My generation has made a self-indulgent mess of things, starting with the hideous Woodstock. Mr. Brooks, you are far too generous in your grading.
25
Wait... what?!?! Everyone since Plato knows it’s the always younger generation going to the dogs, while the older folks have gained wisdom and experience.
Leave it to the young people to toss this time-tested maxim into the dustbin!
Me? I’m 63. Do the math yourself.
5
What a ridiculous and unnecessary column! Brooks laments that politics and culture have gone downhill since--well, since whenever he started counting. And this is what he reports in nearly every column, anyway. And in terms of politics he points to the "talent" of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as being unmatched by the generation following. Did he consider mentioning the slow poison that these two "talented" politicians dropped into the body politic? The attempts to end the welfare state, shifting the blame for poverty to, who else, the poor? Well, that's just for starters. I'm not going to bother with the rest of his specious claims.
40
"Every nation gets the government it deserves.' -Joseph de Maistre
&
"We have met the enemy and he is us.": Pogo
(https://i.pinimg.com/474x/a8/e8/4c/a8e84c8e79b95201bf7191f06c7ca862--kelly-s-interesting-quotes.jpg)
And to paraphrase, "ask for not who impeachment portends, it...."
Here is what makes me think the whole idea of a generational character is an exercise in confirmation bias: RBG (born 1933) is part of the silent or traditionalist generation? Pelosi (born 1940) as well?
6
My, My. Aren't we just rays of sunshine taking shots at those of us who lead the cultural revolution and did good things and some stupid things along the way. But we are not thin skinned and take well to criticism and even opposing views. I'm very sorry if I violated somebodies safe space with that last comment. Poor dears.
14
Funny piece!
Thank you!
2
Overall a C-, skirting the high edge of a D.
Parsing out the grades like this makes for an interesting piece, but in the real world...it all mashes-up and becomes one big roiling pot of something that is bland to the taste, that the brain cant figure out why...when many of the ingredients might be interesting alone.
The Boomer stew is overwhelmed by too much, of everything all the time. Which is what does-in the Boomers, and drags their grade down. Their Consumption for consumption sake culture ruins everything. Politics, Pop, Tech, Sports, Philosophy, Lifestyle, Social Movements, Arts...you name it. If it had a value, even a minor one...Boomers trashed it, and made it trashy, by making it a mass-marketed consumer good.
Which is their sole contribution. Boil it all down and what do you have...what did the Boomers truly do and contribute to the US, and by extension the planet? Unfettered Consumption! Consumption made into a virtue, and means to "create" ones public image. Buy who you are, don't become thru your efforts, something of value and gravitas...buy what that would look like, and then sell it - thru exhibitionist behaviors - as real.
Which is blatantly and unashamedly exampled by Social Media. Posting vids, pixs of objects and places, dopey behaviors, of personal diatribes, and cliched Self-Help memes, food and whatever else - showing off perceived valuables, which by default make the exhibitors more valuable. So says the lie.
Boomers = buying ones "cool".
8
You can’t write an impartial review of your own generation. Pretending you can - and pretending you’re not part of the generation because you arbitrarily changed the birth years included - is SUCH a boomer thing to do. Ugh, have some self awareness!
19
Wasn't there a war somewhere in there?
9
Mr. Brooks rated Regan over Clinton for leadership. Interesting because Regan commited treason selling weapons to Iran and supporting the Contras. Ran up the dept and caused the Savings and Loan recession. Lets not forget he was a racist.
36
Steven Spielberg. Here's a man who skillfully wove stories fraught with moral dilemmas, the fight for justice, love, passion, thrills, and truth seeking. He's taken on the Nazi death camps in Schindler's List with a hero of that age.
Marianne Williamson. She's a woman who understood the women's lib lie of 'a woman can have it all: career, marriage, family, happiness' to mean that a woman CAN have it all, just not at the same time. Look at her now!
2
The "greatest generation" gave us Korea, Joseph McCarthy and the blacklist, "segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever," Vietnam/Cambodia/Laos, support for brutal dictatorships around the world under the pretext of "anti-Communism...." would you like to continue?
And let's not forget the capper, the atomic bomb and "duck and cover."
You also have forgotten that the generation before "the greatest" gave us the nativist, xenophobic "America First" movement and the pseudo-scientific eugenics of "The Passing of the Great Race," that resulted in the draconian, exclusionary immigration laws of the 1920s -- which in turn inspired Hitler's "master race" madness and the Third Reich, and which kept the U.S. freely trading with Germany and helping to build Hitler's military might until our own ox was gored at Pearl Harbor and the substantial pro-Nazi forces in America were silenced.
And we haven't even gotten to the original "Great Depression," the "dust bowl" and destruction of millions of acres of once fertile land...
Yup, the boomers inherited paradise and lost it. Not.
30
C- is a fair--and generous--grade for Baby boomer political era--especially Bill Clinton under whose presidency Glass-Steagall was ended, leading, in part, to the 2008 financial meltdown. As well, after the first World Trade Center terrorist attack, Clinton was too distracted by the investigation into his sexual indiscretions and abuses to do anything to prevent 2001 catastrophe. Post-Presidency Clinton and wife Hillary morphed into public service grifters. Now, with Jeffrey Epstein scandal, Clinton's quick defense of himself sounds like another iteration of "I did not have sex with that woman."
2
David Brooks may belong to the Boomer generation because of his age, but was obviously a Republican Geek on the edge of crowds, not in them. What does he know? He puts Madonna (Material Girl) in with the Boomers? She is the personification of the 80's, the decade that started our downward spiral.
It was a blast growing up in the 60's and 70's, mostly because of our incredible music. I always wonder why the 80's and 90's keep up the criticism of us. Get off your behinds, quit complaining about the Boomers, and get something done! Stop blaming everyone else! We have hit rock bottom! I have lived long enough to see the rise and fall of the U.S.
9
D+
there was the greatest generation,
boomers are the worst generation.
7
Wait, don't you teach a class at Yale? Here's some news: outside of that particular clown college (and Ivies and schools like them), people can get poor grades...and it's ok to give them. Can we really say that Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump have merely given us C-level politics? Really?! All the Oval Office rape, endless war, and domestic ethnic conflict warrants a C?! My suggestion: change your Cs to Fs, and change your Bs to C minuses. Since the Baby Boomers killed off the idea of gentleman-like behavior, there's really no reason to give them gentlemen's Cs.
2
The term “generation” is a good example of a false construct. They don’t exist. Humans don’t reproduce in tranches. There’s a continuum of torch passing through our genes and DNA where no generation is responsible for outcomes, good or bad. We may be generally screwing up the climate and it’s profound diversity but it’s inaccurate to pin it on a generation. Hopefully, many individuals will wake up and rise to this occasion, sooner than later would be best.
15
I'd cross Steve Jobs off the list. Having read "The Authorized Biography" by Walter Isaacson, Jobs was a marketing genius, not a tech wizard. Wozniak and the Apple development team filled that role.
Steve Jobs was obsessive/compulsive, the boss from hell and a terrible human being. He never gave to charity, illegally parked in handicapped spaces for his convenience and shunned his own daughter. The man had zero empathy and was more narcissistic than even Donald Trump.
6
Dr. Mr. Brooks, As a retired boomer I agree with most of your analysis. But you left out an important category - baseball, the Soul of America. I'd rate my generation's performance on that topic a C-. Great players such as, say Reggie Jackson, Johnny Bench and Tony Perez from my home town, Bob Gibson, Sandy Koufax and many others, (granted that Pete Rose and Denny McClain are also boomers). But in a game that has always found ways for players to cheat (viz. the Bobby Thompson pennant winning homer in which the signs were stolen) our generation gets an F in policing. . From looking the other way to the steroid cheats to today's juicing of the ball (for which Mr. Manfred expresses "shock and amazement) the owners have pandered the essence of the game for home runs and television audiences. Granted, the challenges facing the game with pitchers' increased velocity etc are daunting but it seems to me that Mr. Verlander's comment re the juiced ball that "we are not idiots, they wanted more offense" was dead on. Where has Commissioner Landis gone when we need him? (Just kidding.) Writing from the Slough of Baseball Despond, Seattle. Dave Bukey
1
"If there’s one thing young adults can agree on, it is that baby boomers have ruined the world."
How do you know this?
A closer examination would indict Exxon, the chemical compamies (plastics), pesticides and herbicides companies, Pharma, etc.
You start your column Brooks with this 'truism', which is false. and so we all spend then next 20 minutes debating 'fake news'.
therefore the whole opinion falls apart.
8
Mr. Brooks
How did the baby boomers get it so wrong? We were raised by "the greatest generation".
4
Clinton.Bush.Obama.Trump.
Grade each one. Clinton edges out Obama in my opinion due to the N. Ireland peace agreement and foreign policy in general; Obama earns high marks for the policies that ushered in economic recovery while preserving the old style capitalism that led to the crash.
Bush and Trump are not worth evaluation.
Why do pop musicians even deserve discussion? Sinatra was a member of the greatest generation, so was John Coltrane. Does anyone remember?
2
Great column but you forgot one big fat dean's list killing "D-" -- having enjoyed (relatively cheap) access to secondary and higher education, the (mostly white) boomer taxpayer have selfishly decimated public funding for public junior and senior high schools, colleges and universities in state after state. Meanwhile, they also invented the fraud-laden "for-profit" education industry that scams both the poor, the vets and the government , and in suburbs controlled by the the "high performance culture" of the top 2-percenters, essentially privatized their trendy zip code school districts with "tax deductible" local foundations that direct resources to special funding for the programs that will get their progeny into the Ivy League but stiffs special ed and programs to help the socially disadvantaged that nominally "integrate" their school districts and need to catch up to the boomer-inspired moving goal posts for "Advanced Placement" for their in the 1%. Their only redeeming achievement - universal pre-K, which is really being pushed by their grandchildren. How could you miss this "contribution" to the decline of social and economic mobility in the US during the boomer years?
6
Trying to stereotype a "generation" is just silly. Yes, we are a big cohort but to think there completely premeditated mass action and coordinated planning by millions is not true. There were leaders and trends. The guys who went to Viet Nam were mostly drafted. The volunteers often volunteered because they knew the draft was coming. The music was and is amazing. The first time I heard the Beatles it was pivotal. When you are living in the prime of your life many people are just swept along, Have there been great people from the BB generation? You bet but I think we should stop blaming certain groups and realize the human race is varied, complex, sometimes horrible and often wonderful.
6
the early sixties folks ought to be lumped into gen-x with me, but i think Wavy Gravy is the quintessential baby boomer
I think my generation- I was born in 1953- has a lot to answer for. We wasted so much - offered opportunities for education and stewardship which previous generations labored for, we squandered our power, preferring to check our stock market returns while the environmental and demographic crises loomed. The first Earth Day took place in the 1970’s, but we ignored the invitation to live simply. We showed more concern for comfort and luxury than for the common good. Our politicians and leaders- the Clintons, Bush 2, Cheney, Blair, Trump - are mediocre hypocrites at best and malignant narcissists at worst. We introduced reality tv, created a celebrity culture, tolerated increased media violence, assented to the incarceration boom, cut aid to public schools while creating for profit charters - I could go on, but you get the gist. (On the brighter side, we can point to Bernie and Elizabeth Warren and some great musicians and authors.) I teach high school, and the majority of my students are excellent human beings - they give me hope for a better future. I am truly sorry for the corrupt mess we leave for them to clean up - kind of like the littered, trash-filled fields once the music was silenced after Woodstock.
9
David, It's the GOP that's gotten us into this mess, from Reagan's union-busting to the GOP's spineless response to our current "leader." I know it's difficult for a conservative to admit this, but it's pretty difficult to deny it when the truth is smacking you upside the head. The GOP's dark side was never more evident than the wholesale party switch after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. It's just that it has found its climax in DJ Trump.
