Life After the Baby Boomers Retire

It’s stunning Goodwin thinks his age cohort will be missed. You're a soft, narcissistic age of philosophers. There are so many of you that you’ve been able to co-opt the best ideas of your predecessors and sell them as your own.

What were the defining ideals of your youth? Civil rights? MLK - Silent Generation. Sexual Revolution? Hugh Hefner, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem - all Silents. Consciousness movement? Timothy Leary - WW2 generation. Networking and the internet? Donald Davies - WW2. Environmental movement? Six of the first seven heads of the EPA were Silent generation. Disco… That was all you.

Your contribution to America was a culture of self fixation. You are the first generation to have fewer children than parents. You had kids when the pill and Roe v. Wade failed. You grew up on Leave it to Beaver. Your kids grew up on Damien Omen. The cultural bias shift is obvious. Your neglect of the latchkey kid created a more self reliant and pragmatic age cohort – good thing too. Social Security is welfare (you pay for someone else) not an investment. You’re late life leisure will be subsidized by the very kids whose youth you misspent. Perhaps it serves you right that the person who will provide your long term care in late life will not speak English as a first language.

You must have something to show for it. Your competitive consumption that drove the evolution of the dual income household, rampant credit abuse and use of homes as periodic refinance ATMs must’ve given you more than the title of the primary practitioner of the no fault divorce. Even if it didn’t, could you have already squandered the largest intergenerational transfer of wealth with the passing of the WW2 heroes to the point where you can’t retire in comfort?

Here's you're real legacy... You were born at the beginning of the great American prosperity boom. You didn’t earn it, you didn’t create it and you failed to maintain it. Your parents invested in education, arts, math and science for your benefit. When you came of age you opposed reasonable taxes that would’ve provided the same opportunities for your progeny (a generation that was about half your size). Growing up after you was something like attending Disneyland after every attraction has been trashed and given a brand name according to the highest corporate bidder. You’re a Baby Boomer. You can consume everything, imagine anything but produce next to nothing of value. Congratulations!

I’m excited to see guys like Goodwin leaving the occupational and cultural stage. They’ve done enough damage. It’s time for a more pragmatic and self reliant age cohort to begin repairing the fabric of America. However limited my experience base, I am not the reason we are in this “whole” (yeah, that’s a brilliant example of Goodies Ivy League Education shinning through) as a nation. You guys did that one on your own…

Jack Thomas of OR 8:43PM February 18, 2010