him. Very few of the people we've bothered—parents,
college deans, the police, LBJ, the psychiatrist at my draft physical,
supervisors, bosses, attractive types in bars—have minded when we quit
bothering them.
World peace is probably
too much to ask. But it will be hard to assemble those huge conscripted
armies that used to fight wars. We'll all have a letter from our doctor
about our deep-seated psychiatric problems and drug use.
Besides,
war is about power. Baby boomers aren't power hungry. Power comes with
that kicker, responsibility. We're greedy for love, happiness,
experience, sensation, thrills, praise, fame, adulation, inner peace,
and, as it turns out, money. Health and fitness too. But we're not
greedy for power. Observe the baby boomers who have climbed to its
ascendancy in Washington. The best and the brightest? They're over at
And all of you tyrannical,
despotic, overbearing squares and wet smacks with your two-bit
autocracies in the butt ends of the world? You shall gather in finished
basements while your revered elders stand at the top of the basement
stairs yelling, "I think something's on fire down there!" Your offices
shall be liberated by raving peaceniks. You shall spend your treasure on
cocaine and rehab. Your junk bonds shall default. You shall form
overage garage bands and try to play "Margaritaville." Your third spouse
shall acquire an
Black Card with a credit limit higher than the U.S. national
debt. Your daughters shall wear nose rings. Your sons shall have pagan
symbols indelibly marked upon their necks. (Unless you belong to one of
those cultures where daughters wear nose rings and sons have pagan
symbols indelibly marked upon their necks, in which case they shall
not.) You shall be perplexed by the Internet. You shall grow old and
addled enough to vote for
Ron Paul
in a presidential primary.
There
is no escape from happiness, attention, affection, freedom,
irresponsibility, money, peace, opportunity and finding out that
everything you were ever told is wrong.
Behold the baby boom, ye mighty, and despair.
http://online.wsj.com/
http://online.wsj.com/
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