9
I'm a boomer and I'm tired of age discrimination. There are much worse things to be than "old" and "fat." Being "hot" and "chill" are not life's greatest achievements.
3
Mr. Brooks is most comfortable with painting everything in simplistic broad strokes. Great people, inventive people, cruel people, sadistic people, financially successful people, intellectually gifted people, great athletes, civilian heroes, military heroes, self-absorbed and self-serving civilians and politicians, war lords, peacemakers — these people populated preceding generations and will succeed my generation, the boomer generation.
After decades of advancing the cause of enviromental protections such as, clean water, clean air, rescuing endangered species from extinction, fighting for civil rights, human rights, the cause of science for the good of the people, we still have people who toss their trash on the hiking trails, into the streams and rivers where they had fished an hour earlier, hunting — not for the food but for the trophies, buying gas guzzler SUVs and trucks to look cool at Trader Joe's, starting fights at little league games, admiring the Kardashians for becoming rich for being famously curvacious (with no other talent to speak of), looking up to Wall Street greedlings, ...
Shortly after the start of The Great Recession, the brilliant journalist, Bill Moyers, asked the 80-something writer, Wendell Berry, what caused the recession. He replied, "The problem in America today is, too many people want to make a killing, instead of making enough."
This has infected all generations. Mr. Brooks works mostly in a binary mindset. "They are bad; we are good."
8
David, based on your ratings we can now conclude the Boomers were also responsible for grade inflation.
5
Oh dear! I thought Trump was too old to be a Baby-Boomer, until I redid my calculations: 2019 - 1946 = 73. So Trump is 73? Then he is a Boomer, but the oldest Boomer.
1
LET'S GET REAL! A material culture pushed on us by capitalism and its degenerate handmaiden, Advertising, is at the root of so many ills in the world. ...Not boomers, or X'ers or millennials, etc.
Here is a little mundane but large example of the problem that speaks to the idiocy of our society. I decided to take my inherited vintage coffee percolator and brew coffee which I had never done before. It only took 5 minutes and was delicious. I suddenly thought, "how is it that coffee makers took over the world when this simple little pot is so easy to brew and clean?
We are a brainwashed people and we could make simple and easy changes that would eliminate waste and inefficiency. Products pushed on us as being new and better are not always and we need to be wary of what we allow into our lives and ALWAYS think of the tradeoff for everything we buy.
So, I thought I needed a new coffee maker but now I will not buy something that will end up in the landfill in a few short years when I have a perfectly fine pot that will last forever.
Our culture is one that says, if you have the money to buy, then buy what you want but that is wrong. Buy only what you really have to have and only just a few of your wants and always think of the cost to the world in terms of raw materials and waste disposal. We're only now beginning to realize that as we've trashed the planet. So, don't make this a battle between the generations. We are, ALL, now just coming to our senses.
10
"A person who was born in 1900 and died in 1970 grew up with horse-drawn carriages and died with a man on the moon. Today’s 70-year-olds have not seen technological change on the same order."
Mr. Brooks you have to be kidding me! I was born in 1946, so I am a year zero baby boomer. You obviously don't know much about technology. I'm a computer science PhD and I taught computer science for 43 years. The 1st computer I built in the late '70s had 64kb of RAM -- 64,000 bytes of RAM memory. The last one I built a few years ago had 16Gb of ram -- 16,000,000,000 bytes of RAM. My first cell phone in the early '80s was the size of a brick and worked occasionally and was only a phone. My current cell phone is an out of date Samsung with 2 SIMM cards and 64Gb of RAM and is a music player; a very small TV; a very small game console; a computer network terminal; as well as a phone with no long distance charges. Computer networks weren't available until the '70s and they were proprietary protocols over telephone lines. I subscribe to Google Fiber and have a true Gigabit network to/from my home.
Of course I could go on for hundreds of pages detailing medical, educational and other astonishing technological developments. Get a grip. Baby boomers have seen more technological development in their lives than any previous generation -- and possibly any future generation. Who knows. You need to rethink this part of your analysis.
9
Reading the comments by Boomers reminds me that most (not all but a majority to be sure) of that generation are egotistic narcissists and martyrs. They make everything about them — either by boasting of their greatness or crying victim — and they seem defiantly unaware of this fact. They truly are the “me” generation. They talk about their hard work and achievements, when really it was their parents and FDR government that gave them extraordinary opportunities, like worker and consumer protections, government social security and social services, pensions and unions, free press and speech, regulations and oversight, protections against the tyranny of corporations and billionaires, the enjoyment of beautiful parks, safe/clean water and food, affordable college and homes — a future! ... you, know, all of the things my generation won’t have. So pat yourself on the back, Boomers, for a job well done. You are the nail in the coffin.
5
I'm a boomer, and I've always been at least a little disgusted by my own generation. What was life about for most people I came into contact with? Me, me, me, me. I remember EST. Ahem.
Yeah, I'm guilty, too. My graduate degree at UC Berkeley cost $300 or so a quarter. Although I feel that the millennials have gone a little crazy with microaggressions and such, they have understood a little more clearly how the world works for those of us who aren't college-educated white kids. I find myself constantly kicked in the pants when I hear what life is like if you aren't white and college-educated.
4
Of the nominees......the question is: which doesn't belong and why.
"Woe is me."
--The Next Generation
Advice:
Figure it out and stop blaming everyone, anyone else.
3
Were it not for the Republican Party, we'd have done fine.
5
They're all too busy waiting for their dividends to maximize to care about anything else.
3
Since we’re blaming Boomers for all the political downfall, what are the generations behind them doing to fix it? Did I miss something? Victim mentality once again. Ugh
3
To generalize: American baby boomers grew up in a period of unprecedented affluence. Though they professed to reject the materialism of their parent's generation, they were actually as spoiled and self-centered as all children of the rich. When their affluence was threatened, they betrayed their ideals. In a fit of pique, they elected Donald Trump, a racist demagogue whose narcissism reflected their own. When the climate crisis threatened the lives and livelihoods of their grandchildren, they shrugged and turned up the air conditioner.
4
We had it so easy and we blew it. I'm happy with my life but disappointed with my generation. Now I'm counting on my grandkids to be less selfish and more compasionate than me and my contemporaries.
5
I am a baby boomer who finds it offensive that you lump us all together and then think that you should be grading people on their lives.
4
You forgot the disability rights movement and the Americans with Disabilities Act.
2
Bob Dylan's the quintessential Boomer, which is funny because he's technically Silent Generation. Many people associated with Boomer leadership are.
Trump is the Boomers' shadow... the bad side of every generational trait rolled into one. So his sexual revolution wasn't the happy liberated kind, but the cruel and oppressive kind. His talent for using the media didn't involve creative cultural contributions, but debasement and misery. And so on.
2
Gen X/Y/Z and beyond....
Take note. Your first report cards are also coming out. And too many of you are getting Incomplete-Fails, because you have been skipping voting.
There is still time to bring the grades up though...
3
Please stop! this is clickbait. it is exactly the kind of article that comes from the Internet Research Agency to divide us. there is no way you can generalize a generation. at least in the kind of ways that place blame. nothing happens in a vacuum! put a generation in the perspective of a few hundred years at least and then we can talk about it . . . . . maybe. we are all, right now, living in the present moment. do not lose sight of that. these forays into superficial blame games are not productive - in fact, they keep us from seeing how the world really is.
5
I'm a baby boomer. I'll give my generation a C-.
Things might look good on the surface, however the boomer generation has inflicted major and lasting damage to the world. Decaying infrastructure (with no plans for improving it), increased domestic production of oil (not a long-term solution for energy independence), denial by many on climate change (and when they realize that it's real, it will be too late to do anything about it), skyrocketing federal debt (and total denial that it's a problem), high murder rate due to distorted interpretation about what the Second Amendment says (heck, why not allow private ownership of bazookas and land mines?), misplaced priorities on federal spending (we spend more on defense than the next 10 big defense-spending nations combined), and declining emphasis on public education (but heck, opinion polls show that we "think" we're smarter than everyone else).
I remember in high school thinking how my generation was going to change the world for the better. We didn't.
5
Quintessential boomer: You have not listed Gloria Steinem
4
David Brooks, venerated observer of lifestyles & social mores for the NYT has once more reduced a tangle of complex historical events to a single simplistic sociological concept: Blame it all on everyone born between year x and year x+ 30.
As if any given generation & the events, economic, social & otherwise it lives & deals with, were not equally a product of the events & social evolution that preceded it. DB preaches the gospel of identity politics loudly & forcefully enough to make one wonder when he seeks to elevate it to the level of religion. So many already seem to have signed on.
One hopes a few more steps in the development of AI & Machine Learning will move us beyond this latest state of demagogic & formulaic thinking.
5
Please stop bad mouthing my generation. We were dragged off the streets to fight in an unpopular war.50 thousand died for nothing. We were beaten on the streets of Chicago. We marched in Selma. We had dreams but the likes of Ronald Reagan and newt Gingrich squashed them.
6
This entire exercise is ludicrous! both the articles and the comments must be classified as simple belching from too much fizz in that soda. There is no way that's such a complicated subject can be addressed in such a short written piece. Brooke should know better than to even try!
5
Boomers, once idealistic, watched the assassinations of JFK,BK,MLK Malcom X, and died due the lies regarding the Viet Nam war. Without pride in country, they chose self absorbed capitalism instead.
1
How do you take a continuum, carve out a piece and nail it to a post? I see people of all ages wasting energy, voting for scoundrels, volunteering for nothing, waiting for handouts and helping no one.
5
What ever faults we boomers have the generation they spawned is tethered to the technological umbilical chord and sadly there's very little there, there. The fault dear Brutus lies in our phones. What a commentary on the psychopathology of modernity in Amerika.
1
Only a boomer could give the boomers anything other tha F's across the board.
The greatest generation clawed its way out of the depression, what the boomers have achieved since is depressing. Donald Trump is the essential boomer.
10
I question the value of such discussions. Generations are like the bands of color in a rainbow. Although we perceive rainbows to consist of distinct bands of color, they are actually a continuum of light frequencies smoothly graduated across the visible light spectrum. The bands we see are an artifact of how our minds work and our tendency to think categorically.
IOW, the bands of a rainbow have no real existence outside of our minds and neither, I would argue, do generational designations such as boomers and millennials.
Such generalizations have their uses. For one thing, they help us think about a large complex phenomena collectively. However they have their limitations and we should not forget that.
8
There is no illusion that the Boomers failed and failed so much when the War Generation passed the responsibility over to them that it will take generations and tens of thousands of years to recover. Now that might sound like an exaggeration but when the half life of nuclear spent rods is longer than the homo sapien species has walked the planet, and we are at great risk today from a nuclear war than when they inherited the responsibility that could cause the next mass extinction on the planet, then up, they failed completely.
The number of bond measures passed, get the benefit now, make future generations pay for it has never been higher than when the boomers have been in charge. The world went from a debt obligation of just over $12,000 per taxpayer to just this February reaching just over $1,000,000 per taxpayer. The boomers in order to sustain the unsustainable American Dream have sold the next five generations into economic slavery and austerity.
Speaking of unsustainability, plastics, disposable, latest models, these are all part of what changed the consumption of world resources from less than 20% of the annual world renewable rate to over 150% (which means we are well and truly eating into the planetary reserves).
The failure of the boomers is complete and comprehensive and will be felt for generations to come. No single generation has done more damage to society or the planet.
8
Your definition of the Boomer generation is wrong - on purpose? How can you say that Bruce Springsteen, who rose to prominence in the early 70's, and Bob Dylan, who busy on the scene in the 60's are boomers (correct), but the first Boomer President was Clinton? Or that the Boomer political age began with him? The Boomer political age began in the 69's with Bobby Kennedy, and included Nixon and Carter, and Reagan and Bush, before Clinton.
