What did you think of the essay "The Worst Generation" about the baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964)?
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My Boomer Tips
http://www.superseventies.com/worstgen.html
This is in R&S because I wonder to what extent the selfish hedonism of the boomer generation has contributed to the collapse of American spirituality. My grandparents were religious. My parents, not so much. But I have turned back to religion. I wonder what others think about the effect of the boomers on faith.
Anything that actually thought disco music was a good thing was probably misplaced in their spirituality.
To be serious though, I don’t think that religion "collapsed" – it fragmented…look on this forum and see the end results of it – the Christians spend as much time arguing with atheists as they do attacking the belief systems of OTHER Christians…religion was shrinking in the 60s, I think…people were, in the words of the comedian Lenny Bruce "leaving the church and going back to God"…terror-ridden books that pretended a kind of scholarly approach (like those by Hal Lindsey) became the back-bone for a violent and insensitive version of Christianity that turned it’s back on the "spirit" of the law and embraced Nationalism as well as a narrow-minded intolerance…of course people fought to escape it – it stunk of the hypocrisy of the Pharisees (and it still does) – from there the nightmare simply pushed back and forth between the extremes, with the kinder, gentler Christianity espoused by the more moderate and left-wing churches being shoved aside in favor of a bold, brash atheism or mean-spirited right-wing Christianity …
So I don’t agree that there was a "Worst Generation" in the Baby Boomers…there was simply a re-thinking of what America means in the wake of defeating a fascist regime & confronting obliquely a totalitarian one…we may have swung so far to NOT be those fascists that we’ve lost a bit of the old identity (our obsession with money is a telling image, but that’s as much a part of the later generations, if not moreso – I know because that’s where I’m at)…and that swinging away from the fascist mentality has in fact produced in others a sort of home-grown right-wing fascism that seeks to counter-balance the ever-widening gaps our society produces.
The center in America was never truly there, not in any part of our history, but I think we were apt to pretend it existed….perhaps that imagined center was Christianity at one time…perhaps it was Nationalism (the Gettysburg Address certainly supports that)…perhaps it was the older economic systems based more on agriculture and less on machines…who knows for sure, and it certainly could have been something I haven’t considered…but I can say we cannot ever return to any of these…we have outgrown them, at least in their initial meanings, and we have fragmented them to our own individuality if we do still try to hang on to them.
Will we ever find a new center again? I hope so, for as the poet William Butler Yeats tells us, the ever-widening circle spins out of control, and the center will not hold.
A lot of Boomers lost their religion due to the war in Vietnam. Some of us went there and learned the awful truth. Some of us stayed home, protested that vicious and unnecessary war, and were treated like dirt by their parents’ generation. Some protested in Ohio, and were gunned down even though they weren’t armed with anything except outrage. The Boomers lost faith in the USA and its insitutions, and that includes the churches. Had I not already been done with religion, I would have been outraged when the older ‘christians’ of the USA did not rise up in protest against a government that went into Vietnam on false pretenses and then murdered millions of people simply because they wanted the right to govern their own country.
They didn’t fall for the religious BS as much?
Good on them! I can’t say the same about you, you look like you’re neck deep in it.
There’s nothing good about believing in any religion, especially the intolerant, violent and misogynistic Abrahamic ones.
I am in that age group…(way late in that time frame thank you) and while I haven’t read the essay I agree with the sentiment.
Our parents went through the depression and WWII and wanted to make sure we have a better life, well they did…but we didn’t appreciate it and we flushed it.
And then our kids followed suit.
I’d have to say beyond a shadow of a doubt that the generation who grew up in the 1960s were the single most damaging generation and are a direct cause of the morally collapsing society we now see today.
My, such a judgemental little Xtian. Isn’t that expressly forbidden by your god?
Oh, and the essay? It’s crap.
You will never hear me say anything bad about the sixties.
What? Are you saying they’re the worst generation because they don’t follow your religious views?
We were the start of an immoral America. Drugs& free love. If it feels good do it. If a spouse cheated it was your fault not theirs. You somehow drove them to cheating on you. Many paid with herpes and drug addictions.
Well, I don’t like being classified with any generation, and my parents are good, moral, God-loving people, but it was an interesting article, especially in light of where we are now. Our parent’s generations have put us into trillions of dollars of debt and have all but ensured that our children will never have it as easy as they did. They also raised the drinking age after they were too old for it to affect them. That was just tacky.
Did you know that 76 million people were born in the United States during that span of years? And of course, you are thinking of those of us from the 60s – you know, the long-hair hippies who were all hedonistic and selfish and never did anything for anyone else. You don’t want to believe that we were the ones who finally ended that atrocious war in Vietnam and we were the ones who put our lives on the line down in the South for civil rights. And none of us who marched on Washington (twice!) ever became the spoiled brat losers who thought Ronald Reagan was the second coming. Those who did – the ones Begala talks about – were not the ones who marched and protested! Do not put me in the same category as those selfish jerks! Here’s what he has to say about them:
Boomer political and economic values reached their most perfect expression under
pre-Boomer president Ronald Reagan in the Eighties: Screw your neighbor, lay off
the factory workers, shuffle a lot of paper, build an economy in which a few
people get the gold mine and most people get the shaft. It is telling that when
he ran for reelection, Reagan got higher support among Boomers than he did from
his fellow older Americans. >>Perhaps some of the Greatest Generation saw the
selfishness in Reaganism and turned away from it. And perhaps the Boomers saw
those same qualities, that savage selfishness, and embraced it.<<< And this sentence is so full of it, I can hardly believe anyone with a brain could say that. The Greatest Generation loved Ronald Reagan! All of my parents friends and others I know of that generation saw Reagan as some kind of throwback to the "good old days" when men were men and women shut up and stayed home.
