I am 59…technically a Boomer, although, as a person of the Left, I find myself taking the side of the milennials and Generation X against those who fit the now-increasingly-right wing Boomer stereotype.
To those who are in the Boomer cohort with me, I have to say:
Too many of us don’t GET it.
Too many of us don’t care.
Too many of us assume we have the right to the next generation as slackers, and to mock their dreams, when none of us are entitled to do so.
Here is the truth.
We had it EASIER than young people do now.
(White)activists in the Sixties had a far easier situation to be activists in than activists in this era.
Everyone of them who marched against racism and against war-it still boggles me that so many of my age group decided that war was a good thing after all, given that nothing positive or decent has come of the use of U.S. military force since the defeat of European Fascism in the spring of 1945; what the hell were those of you who made that choice thinking?-everyone who marched against greed and inequality and tried to build real alternatives to them that would have fit our conditions-btw, why would anyone who did that ever decided to join the side of the wealthy later? No greater good came of the rich winning after 1980-all of the white activists who did that back then knew they, we, were taking no real risks and would never face any real consequences. We knew we’d just automatically end up with a high-paying job no matter what, that nothing would happen to us no matter how activist we were.
And too many of us in the Seventies, in the decade when I reached adulthood, simply mocked the idea of having any strong convictions at all.
Why can so many of us not see that things changed after the country went right-wing in 1980 or so, and that, for those who still sought “a newer world”, for those who still couldn’t accept poverty and injustice and police brutality and perpetual war as the natural order of things, it has become massively harder to work for a better world since the Boomers’ day?
Why can’t so many of us see that those marching and organizing now, unlike the Sixties and early Seventies(again excepting black and brown activists, who always defied death to fight for their convictions, no matter what), are facing much, much greater risks and much more likelihood of ending up blacklisted and impoverished for life? And that those who aren’t activists, but are simply young people trying to get somewhere in life, the opportunities we could pretty much count on until 1980 are now, essentially, gone?
Why don’t you care that, because you HAVE to have your damn low taxes, because you HAVE to have perpetual cuts in education funding that drive up tuition and force young people to either spend their lives with crushing student loan debt or agree to lose themselves by agreeing to be trained rather than educated by pressuring them to study nothing but science and engineering-legitimate subjects, yes, but not the ONLY things society should want people to be educated, not the only courses of study that matter in any nonbarbaric society-because you HAD to have the unions crushed, job security destroyed, wages slashed, employee benefits cut to nothing, all in the name of an economy based now on nothing but short term rate of return for investors-that you have taken away any possibilities young people have beyond, at best, mere survival, beyond either simply hanging on on a day-by-day basis as unquestioning cogs in a corporate machine OR slowly dying in a studio apartment with perpetually increasing rent or, once the rent gets too high, dying of exposure under the cardboard box your greed has reduced them to sheltering beneath on the street.
Why did our generation feel entitled to steal all hope from the one who followed it?
Who, I ask again, did we think we were?
What gives ANY of us the right to sneer at the idealism of this generation at all?
Do those who do truly yearn for a world where no one at all is driven by anything but selfishness and egotism?