Very convenient for you to have your own set of facts to judge by...
8
The 'boomer' lifestyle and mindset is routinely applied to people born between 1945 and 1960. These sweeping generalizations about entire generations are misleading. Many who graduated from university after the oil crisis of the early 1970s did not have the typical 'boomer' life and work experience.
5
the authors wishful thinking and self-proclaimed conservative bias clearly shows through. when were the Baby Boomers able to become political? this the author actually right 1990? I think he's mixing various age groups together.
1
Culturally, I think it's more meaningful simply to use birth decades rather than these named generations. There are big differences between people born in the teens, twenties, thirties, and so forth. Technically, for example, neither Bernie Sanders nor Joe Biden are Boomers (as conventionally defined); yet, I, born in 1947, so within the conventional Boomer span, feel more in their cohort than in that of people born in the fifties and definitely than that of those born in the sixties (some of whom are technically Boomers). It's also simpler and less controversial.
Decades, man. Generations are about family history: ancestors and descendants.
4
By far the best thing that happened recently was Barack Obama. So far, he is the only "almost" post-Baby Boomer who has been elected president (technically, anyone born in 1946-1964 was a baby boomer, so even Obama, born in 1961, qualified). I would be nice if in 2020 we get a new post-Baby Boomer. My current favorite: Steve Bullock, born 1966.
4
If Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had invented the personal computer four years earlier, Carter would have won a second term and nobody would have heard of Reagan. Reagan was just lucky.
2
THe sad part is that Brooks actually believes this - "The right-leaning boomer movements are just as important: the conservative movement, the religious right, the Tea Party movement, the pro-life and gun rights movements, the populist revolt."
5
I remember reading but I forgot who said, "...the larger the group you generalize about, the better your chance of being wrong...." Demographically I am on the cutting edge of the baby boom, 1947. I think this generation put a lot of energy into seeing their connections and not just their differences. We had great music and great journalists. We tried to believe that love is the answer. If we didn't get where we wanted to go then we need to keep on keeping on.
8
As a boomer, I find myself stuck in the past that I was raised in. It was not the "boomer" culture. It was the Depression era mind set of my parents. It provided a greater sense of belonging than the "business" years of my life. Those of us who are first "boomers" could be quite happy with more "community" and less materialism. "Happiness ain't just for high achievers."
4
The Baby Boom years (i.e., starting with Clinton) coincided with a historic bust in the relative power and prosperity of the United States.
Like arguably the largest decline in U.S. history. Like, we'll have to wait and see but it might be the U.S. equivalent to the beginning of the Fall of Rome:
Chapter 1: The Baby Boomers
Dear Mr. Brooks, You have again tried to lay the problems of today at the feet of a single generation. The premise is lax in that not one generation can be limited or blamed for the disasters we see today. There are too many exceptions, even
though you use categories to make your case stand on firmer ground. It doesn't work because everyone who is a boomer knows that each one of us made decisions based on our current understanding about things like climate change, over population and materialism. Many of us, though not publicized had and have moral courage. We knew racism was a frightening reality which by the way took many generations to cultivate. Many of us marched against it and tried to embrace Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy and Tony Morrison. Did we achieve their fame? No, but that doesn't mean we didn't care or embrace their ideals.
To say we are responsible for everyone from Clinton (who by the way balanced the budget by the time he left office.) Your favored conservatives-- Reagan, Bush 1st Bush 2nd Bush are responsible for enormous lies and led this country into a war they weren't prepared to prosecute. Jesshhh. And our generation is responsible for Trump? Just because he happens to fit into the very narrow description as a boomer, as you describe it does not mean "we" knew anything about him. How dare you blame us for" The invader of our
democracy?" You've gone too far.
9
The conceit or premise of this article seems to imagine that there was some huge fantastical convention whereat "Baby Boomers" made social, economic and cultural decisions as one unified field of energy wearing tie-dyed tee-shirts and matching head bands.
In this the age of the periodical where events are cataloged and compared based upon magazine cover stories, newspaper headlines and lead ins on the evening news, philosophy, wisdom, poetry and artistic genius are matters consumed by an almost forgotten history which occurred sometime prior to the ubiquity of our new universal languages dominated by techno babble.
I was born in 1943 and have observed a dynamic parade of unfortunate "progress." The world seemed better to me in 1950 when I was seven years old than it does now not only because I was very young and ignorant but because even the adults in our circle who presumably knew and still know more about everything were less stressed about the relatively easy acts of daily living. Many born around the same time dream of it as when America was "great." And therein rests the basis of our instant horror show.
2
Bob Dylan was born in 1941 and isn't a baby boomer. He was born before WW2 started. He was obviously very influential, but technically he's not the right age.
5
I suggest Al Gore as a stand-in, roughly fitting within Brooks's description. Because, to me, we started with fantastic ideals, and then went to work for Citibank. The promise was there, but for various reasons, some related to our parents (e.g., one word: plastics), we lost didn't deliver.
2
Mr. know-it-all has it all figured out. He gets an A+ for simplifying complexity.
11
I look at the people I grew up with, my family members, and people I have worked with over the years. Many of us baby boomers grew up in working class and middle class homes, not born with silver spoons in our mouths, worked hard, showed more affection to our children, were more open minded and now are reinventing how to live out the golden years. We have done fine.
10
I am a boomer who is not going to take the bait on this. Each generation has its particular challenges. To divide and stereotype by generation is not productive. My millennial children don't like to be categorized, and I don't either.
15
One of the truly transformative baby boomer movements was and continues to be "women's liberation." In fact, it reshaped the relationships between the sexes, freed women to work outside the home and drove sea changes in the workplace. I am thinking of Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Angela Davis, Coretta Scott King, Joan Baez, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg to name only a few, all of whom championed (and continue to champion) equal rights, equal pay, reproductive rights, and really liberated us from the conformist strictures of the women of the "Greatest Generation." I also think that that movement destabilized male dominated cultures around the world, creating backlashes and repressions whose repercussions are still being felt. Empowered women changed the foundation of the relationship between males and females. Ideally, women are no longer subordinate to men; we have equal standing (almost), with each generation achieving greater and more real equality.
13
The elders said; "You will fight a war." The young men said; "No." Can you name ONE TIME in previous history that that has happened? The boomers denied and refused to fight an unfounded war. And gave birth to the idea that ALL WARS are unfounded. I count that as a great historical consequence. And thanks to the boomer "draft dodgers"; and their girlfriends, and families who supported them. Another forgotten idea from the era? Even right wingers said; "MY KID isn't dying in THAT war."
14
Baby boomers era started in 1980s, with Reagan, who was just a figurehead and his administration run by baby boomers.
They started reckless fiscal policies of cutting taxes and borrowing trillions to pay for them.
6
@CarolinaJoe: Right-wing boomers, which serves to point out that the generation was not a monolith, as many critics would have it. And I think if you look it up you will find that most of Reagan's cabinet was older than that. None of those people were anything like the boomer generation, at least as it is projecte din pop culture these days.
3
I don’t think a generational lens does much to explain the world we live in; in fact, one could argue that thinking in terms of generations is characteristic of the Boomers. The “generation gap” grew out of the relative prosperity of the Boomers compared to their parents. Madison Ave. latched onto that difference to sell blue jeans and records. The Vietnam War and the Draft exasperated it, but that does not make “generation” a particularly illuminating analytical tool for understanding how we are in the fix we are in now. The Generation Gap needs explaining; it’s not an explanatory tool itself. A typically conservative evasion—anything to distract us from the economic and political analysis needed to genuinely understand our plight.
5
The right wing gave ground on the social agenda while they silently captured the economic future.
I believe that this was an intentional strategy on the part of the right-wing leadership.
Those social improvements will ring hollow when someone else controls your economic future.
As a "certified boomer" this was both fun and depressing, albeit true! I wonder how my teenage grandkids turned into the self indulgent beings they are. And then realize who their grandparents are and go, "Oh, yeah".
4
"Today’s 70-year-olds have not seen technological change on the same order."
This is utterly wrong. How about internet? Seventh year's ago, did anyone have any idea about what internet was and how it would impact our world?
9
Bob Dylan may be the voice of the Baby Boomers but he isn't a Baby Boomer. And although there may be a decline in the cultural areas Mr. Brooks values, the scientific advances made over the last 60 years have been truly startling. The period from 1900 to 1950 may have been a period of high culture (with some pretty notable exceptions) and the flowering modern physics, but the discovery of the structure of DNA and its implications, for better or worse, easily rivals it.
3
The baby boomers led "The Age of Aquarius" We were dreamers who wanted love and peace for all. In many ways we moved our society. It is so much better for women now because of our marches, consciousness raising groups, Gloria Steinem (who I'm surprised wasn't mentioned) We stood up against war and stopped the Vietnam war. We continued to march against the wars after that. I can remember marching with my 3 year old against the Iraq war. And we are still marching. We had and anti Trump march here right in my town after the election and I marched in the womens march on Washington that January. Where is this new generation? I expected them to be marching in the streets this week to ban military style weapons??
5
@Crystal: "It is so much better for women now because of our marches"
Those marches have been going on for 100 years. The boomer women had an advantage with the availability of modern birth control, invented pre-boom, but made available to the boomers. Until then, women's rights faced an almost impossible headwind.
5
Born in 1958, I was 11 years old for Woodstock and barely 15 when the last Americans withdrew from Vietnam. I am not sure that I truly had “lived experiences” of either of these events, aside from watching my mother mystified by my 7- years older brother’s anti war activism and his week-long trip to Woodstock, from which she was certain he would return in a body bag. My awareness was shaped more by AIDS, Reagan and the rise of evangelicalism. I am tired of being lumped into this enormous Boomer demographic bulge that was shaped by the assassination of JFK and hippies.
6
How about caring for environment?
The boomer generation, especially in the US, has done more damage than anyone and continues to deny anything is happen.
"The mark of a great society is how many trees we plant, in whose shade we will never sit". How many trees have the boomers planted?
None.
Massive fail.
Z-, in the thing that mattered most.
8
@Edward: That damage was preconceived by the generations before. Rank and file boomers fought tooth and nail to clean it up, but couldn't beat the greedy people who profit from those pre-boomer industries. They get a passing grade for consciousness but a D for failing to clean up leadership.
Because there are so many boomers, of course they had a bigger footprint. But guess who mainstreamed the whole notion that we should quit destroying the Earth... the boomers.
I'm afraid future generations will have to figure out how to clean up the leadership problem. They'd better hurry.
4
@Edward
I disagree. Both Clean Air and Clean Water Acts were bold moves, creating the underpinnings of significant clean ups of both resources.
That we now allow hydraulic fracturing on a grand scale, mainlining industrial pollutants straight into our ground water, and cannot seem to collectively fight global warming are perplexing symptom of the same generation giving up much of the ground gained, so it is a mixed bag.
Not a Z-, but you are right about an F.
1
@mlbex
As I recall it was a partial nuclear meltdown that led to the EPA. Where's that tooth and nail spirit now?
Now that they're comfy it's SUVs, beef, airconditioning and denial all round.
Because there are so many boomers their vote, and environmental footprint, really matters.
Agree about the boomer problem in the Seante.
1
Boomers helped. Boomer neighbors don't sweat property lines - you should be mowing that strip, not me? Who cares? (That was once a big thing.) People no longer have to pretend to like classical music - many actually do like it, but the pretending is over. More adults have graduated from high school and have degrees than ever before. Many of us paid our own way or a big part of it. (Cheaper, yes. Still took a lot of hard work, yes.) So much more respect for women and minorities, great changes have been made. Everyday life is better. Bill Clinton is probably the model. Got some things done, wonderful spirit, lacked the discipline to go the distance. That's a lot of us, but actually, we don't really care if we go the whole distance. Part way is fine.