Paul Begala is a total moron.
I’m a boomer and was born in the early part of that epoch.
Some of us were / are materialistic. That is because we were conditioned to it by the stories our parents told of their experiences during the Depression of the 1930s and the Second World War.
We got told to buy a house and live it it and save, save save. Made sense. As a selfish hedonist I have been riding a bicycle to work every day for 19 out of the past 20 years. My selfish hedonist boss who is also a boomer does not even own a car. The furniture in this house is quality stuff but was almost all bought second hand and with one exception is more than 5 years old. There is no dishwasher or laundry drier, things that you probably take for granted.
He mentions Vietnam. The kids of the 60s didn’t all burn their draft cards, the numbers that did were a vast minority. If my experience is any guide, we were told one thing by one group and another by another group and didn’t know who to believe.
We were also the first generation ever to get mass tertiary education and mass travel across continents. That applies a little more to those a few years younger than me, but what it did was to show us quite clearly that many of the comfortable ideas and illusions held by our less informed forebears about the "natural" superiority of Christianity, the "white race" and a dozen other things were flat wrong. People of education have always known this to some extent, it is however the first time that it became known to millions, not just a few thousand. That turn to education was a partly a result of the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957. Despite this, half of the people I started high school in early 1963 with did not make it to the final year, but dropped out and got paid jobs.
I like how he draws a neat line of distinction between those born a couple of years before 1946 and those born soon afterwards, yet includes those born in 1964 with those born more than a decade before. What piffle.
He has no idea. I’m old enough to remember the late 1950s. I can remember when synthetic detergents were not sold in ordinary stores, they were only sold at service stations. I even remember the time when I first heard of them. Rayon and nylon were almost the only synthetics used in clothing, everything you had was linen, cotton or wool. There were no shopping malls because very few people owned cars, I recall a controversy about plastic buckets because they collapsed when used to carry hot water from stoves to bathrooms, carpets were rectangles of cloth in the middle of rooms, there was no television, people kept chickens and grew vegetables, (my parents even kept a cow before I started school and probably would have for a lot longer if my father had not developed a heart problem) women and sometimes men knitted and sewed, even small towns had tailors and semi-professional dressmakers.
By 1964 all that had changed. Those born after about 1958 experienced a totally different world in childhood from those born in 1946 – 51 or so.
What has happened in the years since the 1970s is that mass tertiary education became too expensive for governments to support. This was a consequence of the "oil shocks" of the early 1970s and the stagflation that followed. The result is that tertiary students today are saddled with massive debt when they finish university or college and realising this, are going for educations that will land them in better paid jobs than science, often law. In such faculties their minds remain uncontaminated by geology or biology. The arts faculties where at least some wider ideas might be introduced are virtually deserted, in some places the classics departments have been closed.
He complains about disco? What of the slogans I saw sprayed on walls in the late 1970s "Disco sucks"? Here’s the biggest hit of 1979 – My Sharona. Does it sound like disco to you?
It’s mostly humbug
Ridiculous. The center of American life was capitalism. Not religion or altruism. It was the altruistic morality of religion that destroyed capitalism and allowed Fabien gradualism to take hold, slowly expanding government power and destroying individual rights. Religious altruistic ideology destroyed the American businessman through guilt and self-doubt, and ended our golden age. The Baby Boomers are a symptom, not the cause. The cause is anyone who ever preached the idea that we should be guilty for producing, for inventing, for thinking, for living. I don’t know how anyone can claim that self-sacrifice is profoundly American and keep a straight face. The colonists rebelled because they refused to be treated as sacrificial animals, and now people are saying that the American way of life is to voluntarily become one…
"It is generally understood that those who support the “conservatives,” expect them to uphold the system which has been camouflaged by the loose term of “the American way of life.” The moral treason of the “conservative” leaders lies in the fact that they are hiding behind that camouflage: they do not have the courage to admit that the American way of life was capitalism, that that was the politico-economic system born and established in the United States, the system which, in one brief century, achieved a level of freedom, of progress, of prosperity, of human happiness, unmatched in all the other systems and centuries combined—and that that is the system which they are now allowing to perish by silent default.
If the “conservatives” do not stand for capitalism, they stand for and are nothing; they have no goal, no direction, no political principles, no social ideals, no intellectual values, no leadership to offer anyone.
Yet capitalism is what the “conservatives” dare not advocate or defend. They are paralyzed by the profound conflict between capitalism and the moral code which dominates our culture: the morality of altruism . . . Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society."
- Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal -