Brief Reign of the Boomers
Shaun Mullen has started the wake for The Politically Departed (below), so in sadness and hope, another take on the generation that tried so hard and accomplished so little:
Another first in Barack Obama’s presidency is change from the generation born when millions came back from World War II and began to beget–Baby Boomers, the first of whom are now eligible for early Social Security benefits.
For a noisy cohort, the Boomers produced only two presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. This year, they and the rest of us ended up with a choice of two men whose times of birth bracketed their own. For the best-educated, wealthiest generation in American history, this is a meager presidential output.
How so? The conventional wisdom about Boomer self-absorption doesn’t explain everything. This is, after all, the generation of the 1960s’ college idealists acting out passionate new ideas about sex, gender, race, war and politics.
They held the media spotlight briefly but never cohered into a political force. In “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama disdains “the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation–a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago.”
Did, after all that turmoil, Boomers terrify the Silent Majority into the Reagan Revolution and then retreat to fuel the “greed is good” decades that led to Wall Street bubbles and today’s crippled economy?
2 Responses to “Brief Reign of the Boomers”
Interesting article. Relevantly, many prominent experts and publications have pointed out that Obama is part of Generation Jones, born 1954-1965, between the Boomers and GenXers.
You may find this page interesting: it has, among other things, excerpts from publications like Newsweek and the New York Times, and videos with over 25 top pundits, all talking specifically about Obama’s identity as a GenJoneser: http://www.generationjones.com/2008election.html
Obama is not only technically a Boomer, but a true Boomer, to which this article eludes but from which it then backs off.
The difference between the president elect and his generational counterparts is simply that he continued living his ideals – we abandoned them.
But his ideas and ideals are all Boomer all the way. For more on this: http://boomercoach.wordpress.com