3
let's review ...we've just had a series of major incidents of gun violence toward immigrants yet this administration chose to conduct major deportation raids by ICE resulting in separating parents and kids as a "deterrent" just days later.
Once again, we're so numb by Trump and all Republican's profoundly cruel behavior it has become the "norm".
Apparently, this is how conservatives want to Make America Great Again!
The title of this article says it all. 'Your Baby Boomer Report Card.' "Your" report card. Brooks conveniently excludes himself by disagreeing with the census bureau that he is, in fact, a baby boomer. So it's all about YOU. Nothing to do with him. He also removes Obama while he's at it. He then proceeds to belittle the achievements of the generation who, in a very short time span, made the most impactful, liberating societal changes in human history. The cultural upheavals lead by America's youth became a source of enlightenment not just to those of university age, but also to older - and younger - people. Many commenters have blamed the ruination of the environment on the failures of their (I suspect) parents. But the environmental movement took off in the seventies, propelled by the ideals of the sixties, an area that previous generations had very little understanding of, or interest, in. Brooks was laughing as he wrote, I think - or is he bitter that he couldn't bring himself to join his peers in forging a new and more progressive world? And how has the current youth distinguished itself in the "march toward progress", I wonder? I don't see any mass protests.
9
I hope I'm not the first one to say this: what about the wholesale introduction of drugs into mainstream society by Baby Boomers?
Drugs were much more prevalent than pensions for us boomers and the cost will never stop.
6
Where we were warned and the Boomers seem deaf.
Rachel Carson
"As crude a weapon as the cave man’s club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life."
"The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction."
"It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility."
Humility is not only lacking but not even considered a virtue.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex."
4
Ok, I'm a boomer.
The world presented my generation with several events that shaped and scarred us:
the lies and waste of the war in Vietnam
the lies and cynicism from Watergate
the murders of MLK, JFK,RFK,Kent State, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X....need I go on ?
The so called "greatest Generation" designed and ruled over that time and its events....we just lived through it and tried to make sense of it.
Try to understand our thinking as we were shaped by these kinds of disappointments.
8
The fact that Madonna is the only woman nominated as the potentially quintessential Boomer is not surprising in a column that manages not to mention how different the life of boomer women is from previous generations and the impact that has had on the family, workplace, politics, culture and society. For a columnist who takes on the broadest of topics and is grading an entire generation, missing half of the population seriously undermines his conclusions. C-
12
D+
there was the greatest generation,
boomers are the most generation.
3
I can't decide between the guys behind the statins that save so many lives (Drs. Joseph Goldstein & Michael Brown of the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas) or the Beatles now represented by Paul McCartney for the quintessential boomer.
Under Technology and Innovation, Mr. Brooks forgets to mention that the boomers have massively changed our environment for the better, while also failing to address challenges that still remain. The Clean Air and Clean Water Acts kicked off fifty years of improvement that Donny's EPA can't fully reverse, even though it's trying. Our energy infrastructure is moving ahead in its transition toward a carbon-free future, yet its momentum is slowed by our clinging to coal while refusing to invest in newer, safer nuclear power technologies. One stark indicator of change: Fifty years ago the Cuyahoga River caught fire. Today, you can eat the fish you catch in it.
6
As an aging boomer there is much to reflect on here. I think Joni Mitchell should be considered for those who defined that generation. She seemed to struggle with the high art/low art split and the question of how you can be a serious artist and still be Pop and relevant to the mainstream. The boomers killed the distinction between high and low art and high and low culture. Thank you Andy Warhol! We live with that to our detriment.
5
Quintessential boomer: Homer Simpson
What is says: Art imitates life imitates art. (Boomers love their irony.)
2
As to the question, I pick Madonna. The reason is stated - her unique ability to reinvent herself, grow, and remain relevant for most of her career (not the last 5 years).
2
Boomers can get any grade you want to give them if you keep moving the goal posts around. There will always be some bits of good stuff and some really bad.
Since boomers have exploited the environment to the extreme, the only grade that is going to matter is on sustainability...which us boomers have essentially ignored. So, F minus or lower.
5
As I expected, Mr. Brooks was referring to white people baby boomers. This is to be expected and I register no complaint. After all, it is embittered and fearful boomers who voted in Trump, obliviously self-absorbed and unmindful of the mess generations behind us have to endure as a result.
A plurality of boomers examined by Mr Brooks voted for President Obama, but then became addled by the full-on Republican assault on Mr. Obama, his policies, and the rank racism he experienced--remaining uncharacteristically silent and self-absorbed by the inevitability of aging. Mr. Brooks's boomers sighed when Republicans let the assault weapon ban expire and buried the Voting Rights Act damaged by the Supreme Court.
So I am not surprised that Mr. Brooks predictably selected certain individuals as emblematic of my generation, especially Trump. That choice represents a horrible generational legacy from which this Afro American woman is happy to be excluded.
7
I am an Xer. My initial response to this article was anger, and then I stopped and considered my real problem with Mr. Brooks's article. It encourages the unfair judgement of individuals and their value based on involuntary group membership. This time age. Those boomers wrecked everything...or maybe...Those boomers weren't half bad. Just replace the words baby boomer in Brooks's title "Your Baby Boomer Report Card" with any other group and ask yourself; Is this statement helpful, appropriate, or decent in the slightest?
Did any average, individual in the boomer generation have any more control over the direction of the culture, government, or their world than anyone in any other generation? If so, they truly were a unique (don't forget the word average at the beginning of this sentence). People try to survive and they react based on the information the culture gives them and the circumstances of their immediate world.
If Brooks wants to isolate individual, key decision-makers, then we can rate their decisions and the impact of those decisions. I think David Brooks probably knows better, but couldn't help himself. Writing under deadline must be tough. I respect that. I do things I know are silly too. Like this. It's utterly pointless for me to write this, if I expect Brooks to read it, consider it, or anyone to stop flaming entire groups of people on the net.
I guess I've lost my head and screamed into the void. Shame on me. Time for a late lunch, I suppose.
16
Hands down we were a miserable bunch compared with our parents from the greatest generation. They suffered the Great Depression and fought a war to save Europe and European Jews. Yes they had pensions and left behind good schools and infrastructure but they also paid lots of taxes. Draft dodging boomers like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Bush who
got us into the mother of all wars from which we may never extricate ourselves. Boomers on this score D. The boomers caught the end of the golden age of America in the sixties, the seventies saw Milton Friedman change the game, we went off the gold standard and entered an era that saw manufacturing and labor destroyed and finance rise an era that brought the middle class to the brink and the era of oligarchy began in earnest. I would give boomers an F on the real economy, the forties through the sixties saw all boats rise, after that it was a crusade to steal from the labors of others largely begun by Kohlberg Kravis and Roberts the original vulture capitalists. (While on the subject though no one has done more to destroy the middle class than the generation following the boomers, Amazon and the internet wiped out what was left of small businesses and manufacturing)Our standing in the world has gone from beloved savior after WWII to despised bully following Vietnam, Central and South America and Iraq, definitely an F, but they gave us Martin, John and Bobby we gave them Clinton, Bush and Trump. We get an F all around.
7
Neither Jimi Hendrix (born 1942) or Bob Dylan (born 1941) are boomers. They were members of the Silent Generation.
6
Mr. Brooks forgot to give credit to baby boomers for making the earth uninhabitable for future generations. Minor omission I'm sure.
253
@Richard Wilson Think your long-term memory may be failing. Have you seen any of the pictures of NYC smog circa the 1960s? The boomers embraced and amplified the environmental activism launched by the previous generation (and, to be fair, a couple of its predecessors, but I digress). They made it politically uncomfortable for politicians to continue ignoring ecology as an issue. Did boomer office holders at federal and local levels get everything right? Of course not. But which generation of politicians has?
32
@Richard Wilson: The rank and file boomers tried to enforce clean manufacturing, but the economic leaders just exported the pollution to the third world.
They were the first to talk seriously about not making the Earth uninhabitable, but the momentum has so far proved greater than the will to change. Many boomers drive the most economical car they can get, eat organic, and try to reduce their environmental footprint in other ways. That might not be enough, but that's the best an ordinary citizen can do.
When it comes to leadership, the boomers (myself included) get a D. We couldn't protect ourselves from the greedy people.
23
@Richard Wilson Inaccurate. The second half of the baby boomers like myself came of age during the first global energy crisis. We learned that conservation was important. Many of us adopted those habits and followed them the rest of our lives.
We couldn't help that the auto industry and the oil producers, run by the preceding generations at the time, put profit over principle despite all the opportunities to make a lasting change. Blame the oligarchs but not an entire generation.
Besides, Gen Xer's seem to be the ones who care the least about the environment. Many of them thought the ecology movement was a boomer/hippie thing so they did what ever they thought was the opposite. While Boomers were snapping up Priuses, they're buying gas guzzling 4WD pickups. Take a look sometime at who's driving those large pickups in the cities and burbs (I'm dismissing rural communities where they're needed for work). There are more 40 and 50 somethings than Boomers.
23
One thing about boomers: in general, we write thank-you notes.
I've had one, exactly one thank-you note from anyone younger than a boomer, despite lots of wedding gifts and baby showers.
One.
Thank you notes are important.
Emails and text messages don't count.
7
Dear Laura,
Thank you for massive national debt, a soon-to-be uninhabitable planet, and Donald Trump.
Sincerely yours,
Every subsequent generation that will pay for your sins.
(P.S. My boomer parents raised me to write thank you letters - which I’ve passed along to my seven year old daughter. YMMV.)
5
@Laura But email and text thank yous DO count to younger generations. That's why they use them.
What generation Bob Dylan belongs to is as important (or unimportant) as what generation Shakespeare was part of. Genius is timeless and Bob wins.
4
Every generation deserves both praise AND blame. No generation exists in a vacuum; each carries the burdens of the past and the advantages, and each leaves both for the next.
Without historical perspective, both praise and blame are meaningless.
6
"It’s never been my duty to remake the world at large
Nor is it my intention to sound a battle charge
’Cause I love you more than all of that with a love that doesn’t
bend
And if there is eternity I’d love you there again"-BD
3
The boomers, like all generations, are not a monolith, although it was a huge demographic bulge. You're really talking about the well educated people like you, who did have a lot of choices (although many of us, like the class of 2008, graduated into a very bad recession and stagflation.). When we finally did achieve political as well as economic power, we didn't live up to our ideals, whether those were conservative or liberal. What we also didn't do, was achieve a high enough birth rate to replace ourselves and keep social security etc going in perpetuity. One of the many reasons this country needs immigrants.
3
As an older Millennial, it seems fitting to me that a Boomer evaluated his own cohort and deemed it good. That kind of high self-esteem doesn't mesh with the view of that generation as seen by those younger than the Boomers. High debt, wars, congressional deadlock, and the modern political parties.
But hey, you gave us Madonna. The Material Girl. Acquiring all the material sums up the Boomer generation well.
3
Age 68 and I tell every Boomer
We failed
F-
4
Bill Gates. Tech visionary. Great humanitarian.
2
Well David, whatever you think of him, Bob Dylan won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, and is the only Boomer on the list of Americans who have won. It is my opinion that the reason the Boomers haven't been preeminent in serious music is that they were cursed by Arnold Schoenberg and his Dedacaphony, or if you like 12 tone music. As to literature the Boomer mania about interior short stories and books has limited its relevance to others. But there is time yet: the boomers end in 1964 and those people are only 55 years old.
2
America’s political institutions have become dysfunctional, civic debate has crumbled, debt has soared and few major pieces of legislation have passed.
When George Bush was appointed to the Presidency by the Supreme Court, the debt was on a downward trajectory and would have been eliminated by now. After a tax cut for the wealthy, 911, and a recession, George Bush declared the Trifecta. Deficits rocketed and the economy tanked.
