Baby Boomers: The Original Millennials?
These days, it seems to be popular to rally against the perceived entitlements and apathy of the generation known as Millennials, the vague term applied to individuals, myself included, born generally between the early 80’s and the mid 90's. Most of us who fall under the millennial umbrella came of age at the dawn of the millennium and vividly remember exactly where we were when the Twin Towers toppled down from the New York Skyline in a gargantuan cloud of dust. In the almost twenty years since, as many Millennials graduated college, entered the workforce and began settling down to raise families, we’ve seen a younger generation, sometimes dubbed post-Millennials or Generation Z, many of whom were newborns during 9/11, beginning to weigh in on several of the most urgent issues being fiercely debated in our country.
Perhaps no issue is more pressing for today’s young Americans than the rampant occurrence of school shootings. This comes as no surprise since it’s these very kids who keep finding themselves in the cross-hairs of armed shooters. In response to this epidemic of mass shootings, student led movements like the March for our Lives and others have put pressure on lawmakers to take some kind of action to close the many loopholes and regulate the oversights which so easily allow high powered guns to fall into the worst hands. Although the most vocal criticism of these movements and it’s leaders has come from gun advocates, there also seems to be a general outcry against those students and teens at the forefront of these movements from many people in the Baby Boomer generation.
The term “Baby Boomers” refers to the generation of people born in the post WWII years of relative economic prosperity and renewed optimism about the American way of life. The Boomers, generally speaking, benefited from the sacrifices and hard work of their parents during and after the war as they returned to a booming workforce and built comfortable lives for their families. It’s ironic then, that some Boomers are so quick to label Millennials as spoiled and entitled brats given that it was the Boomers who essentially wrote the book on enjoying the unbridled spoils of their parents sacrifices. This is not to say that Boomers didn’t face struggles during their own coming of age; they faced their own life changing historical crisis when Kennedy was killed in Dallas; they witnessed (and in some cases, joined) the struggles of black Americans for their Civil Rights and many of them later spoke out and resisted a terribly unjust and horrific war, despite being viewed by many among their parents generation as naive and unpatriotic cowards.
Given what their generation is usually revered for, namely standing up against the avarice and abuses of their own government as well as many of the previous generations norms and conventions, it’s ironic that the Boomers are now the generation in power and usually the ones preserving the status quo. What’s more ironic is the widespread dismissal of the opinions and determination of many of today’s youth. Many Boomers seem to hold a contradictory view of their own past, simultaneously glorifying the simplicity and purity of the good old days while also contending how much harder they had it compared to the kids of today. For some Boomers, this conflicting view also seems to be applied to Millennials themselves, who are often branded as self-centered and apathetic to today’s key issues and then far too often brushed off as naive and immature when they attempt to voice their opinions on said issues.
As far as the self-centered/self-absorbed charge against Millennials goes, let’s not forget that the Boomers are the preeminent example of a largely self-absorbed generation. Let’s not forget that in the 1970’s, the Boomers’ focus on self-fulfillment and self-advancement led Tom Wolfe to dub them the “Me” Generation. Let’s also not forget that the Millennials, at least the older Millennials, were raised by Boomers. Of course, parents are just one of many influencing factors in the development of self, but if you want to trace the origin of much our contemporary self-centered living, at least going back as far as the fifties, then the Boomers, by and large, would be patient zero. They were the prime beneficiaries of the great boom of American confidence and exceptionalism following WWII and it did wonders for their sense of self-importance.
The dismissal of Millennials as uninformed and naive is another rich irony coming from the generation which, for a little while anyway, believed they could, as Hunter Thompson writes in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, “buy peace and love for $3 a hit”. It’s easy for the older generation to look down upon Millennials, always seemingly glued to their smartphones or tablets, drinking their artisinal, gluten-free, organic soy lattes and think “What’ve they got to worry about? They have no Vietnam breathing down their necks, eyeing their draft number. They don’t have to worry about segregation; black citizens aren’t being thrown out of restaurants and ending up target practice for attack dogs and fire hoses. Compared to all that, we’ve made incredible progress.”
