This brief commentary from a Baby Boomer writing about his own generation and the problems we are facing in the nation, among other things.
Click here to read Victor Davis Hanson's commentary (a contributor to the National Review).
A couple choice quotes:
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.Perhaps the greatest trademark of the 1960s cohort was self-congratulation. Baby boomers alone claimed to have brought about changes in civil rights, women’s liberation, and environmental awareness — as if these were not prior concerns of earlier generations.
Our present problems were not really caused by an unpopular president, a spendthrift Congress, the neocon bogeymen, the greedy Saudis, shifty bankers, or corporate oilmen in black hats and handlebar moustaches — much less the anonymous “they.”
The fault of this age, dear baby boomers, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
I know I keep harping on the Baby Boomer generation, but I am convinced that historians will asterisk this generation as the progenitors of many problems that will take a few generations to correct and/or undo. The generation (which many would consider me to be one at the tail end of the generation) is of a different something-or-another, it seems, and while there is good that has come from many people of this generation, as a whole we are beginning to see the significant shortcomings. As one commentator mentioned a while ago, when dealing with people of this generation in his parish/diocese he has a hard time convincing them that they are no longer the "young people." How does a generation that early on defined itself as "not trusting anyone over 30" deal with becoming 65? Is it just a matter of not wanting to grow-up?
Hat tip: Confessions of a Carioca