When Obama was elected the Republicans vowed to do everything they could to stop him from accomplishing anything and behold, they filibustered more in 8 years than in the previous 230 years combined. And still they are undoing anything he was able to accomplish. One of our political institutions is dysfunctional, but you don't mention whom.
3
I read or heard this statement recently;
The Boomer generation, as youths, was the last generation that actually believed their government never lied to its people. Vietnam and what followed made us cynical.
1
Bob Dylan, nominated here as a quintessential Baby Boomer, was born six months before Pearl Harbor, and thus was not a Baby Boomer.
2
Always appreciate your columns, David. I notice that, in spite of what the Census Bureau people say - you are technically a Boomer, but choose not to identify as one. :-) What, then, does that make you? Many divide the group into Boomer I and Boomer II. I think most of us like to think we belong to no generation. This column does give a great deal of insight into your interest in defining identity.
And Happy Birthday this weekend.
3
David -- you forgot The Beatles, not to mention the Byrds, Rolling Stones, and on and on. I feel sorry for today's young people because they missed out on the greatest music (movies too) ever made.
3
Good job, Mr. Brooks, at pitting one generation against another. Let’s each blame another group of people for the fix we are in. Of course the so-called Boomers failed at some of their efforts and succeeded where no one else has before or since at others. So is it now and so it will always be. Dividing us into groups so one can cast stones at another makes you complicit in the divisiveness and tribalism you pretend to deplore.
8
I am embarrassed to be a boomer for whom a cultural exemplar is... Madonna. No. Accurate nominees: Aretha, Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, Emmylou Harris.
Though you give us low grades for morality, no mention is made of the fact that the Pill came on the scene just at the right time for us. We had to sort out this new freedom.
4
Grouping 'boomers' into ONE group is like racism, where you group together ALL of one race. Boomers born and or educated or migrated to different parts of the country differ. Maybe coastal boomers are different from the middle boomers? I suspect the younger gen of today, in the middle states, is more like the boomers of the coastal state 20-30 years ago. The wave takes time to travel.
8
David, Bob Dylan IS NOT a baby boomer. He was born in 1941, and therefor part of the Silent Generation. I think this is a very important distinction because several of the most important cultural icons of the 60’s were not boomers, (Including Jimi Hendrix whom you also mis-categorize). Just as the millennials are now appropriating all the art and culture which has actually been created by Gen Xers as their own, the boomers always take credit for the great work that was made by the generation that came before them. I think that it’s the small, quiet generations that actually make the most profound changes. Let’s give them some credit where it’s due.
4
Please cite some important stuff next time - cancer cure rates improvement, genetic testing, smoking cessation, automotbile safety - that Baby Boomers have also been responsible for.
4
Couldn’t agree more as regards high culture. However, it is linked to the pop culture movement. One need only look to the Kennedy Center Honors who inducted the following artists the first two years; Marian Anderson, Fred Astaire, George Balanchine, Richard Rodgers, Arthur Rubinstein, Aaron Copland, Ella Fitzgerald, Henry Fonda, Martha Graham, and Tennessee Williams.
When compared to the rappers, rock and rollers and pop singers of the present, One can only contemplate how far we have fallen.
Oh, and a grade of C- to the most avaricious generation the country has ever seen.
The complexities of humanity make it impossible for ANY generation to deserve or be awarded an "A". Hopefully, as a species we will continue to evolve, embrace, celebrate and honor the planet we inhabit. I am a boomer. We are not perfect... but we deserve a C+ or a B. Largely because of the positive societal changes that have occurred as the result of our generations dedication to improving human rights... for minorities, women and gay and transgender communities. Our generation also powerfully created the pathways that have allowed millions of Americans to have access to medical care and public education. Members of our generation are also created the tools that have allowed a majority of Americans to have access to technology. We are the generation who opened doorways and pathways to a worldwide understanding of the importance and need for ongoing and vigilant environmental protection of fresh water, farmland, forests and the diversity of life. on this planet.
7
The only woman you saw fit to nominate was Madonna?
308
@Kate Grey
Now I notice that Madonna appeared in two lists here. Not my day.
7
@Kate Grey I'm a guy and noticed that too, women mean nothing to the male conservative, even a minor conservative like brooks.
15
Bob Dylan did change everything. If you didn’t notice, you weren’t paying attention.
88
@Christopher Johnston He isn't a Baby Boomer. Abraham Lincoln did some good things, but he didn't make this list.
9
Ronald Reagen???? Are you kidding me?! He destroyed far more than he accomplished. Racist. Homophobic. Classist. And none too bright.
Manners and Morals - a solid F. Self-abdorbed. Sharp elbows. Everthing measured in dollars and size. Hugely sexist.
I am a tail end boomer. Fortunately I was raised in poverty and never got to entitlement. Plus, I may be part of the last cohort to receive a real education.
5
If I don't count, where do I belong? I've been unmoored and set adrift.
2
We are retired with fat public pensions, gold-plated health insurance and zero debt. The brats and their brats run their rat races thousands of miles away, and we are not on any social media. We do whatever, whenever we feel like, together or separately with friends. We pay next to nothing in taxes and haven't the slightest care in the world. We smoke the very best weed and drink the very best wines. I give us an A+ and retire the trophy.
3
A millennial blamed me, a quasi boomer for ruining the country. Specifically causing college tuition to explode. Then she promptly voted for Trump. College tuition went up in price because certain people (on the right) didn't want to pay taxes to fund it. Point being, most of the woes in this country are due to ignorance of voters who vote against their own interests. From my standpoint, the ignorance is present in all generations.
8
"The Boomer political era began in 1992" ??? Huh. I seem to recall something about college students becoming "Clean for Gene" or working for Bobby Kennedy in '68, protests against the war in Vietnam (including Univ. of Wisconsin, Kent State, et al.), SDS, marching on Washington (including Vietnam Veterans Against the War), staffing the Watergate investigations(a la Hilary Rodham) ....
6
I think the quintessential boomer is any veteran who served willingly or not during a most contentious time. It was not a popular decision to serve but they loved their country enough to go ahead and serve. Entirely too many never returned. In spite of today's rhetoric, they were not snowflakes!
1
We live as we began - divided and inchoate though righteous morally. Our anchors have never been set and we have drifted. Some served for better or worse, most avoided and we learn history really doesn’t care.
My vote for the quintessential baby boomer would be Hank Paulson. From modest backgrounds, academic and sports excellence to Wall Street and the behemoth that is Goldman Sachs, the very pinnacle of a baby boomer career while fighting for environmental and conservation issues.
Self-discipline is not inherent in life. It is acquired by confronting external constraints.
As the US has become more powerful, those constraints have receded. And, self-discipline has diminished.
The real problem in advanced Western societies is that the reduction of self-discipline produces the loss of values.
In short, the modern world has become "spoiled."
3
Thank you David Brooks: ever thoughtful. To be born in 1953 has been to invent social and cultural strategies to avoid the excesses that sometimes characterize American society. Gone is the kind of outright prejudice against us women: the generous people who helped to educate us (especially in NYC) showed us the value of independent thought and action formed to create a valuable future. Strange are the cliches of excess of all kinds... all those I know and hold dear avoided this. Choose your actions and partners well.
1
The new technological "leaps" since 1970, except in the health sphere, are rather meaningless, and in fact a reflection of our frivolousness and self-indulgence. Better TV sets? Internet in our hands (same as better TV, really)? Microwave cooking? As a consequence of the way instant gratification has been fostered we Baby Boomers have created an environment where attention spans have decreased, morality is whatever is convenient, values are a quaint notion. We have lost much more than we have gained. I swipe left on the last 40 years.
2
Why Steve Jobs and not Bill Gates on your quintessential boomer list? Along with Jobs, Wozniak, and Allen (whom you left out), he created home computing and the "knowledge worker." Not satisfied with that contribution, he went on with wife Melinda to start a huge foundation devoted to the premise that all lives have equal value, to challenge other beneficiaries of technology and other wealth to give away their fortunes, and is outspoken on the need to tax the wealthy. If quintessential means the most perfect example of a group, he certainly reaches toward "perfection" more than Jobs does, even if he's not the most representative.
3
You are too kind to us. We rested on the laurels earned by our Fathers in WWII instead of continuing to extend our best aspirations throughout our country and the world. Today we find our image greatly diminished, a poor inheritance for those generations who follow.
4
As always, David Brooks provides interesting questions and thoughts. However, evaluating by 'generation' will not be very helpful. We must face a future that could end at any moment, and which will quite possibly not survive for more than a another few generation. Over the last 500 years, the human species has created the overwhelming problems, we now must face, as well as the wealth and 'advanced' status that the 'fortunate' enjoy. No problems are more critical than the exploding world population and the effects on the state of our home ... planet earth. Climate change (deterioration), and the ever present danger of nuclear war are our reality The modern american history, of only 3+ centuries, and our contemporary wealth and power, is rooted in slavery and its malignant replacements, and by the 'development' of a continent by overcoming, displacing and almost destroying native peoples who had lived here for more than 10,000 years. We must understand and accept the magnitude of the changes we must accomplish if the planet's life is to survive. The young must, of course, lead the way, but it can't be successful without the participation of all living 'generations'.
2
The Roman poet, Ovid, said, "Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor". (I see the better way but I follow the worse).
The gap between knowledge of the good and doing the good has never been larger than during the boomer era.
Previous generations were largely uneducated, ignorant, naive, mystified, misinformed, and misled. As the most highly educated, most knowledgeable generation ever, boomers have little excuse for their excessive self-indulgence, the messes they've made, and the problems they've failed to solve.
133
@Lawrence Chanin
Well, they were also young (I was born 1964). And *no* generation in a system such as ours (democracy), can roll back every entrenched infrastructure, to do their bidding, the minute they take ownership of the world.
As the last so-called boomer, I could be mad at my grandparents for helping reify a system that made the ideals of democracy subservient to the self-interest of capitalism (in my opinion).
Some problems were faced head-on. The civil rights movement? women's rights? -- there would be no Me Too movement without those feminists that everyone disliked in the 1960s.
The enlightenment of most people in this country about race and gender was fueled by a particular generation's attitude about it. But nothing gets "solved" in a generation.
24
@Lawrence Chanin
I love an apt Latin quotation, but a little context is needed. Ovid WROTE "Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor" but Medea SAYS it (Metamorphoses 7.20-21): "I see AND APPROVE OF the better but I follow the worse." In this passage in Metam. 7, Medea is not speaking about killing her children, but about helping Jason acquire the golden fleece by betraying her father. Medea is torn between love and loyalty/reason in this passage. For what it's worth, reason wins in this short passage, which concludes, "dixit, et ante oculos rectum pietasque pudorque constiterant, et victa dabat iam terga Cupido" Metam. 7.72-73 (She spoke, and honesty, loyalty, and modesty stood before her eyes; and Cupid retreated in defeat.)
Are boomers really that much more knowledgeable of the good? I suspect that the definition of good has simply changed. In the contest between love and loyalty, how many since the mid-60s would hesitate to side with love against loyalty or duty? One thing I miss about my generation (I'm one of David's disqualified boomers, born in 1964) is the lack of doubt and internal struggle.
2
Intriguing column. I mostly agree.
Should have included sports. Someone's already done the heavy lifting here:
https://www.si.com/more-sports/2011/02/17/generations
Which generational cohort (let’s face it, is sort of a silly concept anyway - but hey, I’m a cynical Gen Xer) voted in greatest proportions for Trump? Oh yeah, boomers.
3
No grade on the Environment?
5
On the politics, boomer presidents may be a mixed bag, but our impact on politics was enormous---Viet Nam, Watergate and Civil Rights, for a start.