It’s true, kids these days don’t have to travel 3,000 miles to a jungle to have bullets whizzing by their heads. All they have to do is step into their classroom or local movie theater, church or synagogue and in an instant, bullets might be whizzing by their heads. Jim Crow may be dead, but that doesn’t mean it’s ghost has been vanquished. Segregation may be gone, but that doesn’t mean that racism is. You need only turn on the 24/7 news or go on YouTube to see footage of a black girl in her classroom being flipped in her desk and pined to the ground or unarmed black men being shot dead in the back or pined down on the pavement and being punched and kicked ruthlessly by a gang of police. Maybe all these kids are trying to say, much like many Boomers were saying back in the sixties, is that we still have a ways to go in the name of progress. The work is never truly finished; we must always be on guard.
It seems to be a recurring flaw of each generation to believe it has it worse than the one which follows, but the bare bone truth is that each has its own struggles and its own spoils. Boomers didn’t have a great depression to struggle through; they were the first generation to enjoy the new and splendid wonder of television, rock music and space travel. My generation was the first to enjoy video games, Furby’s and smartphones. These technologies were miracles of the age, miracles which made our parents think we’re so spoiled and ungrateful. Boomers count the death of Kennedy, Civil Rights and Vietnam among their collective struggles. For us it’s post-9/11 paranoia and the looming threat of terrorism, mass shootings, and the specter of racism and discrimination rearing its ugly head once again. The dark cloud of nuclear annihilation is still with us, a scary hangover from the Boomer days. For Millennials and post-Millennials, maybe mass shootings are their Vietnam. Maybe taking a knee during the anthem or movements like Black Lives Matter to protest the shootings of unarmed black people and fighting discrimination against LGBTQ people is the millennial version of going down to Alabama to register blacks to vote or marching in Selma.
If our History teaches us anything it’s that human nature tends to be cyclical. Humans very rarely learn from their past mistakes, in fact they usually keep right on making them. They might not always return as obviously as before; it might not always be as blatant as separate water fountains or lynchings. They might not even be recognized as mistakes until decades later, but isn’t it the responsibility of people, from any generation, to sound the alarm when they see injustice and outright horror playing out in front of their eyes? Isn’t that what those young adults at the forefront of these causes are doing, sounding the alarm, sending out the distress signal to warn us, to urge us to try and do something?
Sure, there are plenty of apathetic, self-absorbed kids among us, whether born in 1953 or 1993, and there always will be. Sure, there are always gonna be a few misguided fools and opportunists mixed into these movements, whether it’s the burnt out acid eater who’s only at the peace rally to listen to the Dead, score some mushrooms and get laid or the self-righteous, overly sensitive liberal wannabe who cries racist over someone wearing a Pocahontas Halloween costume or a comedian telling an off color joke yet has nothing to say to the true racists, the real hate mongers, those marching down the street and those holding political office.
These freaks and phonies are always going to be there, in every generation, on every side of every debate, cause and movement, but that doesn’t mean everyone else in their age bracket is also full of shit. We can’t simply label an entire generation as naive brats simply because they’re young. You don’t have to be thirty to see that something is fundamentally wrong and want to find a way to change it. If that were true, all those boomers who didn’t trust anyone over thirty might not have helped end segregation and the terrible treatment of blacks in the South. They might not have so fiercely fought against the Vietnam War and who knows how much longer it might’ve dragged on.
These Millennials speaking out and taking action are recognizing and confronting some of the most urgent problems plaguing our society today and, like the Boomers before them, trying to make the world they will one day inherit a little better than they found it. Maybe it’s time for those obstinate Boomers to heed the eternal words of one of their own, Bob Dylan, when he sang “Your old road is rapidly agin’/ Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand / For the times they are a-changin’.”