2
Parenting | F |
[I actually include my Generation (X) in this too.] The Boomers were the ones who decided their childhoods had been insupportably desolate and so they raised a generation of humans who have little concept of anyone beyond themselves. Boomers' children were fawned over from the cradle, told there were no limitations to whatever they desired and informed that simply showing up was good enough to get a ribbon. Their education was limited to standardized tests and binary equations. Their horizons were defined by Google Search. These children were then marched out into the world (sort of) and expected to get along with everyone else who had been told that *they* were the center of the universe. Is it really all that shocking that children raised to be hyper-individualist, anonymous online personas are becoming radicals on the Left and the Right?
2
And of course advances in the rights of women make no difference to Mr Brooks.
4
Yes isn't it always mommy and daddy's fault.
3
Ah, so I'm back to being "generationless" again, being born in '61. Back in the 90s, the Boomers wouldn't let me join the club because I was too young for Woodstock, and the Gen-Xers thought I was too old because I remember the Beatles.
And I confess, I ended up with the worst of both worlds - not enjoying the privileges of the "real" boomers, but being blamed for what the millennials endure now.
*flips desk*
6
I think the big downward slide started with Ronald Reagan. I thought he was doing a terrible job while everyone else was praising "what a great statesman" he was. I would hope so...he was an actor first. He tripled the deficit. We had the Contra scandal. And then he couldn't testify because he came down with alzheimer's.
2
Having been born in 1958, never felt like a boomer, more gen-xer, maybe just a late starter. Let's see, graduated high school in 1976 (Bi-centennial). Worked summers at 13-16, then full-time thru rest of high school. Well, 18% unemployment when I went to Denver. Still had to get a job, had no other way of eating. Luckily, knew nothing of the unemployment rate until years later.
So, yes, we screwed up by supporting Republicans from Nixon on. Please read history and see how that party has verged on Treason (I except T. Roosevelt and Eisenhower) since the beginning of 20th century. They refused the League of Nations, wanted to appease hitler, Nuke Korea and China, and on and on. I hope the Republican party dies with our generation.
2
I thought the Boomer Generation began in 1946. How is Dylan, born in 1941, a Boomer? Certainly influenced Boomers, but so, too, did Paul Simon, who is five months younger than Dylan.
2
In 1972 I voted for McGovern as an 18 year old. My cohort was fairly scoffed at by the nation - run by the greatest generation at that time - as Nixon cruised in for an easy victory. Much of what has become of our country began then, at a time when I never conceived we could possibly gain the level of prosperity of the previous generation, or that world civilization would even survive to 2000 - fear of nuclear war was everpresent. It was in fact a pretty dark time, and I sympathize with younger generations, having similar but different experiences and world views now.
However, all the focus on generational perspective misses the long view: that the earth is on the receiving end of humanity - for better or worse, as far as humanity is concerned. As a species, our carving up of the planet began in earnest millennia ago, and every human being that has ever lived owns a piece of that. Best of luck to us.
3
I don't know how you can pin some of these on the boomers without saying they reflect on the Zeitgeist covering subsequent Gen X, Y and Z.
For example, overtly, dressing casual has become the new normal when the Boomers are forced to retire early. The morality of I-am-free-and-you-are-will is supplanted by the current extremist position of I-am-free-but-you-are-not. The current environment is that of a regressive one. So, if the Boomers get a C for you, the current situation will be a F-!
The Boomers are not done yet. It might well be that our last great act will be violent revolution that destroys the social order that condemns older Americans to poverty and exploitation. The cruelty of Republicans who hate Social Security and Medicare and want to reduce them to a pittance. A rebellion against the purveyors of bigotry and religious flim-flamery and finally one last blast at the reactionaries who hate freedom and social compassion. The final battle between the Hippie and the Straight?
2
There are boomers an then there are boomers.
"Hippies" (to paint with a very wide brush) and other searchers of the Boomer generation were never even a significant minority, much less a majority. We were always outnumbered by "middle America", the Nixons, Reagans, etc. Trump is just the logical extension...
But we did try and by trying we gave more than we received. See today's Blue states...
5
If music can't change everything Dylan changed the nature of popular music.
One other feature of Baby Boomers. Many of us are the parents of Millennials. They are pushing society forward. Not always well but certainly seeking to improve equality and the environment to name to roles Boomers had an indirect hand in.
2
It speaks volumes about the Boomer generation that in the bonus section, of the six nominees for quintessential Boomer only one is a female, not one is brown-skinned, not one is LGBTQ. For Boomers, it was a great time to be a white, straight male. Although some may not be happy about it, personally I'm thankful we're moving on, thank goodness for Me Too, thank goodness that the DT's of the world are nearing the end of their time on Earth. Bring on the younger generations!
2
After reading many of the comments, I feel a need to say that many of the ideas expressed here about the "Baby Boomers" seem to lack an understanding that there are always older and younger generations who were and are alive during the time of our generation.
To blame the "Baby Boomer generation" exclusively for being self-centered, or responsible for inaction on the part of the government for various needed legislation or social change strikes me as unrealistic and foolish.
We weren't standing totally by ourselves once we were adults in a position to make positive change in areas where it was needed. We were looking at powerful people much older than we were during the late 1960s, and all during the 1970s who were making decisions many of us disagreed with, or were powerless to change or stop.
The oldest of us were not really old enough to create policy, or grow innovative ideas or plan effectively until we were into our forties--that is, the mid-1980s.
We weren't given some extra sense of being able to predict the future--we lived in the present just as those who were younger or older than our particular generation: people who also affected the planet, who were self-oriented in consumerism, who also were just trying to make it in this world as the majority of us Baby Boomers were doing.
To blame one generation for anything is a pointless and futile
exercise which only shows a weak understanding of history and how populations of all age groups affect life.
4
How can you not even mention the planet, which has been all but doomed due to Baby Boomers' indifference?
Unfortunately the Boomer's political failures are killing this country. Which is why we need to transition to the next generation of leaders ASAP.
1
David, I was born in late 1948 and you are telling me that I had no political influence until 1992? As to great, please stop with the Reagan nonsense, he next to Trump was the most destructive president the US has ever had. Most of our problems we have he initiated and no I didn't vote for the guy.
7
My astute and observant mother (b. 1925) felt the Boomers greatest contribution, in contrast to her own "greatest generation," was in the realm of historic preservation. Her generation was keen, in the 50s, to knock everything down and start anew. Boomers saved many wonderful buildings and neighborhoods.
7
First, the apparently mandatory classifying of generations. Then the blame-gaming. And the generalizing! It's almost "Make America Great Again" stuff. reactionary palaver. One can almost hear Archie and Edith singing "Those were the good old days." Why grade generations, when we the people ought to be listening to candidates. evaluating their suggestions, and working to take back the federal government, at least, from the corrupt, ideologically sick, wealth-serving, society-hating Republican movement that seeks to Make America Oligarchic (MAO).
3
The Boomers will be forever remembered as the generation that turned their back on climate change. (But at least they won't be remembered for long...)
1
Back to the baby boomers(1946 to 1964). They benefited from high tax rates. They were able to get an education with no debt. They were able to buy homes. They were able to have jobs that paid their expenses. They voted for government representatives that made that happen. Now, the baby boomers have all that they need thanks to progressive taxation. Now the baby boomers are saying, "I've got mine, it's too bad that you don't have anything; it's your fault" and they, all of a sudden, become Republicans, ignoring the fact that Republicans have always been against progressive taxation which funded their advantage.
3
Why don't young adults vote? Baby Boomers have always been active in politics. Again - why do young adults shun politics? This is the question that needs to be answered and this article does nothing to address this huge problem.
3
Mr. Brooks, Several years ago you wrote a scathing editorial about Gen X as parents. X parents were particularly at fault for refusing to allow their children access to popular culture like Disney and sports. Gen X parents communicated contempt for popular culture by wearing black and eskewing institutions that held communities together i.e. churches and schools. Gen X are home-schooling, atheists because it reflects the resulting insecurities of the previous generation. Baby boomer (BB) parents were the"me" generation; free to be self-indulgent & anti-establishment, as needed. Popular culture was a means for BBs to parent their children while they attended key parties. Gen X doesn't want to follow the lead of Boomers for all the good reasons identified in this new editorial. The question should be how should we all insulate ourselves and our children from the indifference, greed and selfishness? Many of the leaders of the Civil Rights spoke against the perpetrators of injustice who were then and are still are just as likely to be Baby Boomers. BBs come from all backgrounds, highly visible or not, and they disguise entitlement as the pursuit of happiness. They invented the 401K and then made it possible for it to be emptied out. Thanks to BBs we have hospitals for profit, implicit insurance collusion and little safety net for people most in need. What is the story behind the freedom they crave? That the future always looks brighter for those in power.
1
Like every generation before us, and every generation to come, we can incorporate both the best and the worst. At our best we got Richard M. Nixon to create the Environmental Protection Agency. At our worst, we're allowing one of our own, Donald J. Trump to effectively dismantle it.
1
"The boomers entered college just as universities were expanding and becoming more specialized and professionalized. This produced the most educated generation up to that time, but the specialization and ghettoization of intellectual and artistic life took its toll on the nation’s culture."
Mr. Brooks, could you please explain how the specialization and the ghettoization of intellectual artistic life took a toll on the nation's culture? Do you mean finally giving PoC along with LGBTQ+ people equal rights has taken a toll on your white, rich, heterosexual values? I'm at a loss to what you mean by this statement. Clarification is needed.
3
In 1975 I had yet to graduate from college in Iowa, but when I moved to California things changed, that is until Ronald Regan, Governor of California, changed the course of the state’s higher education system. In his eight years, he cut state funding for college and universities and laid the foundation for a tuition-based system.
I went to a college l could afford in Chico, and we all dreamed "big." I remember sitting in a geology c!ass learning about the environment. We didn't study topography like at Iowa State, instead we learned we needed to eat less meat, and other things that would save the environment.
I got angry when our grand project turned out to be sending copies of our textbook, filled with insights, to key state legislators. What else? When Regan got into the White House the first thing he did was take Jimmy Carter's solar panels off the roof of his new home.
Don't blame me. Blame greed and stupidity. We keep hoping and praying that things will get better; we turn to our brilliance to save the day. Guess what?
Cliff
Cal State, Chico
Class of 1978; better late than never, right?
2
A superficial and annoying piece.
And then there's this:
"We’re only counting real boomers here — those who had youthful, lived experience of events like Vietnam and Woodstock. Despite what the Census Bureau people say, those born after 1960, like Barack Obama, don’t count."
As a 1960er, I think can speak for all of us in saying we did not experience Viet Nam or Woodstock except, if we were very engaged for an 8 or 9 year old, their echoes through the media or older relatives. I hate being classified as a boomer. Given his age, Brooks should know better.
The "real boomers" were at the time and in the 70s and 80s, when we were coming of age, always telling us we were too young, had missed "it," were always trying to copy them, etc. Then later, after the fact, when it comes time to apportion blame for their shortcomings, we are suddenly welcome.
And Dylan technically isn't a boomer, either. Too old. Boomers were Dylan's audience, but he was born during the war, not after it.
3
Claiming that the "We're all in this together/I'm nobody better than anyone else" ethos of the Silent Generation makes them morally superior to Boomers (or any other succeeding generation) is engaging in nostalgia-tinged naiveté. That generation's moral credo is more accurately stated as, ""We're all in this together - as long as those of you who aren't deserving of equal status know your place. I'm no better than any other white, heterosexual, man of means, But I'm definitely better than anyone who can't describe themselves that way."
1
23 Marvel Movies and cheap plastic toys from China delivered same-day or climate change and the deficit. I’d say that nets to a B.
In all seriousness, boomers were the first generation that had to choose between themselves and the future — their choice is now painfully obvious.
4
I couldn't agree with the boomer author of this piece any less.
Social Movements: D+
Civil Rights was an accomplishment of the greatest generation. The great strides in feminism were made well before the boomers, and the effort of their time, the ERA failed. Progress on LGBTQ rights largely waited on the millenials and the boomers are among the least supportive. Maybe they get points for environmentalism, I simply don't know the history of that one well enough.
And to call the conservative movements of the 80's and later boomers something to be proud of is even more laughable. The Tea Party sure did exist, I can't deny that. But other than being a racist backlash to our first black President it claimed to be about fiscal responsibility and balanced budgets. Yet first chance they get, they vote in droves for a tax cut and spend budget busting racist. Ditto the religious right and populist revolt. The Gun Rights movement has bequethed us a culture of mass-shootings and death. The pro-life movement has accomplished almost nothing other than being a wedge issue to elect republicans for a generation (as well as being a mark against the feminist bona fides Brooks wanted to attribute to the boomers). You don't deserve an 'A' for merely existing. You deserve an A if your net contribution to society was positive and left future generations better off because of it.
1
Don’t be so hard on Clinton,it was the republican congress at that time that helped to create this mess. Reagan and Thatcher? Many would say they too are culprits.
1
The baby boomers I know fought in Viet Nam and came home to hate. Many have been sleeping on the streets for decades. The inspirational leaders were slaughtered one after another, race riots spread across the country. Regan began the in your face GOP racism Corporate America began to worship at the altar of greed, Rich CEO's like Trump who did not go to Viet Nam decided to take away real pension plans because 401 would help Wall Street not the people. Housing prices, cost of living didn't go up because of selfish baby boomers but because of horrific political policies. All about the greed.
Look at the old GOP politicians who passed laws that helped out there corporate buddies, never served a day in the military. the same bad policies of Regan we are still living with a forty year old pay check. Same thing happened in England and both Regan and Thatcher died of dementia but of course cut the science funding and now we have an epidemic.
So pay attention to your history and stop BASHING YOUR FELLOW Americans. We can change our circumstances and stop blaming each other. Let's get busy and make our own future. Voting for Warren or Sanders might be an excellent way to start. Understand the policy of economics and how it impacts your family community. Dont get mad get smart.
5
What??? No grade for Economics?!?! Because it would be a D at best? The Boomers have played a huge role in creating the current disparity of pay and financial inequality. They moved our manufacturing to Asia. They have celebrated and showered praise on the shareholders at expense of the workers.
Why did Brooks overlook the very things that non-Boomers truly blame the Boomers for? Oh yeah. He was born in 1961 and likely supported all those economic policies.
2
Donald Trump is definitely not the prototypical Boomer. He didn't work for social justice or change, or protest the Vietnam War, except by dodging the draft. His opulent, gaudy lifestyle without any values is not what Boomers have stood for.
3
Oh please, can we just stop with the boomer blamefest?
We pretty much wrote the book on environmental consciousness and moral protests (remember Vietnam).
It was the me too of Reagan that really got the rot going.
We are not a monolith, and this progressive and her friends is tired of pretending boomers are the problem. Yes, there was a reaction and Reagan spearheaded that, just like Trump followed from Obama and innate racism and victim blaming and Berniebustering infighting. But none of these individuals (including Bernie himself) are to blame for the blowback.
5
I'd like to point out we insatiably greedy, navel gazing boomers left body art and tattoos to be claimed and fully-embraced as stylish by the following generations.
In my formative years you rarely saw inked flesh unless you were in the company of bikers, ex-cons and some ex-military.
3
"If there’s one thing young adults can agree on, it is that baby boomers have ruined the world"?
Rubbish! They just agree that corrupt politicians and billionaires who've subverted our government and trashed the world of "young adults" (and that of anyone other than the uber-rich), and that Big Energy, Big Pharma, and the likes of the NRA have "ruined the world" in demonstrable and tangible ways!
And also that those who spew alt-right propaganda and that those who provide disingenuous, squid-ink sophistry to cover for all the corruption are contributing, big-time to "ruining the world." Look in the mirror!
6
'debt has soared'. Clinton helped usher in a balanced budget which was squandered by GW Bush (a Boomer) and completely obliterated by Trump's (another Boomer). For a different perspective, on the Boomers I highly suggest the book 'A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America' by Bruce Gibney.
1
I’ve always been skeptical of the generational stereotypes. I was a WWII baby. I registered voters in Mississippi in 1964, was probably the only designated driver at Woodstock, brought residents from Harlem to D.C. for The Poor People’s Campaign, marched for civil rights and Gay rights, and Women’s rights, protested the Vietnam Nam War and brought down Nixon, blah, blah, blah. How is it we are called “The Silent Generation?”
4
For heaven’s sake. Bob Dylan is not a Boomer. He was born in 1941, part of the “Silent Generation.” He was made hugely popular by the enormous number of Boomers who were dissatisfied by what was happening in the world in the 1960s. Same for Beatles, Stones, etc. They are geniuses, but Boomers they are not. Sorry, David, your rankings don’t hold up. I am an early Boomer. We changed restrictive rules on college campuses that were legacies of racism and gender discrimination, protested against the Vietnam War to the point that the military draft and the war ended (partly because our affluent Greatest Generation parents supported us), saw huge numbers of women in our group go to graduate and professional schools (thus completely revolutionizing and broadening scholarship and intellectual output), joined the Peace Corps, and changed everything we touched from within. We are now winning Nobel Prizes, are leading the environmental movement, and using our pension money to support the ACLU, the SPLC, and the candidates working to right all the wrongs that have happened since Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan changed the GOP beyond recognition. We had children who now themselves make up the single largest demographic group, and we raised them to be fair minded, empathetic, hard working, and public spirited. And to love Bob Dylan.
4
Pretty funny, Mr Brooks as the schoolmarm, but perhaps this is true to his "reawakening", a 60's expression if ever there was one. Glad to see Nicky pointing out all the fantastic writers of my g-g-generation but I have to agree that institutions have floundered. I guess John Lennon was right when he said "you tell me its the institution/you better free your mind instead".
Too big a sample. Besides, many of the heroic soldiers who fought World War II did so in a segregated military. As late as 1938, a black leader wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt to ask her husband to please use his influence to stop lynchings. She replied that he thought federal influence would feel to Southerners like Northern intrusion and it would be best to let them sort it out themselves though education and evolving values (my paraphrase).
"Shared values" meant that people were polite and mannered and African American people stepped aside to let white people pass and kept their heads down. Good Baptist girls got "carried away" and got pregnant and married and made their beds and lay in them.
A lot of what happened in the 60s and 70s is that people got tired of hypocrisy. A lot of what's happening with some liberals is that it is easier to recognize hypocrisy in others than it is to recognize it in ourselves.
The good old days? Keep em. They never existed. The world has always been a big messy place held together with bailing wire and duct tape and all we can do is hope and vote and work and love.
5
I've increasingly come to believe that attempting to define any generation to lay either praise or blame is a fool's errand.
All of my Boomer siblings and their children and grandchildren are conservative, evangelical supporters of Trump and have always been conservative and evangelical. I and all my Boomer and early Gen X friends and all of their children are very liberal, not evangelicals, and equate Trump with the greatest evils of our culture.
Similarly, the videos from Charlottesville showed mainly people in their late teens to 30s dressed up like Nazis or Frat-styled Proud Boy Fascists or neo-Norse rune tatted and ax and shield wielding hooligans; but most of those opposing them were also from their late teens to 30s.
I was born in 1956, one of the three peek years of Boomer births. By the time most of us came of age in the '70s, our older siblings had gotten all the good things, leaving us little. They, of course, think we were the spoiled ones. Such is the reality of inter- and intra-generational warfare.
Why does David Brooks believe Reagan, Thatcher, et al., were gifted politically? Arguably, they, not Boomers, led the charge to dismantle the pension system and the social safety net, increased the power of corporations over us, and, often, engaged in foreign policy blunders. Further, much of the world was still controlled by the Silent Generation and older pols while we assume Boomers controlled things.
BTW, Dylan (b. 1941) wasn't even a Boomer.
1
Muhammed Ali wasn't a Boomer, but he was as emblematic of the generation as anyone.
“Donald Trump.”
David your final note falls like a guillotine cutting through bone and flesh seeking final repose on the blood soaked wooden block.
How about the Donald as the final revenge of the Baby Boomer mixed bag generation; the ultimate affliction to the nation.
Trump who is truly helpless in the grip of a profound and destructive affliction embedded in the deepest reaches of his psyche — an ego so profoundly fragile and wounded that he is utterly helpless but to incessantly and compulsively rage against any perceived criticism, affront or contradiction.
This disables, disarms and sabotages any suggestion of civility and rational coherence in his communications with the outside world. The extension of this condition is an unbridled compulsion to serially lie and fabricate in order to construct a false reality without challenging and annoying contradictions.
That he, so helplessly afflicted and profoundly disabled, is President of the United States is unfathomable, monumentally disabling, and profoundly divisive to the nation.
He will not be redeemed or changed and America will continue to be substantively diminished by his daily delinquency and persistent destructiveness.
1
Boomers brought us Donald Trump and the fallout that will take decades to remedy. For that alone, they get a big fat FAIL as a generation.
The Boomer generation did NOT start with the election of Clinton. Boomers were active and influential before man set foot on the moon.
It was the Boomers that put Reagan in office. The generation was officially ruined when the hippies became the yuppies, and proceeded to shaft every following generation from Generation X to the millennials.
Let me guess, David Brooks is a boomer?
1
Lol. Brooks gave Boomers an A for their environmental movement, a movement with zero wins to its name.
1
I object to the only woman you mentioned at the end was Madonna.
1
Sir, it sounds like you want to “Make America Great Again” and bring back Ronald Reagan. You know, the guy who divided this country into the haves and have nots. The one who sold his soul to the Religious Right. And more.
1
"The right-leaning boomer movements are just as important: the conservative movement, the religious right, the Tea Party movement, the pro-life and gun rights movements, the populist revolt."
First off, these movements weren't people 'quietly reacting' against the left-wing movements. They were very loud, and are still very loud. Second, the media, left-wing or otherwise, can't shut up about these movements and how they constitute the Real America in the Heartland, away from those godless coastal city folk.
Third, Social Movements doesn't deserve an A (maybe a C+), and Boomers don't deserve a B (maybe a C-).
Madonna? Well at least there's one woman in all this besides Oprah and Meryl Streep in pop culture. Even a couple of non-whites in Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Wonder. Did it ever occur to Brooks that his image of the "baby boomer" generation is a product of his own bourgeois fetishes? Or that this generational junk is meant to efface far more important categories such as spatial location, race, class, gender, draft status, media structure and ownership, etc. etc. Listing a bunch of superstars, then rating them against another era's superstars is a fools errand.
2
"Squandered Opportunity"
My generation's epitaph
Ask not for whom the bell tolls, David.
Born in 1961, you are a boomer according to demographers.
"the most educated generation". Wrong!!!. They , and subsequent generations may have the best vocational training, but they are among the least educated.
2
Bob Dylan (Robert Zimmerman) was borm in 1941 and does not qualify as a Boomer.
Your grade for the baby boomer generation is almost laughable if the situation was not so dire. Our generation will pass on insurmountable debt, an environment dying from global warming, a world filled with war and hatred, increased levels of white supremacy, gun violence that makes one afraid to send their kids to school, increased proliferation of nuclear weapons of mass destruction, increased racism, etc. We deserve to get the worst grade possible.
1
How about a 'Child-rearing' category?
2
Mr. Brooks points out a key feature of Boomerism: absolute materialism, strongly associated with Republican-style politicking, but our dates are usually listed as 1946-64. Mr. Brooks neglects the strong counterculture we built and are sustaining. We contributed the ideas and work to make the civil rights movement and "second-wave" feminism happen. Mr. Brooks talks about male Boomers and what they did, but ignores what women did. Second wavers include Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Starhawk (not mainstream but a serious influence on Baby Boomer feminists (I am one of them), Andrea Dworkin (trenchant deconstruction of porn as male power), Tori Amos (great Boomer musician and composer who contributes to third-wave feminism), Angela Davis (born 2 years before the start of us Boomers who has had a huge influence), Sonya Sotomayor, Jill Abramson (Executive Ed, NYTimes), Margaret Chan (Dir. Gen, World Health Org), Drew Gilpin Faust (President, Harvard University), Jennifer Doudna (inventor of CRISPR), Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (President of Argentina), Helene Gayle (President and CEO, CARE USA), Arianna Huffington (HuffPost Media Group), Christine LaGarde (Managing Dir, IMF), and Angela Merkel (Chancellor of Germany). Who is the quintessential Boomer? For men, Mr. Brook's list may work. For women, not at all. The quintessential Boomer for women is (drum roll) all Boomer women, because together we changed everything. We aren't done yet.
3
I'm glad this article leads in with a complete disqualification of anybody younger than 50's opinion. Really makes me glad to be alive and valued as a member of society. Then again, disenfranchising entire categories of people just to isolate your own point and pretend it's a good one is a pretty Boomer thing to do.
It doesn't matter what your opinion of yourself is, and it doesn't matter what others' opinions of you are: you'll be dead before anything you do matters in the grand scheme of things. If you were a political scientist you'd already have known that before you typed the first word of this travesty of an article.
One damning and lasting legacy of the boomer generation that is glaringly missing in the report card is the devastating impact this generation has had on our planet and climate due to a selfish unwillingness to address issues that do not affect them directly but will last beyond their lifetime
1
"Special Bonus Question: Who is the quintessential boomer and what does he or she say about the generation?
"Here are the nominees:
"Bob Dylan: Entered the stage with a burst of genius that seemed as if it was going to change everything, but somehow didn’t."
Wait, since when is Bob Dylan a Baby Boomer? He was born in 1941, five years before the Baby Boom began.
Is this like Toni Morrison's description of Bill Clinton as our "first black president", one of those "you know what I mean" moments?
"So maybe it’s time for a resentment-free assessment of the boomers, conducted by a trained pop sociologist with no ax to grind." Who is this person? Brooks? I suppose that's going under the assumption that we don't actually read his columns.
Other commenters have dutifully unpacked this flawed grading analysis and given the Boomers the F that they've truly earned. As for the quintessential Boomer, it's disingenuous to nominate a variety of headline figures and ignore the Boomers who represent the quintessence of their generation.
Why not Jamie Dimon or Lloyd Blankfein, who help cause and then profiteered on the 2008 crash?
Or take these other financial executives whose names aren't as boldface in the papers but who are equally culpable in crashing our economy and cashing in; aren't these the type of Boomers we're talking about when we talk about how the generation has failed the country and the world?
Joseph Cassano, AIG Financial Products Executive
Vikram Pandit, Citigroup CEO
Ken Lewis, Bank of America CEO and President
John G. Stumpf, Wells Fargo CEO
John J. Mack, Morgan Stanley CEO, and Chairman
John Thain, Merrill Lynch CEO; and as mentioned:
Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase CEO and President
Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs CEO and Chairman
3
David Brooks is still living a 'tad' in his own boomer reality.
He should read his own paper and become familiar with what's happening in our country. He should familiarize himself with how this administration is a 'tad' bent on making life as difficult and traumatic as possible for any who are not white let alone boomers.
Brooks' report card for being a 'tad' divorced from our present dismal reality is an A+.
1
Bill Clinton: "... sometimes self-indulgent." Yes ... and the Titanic had a leak.
2
The dysfunction of American political institutions in the age of Clinton and later is not the fault of Boomers writ large. It's the fault of conservative Boomers, who (1) pursued a frivolous impeachment of Clinton in order to permanently cement in the minds of voters the idea that, whenever Congress tries to hold the President accountable for his misdeeds, it can only be through naked partisanship, not out of a genuine desire to protect the Constitution and the rule of law; and who (2) have fetishized tax cuts and the destruction of any notion of the common good, all in the name of Saint Ray-Gun. So kindly take Ray-Gun off your list of political giants.
2
Regardless of the grade Baby Boomers have earned we have been taxed to death. From the 1950s when we were old enough to buy candy at the grocery store we've been paying high taxes that keep getting higher. Even in our golden years our Social Security is taxed and our home mortgage interest was virtually eliminated for the middle class. Cities like Dallas, TX - which has a huge single family home property tax wants to raise property taxes even more. Under the current federal tax plan income levels rise each year with inflation. As a result, more people are subject to the highest bracket than they would have been under the old method. By 2025, 8.9% of taxpayers will pay more than they would have under the previous tax law. In 2018, only 4.8% of households paid more. The Tax Act eliminates most itemized deductions. That includes moving expenses, except for active-duty members of the military. Those paying alimony can no longer deduct it while those receiving it can. This change is effective for divorces signed in 2018. If you live in a state with high property taxes, you can only deduct the first $10,000. So, go ahead and give us a grade but remember we have been paying taxes all our lives and that tax burden continues to go higher each year.
2
David, you've missed the point. The principal criticism of the boomer generation isn't about whether it has lived up to other standards in any particular cultural or academic sphere. Every generation has its artistic, academic, and political titans. The fundamental problem with the Boomers is that it is a generation that showed so much promise but in many ways has come to be defined by its selfishness and short-sightedness. Whether it was the rise of the Religious Right as a backlash to the Civil Rights Era, the shocking abandonment of protecting our environment post-Carter, the "Greed is Good" rationalization of the 80s that has led to widening economic inequality and unprecedented corporate power, or the racial backlash personified by Donald Trump, the lasting legacy of the Boomers is leaving the next generation with a massive mess to (try to) clean up.
3
As a historian (and a "Baby Boomer") who focused my academic study on this generation, I can tell you that any attempt to come up with a grade for such a huge and diverse population of Americans is really quite meaningless.
Those of us born between the years 1946 and 1964 are the so-called "Baby Boom" generation because of our unprecedented numbers: some 73 million.
With numbers like that, anything this particular group of people created or experienced or offered would have an influential effect on society whether it be values, politics, economics, culture, style or thinking--some of which might even clash--but ultimately it all rests upon diversity, not homogeneity.
We weren't and aren't to this day all one thing, whether by age, race, political persuasion, ideology, style, or sexual preference.
Large numbers of us may have imbibed in mind-altering substances, or danced to the music some of us created, or dressed in certain styles that identified us with common values and ideals (including business suits for both women and men), or invented ways of doing things which were innovative or unique, or created and participated in movements for social or political change--but it was never one thing which could be held up to be graded.
I would say that the lives we've known through some 70+ years have been solely influenced by one outstanding phenomenon in American history: corporate growth.
2
I think you left out a very important category: Rearing the Next Generation. In this category, I would give baby boomers a mixed grade. Generation X, those primarily the offspring of the baby boomers, have been reared to not repeat the mistakes of the boomers but have become more entrenched in their own ideologies and exhibit an endemic lack of compromise that inadvertently magnifies the boomers' mistakes.
@Broadacre
I think you have a foundational mistake there -- Generation X is not, for the most part, the children of Boomers. That's Gen Y/Millennials.
1
Many/most Gen x er's have Golden generation parents.
Bob Dylan, The Beatles, etc. were not Baby Boomers. There are members of that interesting trans-Atlantic generation born during WWII.
But you didn’t mention Stewardship of Planet Earth. Why?
1
No influential boomer novelists? You need to expand your reading. T.C. Boyle, Louise Erdrich, Octavia Butler, Jonathan Franken, Barbara Kingsolver, Tim O’Brien, Kim Stanley Robinson, George Saunders? If we expand to 1964, let’s add Jennifer Egan, Michael Chabon, David Foster Wallace, Andrea Barrett, Jonathan Lethem.
113
@Nicky - Texan Mary Karr's The Liar's Club was just listed #4 on a NYT list this week!
3
Oh, excuse me .. Mary Karr's The Liar's Club is considered a memoir...still a good read though...
3
@Nicky Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Maya Angelou, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Larkin, John Updike and Toni Morrison. Pretty good bet they were all Deomocrats.
4
I vote for Clinton
I was born after 1960, so not quite a boomer. I learned in US History (in public high school) that after WWII, the federal government encouraged women to leave the workforce and rampant consumption in order to put servicemen back to work. In one decade we went from a nation that was frugal and did not waste to the 50s, when no one worried about wasting anything. During WWII it was patriotic to conserve resources, after that it was patriotic to waste. White Americans drove big heavy cars running on leaded gasoline, they used bug sprays and other pesticides, they poured used motor oil in the gutter or the back yard, they littered, they dammed more rivers for power, and they never questioned where all the waste was going or what the consequences would be. We can’t blame the boomers for all of it. The federal government, under Republican leadership encouraged an indulgent, wasteful lifestyle and Republicans have continued to encourage and defend consumption ever since. They mock those of us who want to save resources and preserve the little that is left by calling us “elites” (as Brooks does) and tree huggers. Many boomers resent being told their wasteful lifestyle is bad for all of us and stubbornly cling to the old ways like our neighbor across the street who refuses to use the recycling bin provided to him. trump is the quintessential boomer, self indulgent, wasteful, self-delusional, clinging to the past. Grade: F-
4
Environment | F | None of the rest matters at all, Savid.
2
There's no question that we boomers get an F.
We were going to transform the world and make it better. While it's arguably better in some ways (World Wide Web, feminism, gay rights), we are leaving behind us a planet that's a flaming ruin, with species loss accelerating alarmingly. For the first time, humanity is facing extinction in the face. I have pleaded with my sons not to have children of their own. I've also told them how sorry and ashamed I am.
Our last hope is the Millennials, who must now save the world we lost.
1
As far as I can tell, fundamentally, us Baby Boomers have followed in the footsteps of all the preceding generations of homo sapiens to bend Nature to our will. That earns an A for ambition but an F for foresight.
3
Nope
Disagree. We get an F
We are in our last stages of this realm and reality.
Look what we have wrought worldwide.
Wars , famine . Pestilence , criminal oligarchies.
White fright
Scapegoating women and any non WASP of “ other” classification worldwide.
Assassination, incarceration , concentration camps filled with children sitting in their own excrement.
No true agape love.
We failed the entire planet
3
Too bad "Environment" wasn't included on this report card. We boomers earn an "F" in that subject.
This was interesting. I am a boomer (born '57) and I think the Boomers don't deserve a grade of B. Yes, I agree with many of the categories, but in politics and morals, we deserve an F. Boomers sold out for self enrichment after college. Divorce soared, family ties loosened. Politicians failed to protect us economically and socially. We squandered much of our opportunity. We are the "Me" generation, for sure.
I will say that boomer music was exceptional. Music today is so derivative and unoriginal.
2
"Personal freedom has been the master trend for this generation."
Mr. Brooks forgot to mention that during the Viet Nam War we had the draft and many had no personal freedom as they were sent to serve in a war they didn't believe in, unlike today's young folks who have never had to worry about being drafted and losing their freedom. Big difference.
5
I give the boomers a big fat red F for ruining the future for my kids. Don't even get me started on the rampant child sexual abuse they allowed in the 70s. We're only now addressing that portion of the boomers' excess. When can we talk about why y'all forgot to watch your kids?
If they'd just get out of the way and stop hoarding the governmental power, I'd give a few points of extra credit to make that grade a D.
Really, if they'd just get out of the way and let the rest of us clean up their mess, I'd be a happier Gen X woman.
2
Boomers took advantage of all the privilege a post-war world had to offer, then shut the door behind them. They pillaged the planet to squeeze every last nickel of profit, and left behind a world on fire. They rigged an economy to benefit their own wealth production, then cut pay and benefits and pensions for everyone behind them.
Sure, the boomers did great - for themselves. For everyone else? F-
4
Art, classical music and novels have lost their importance.
Mozart and Beethoven used to be composers for the common man. Not they are only appreciated by the elites. It's too
bad because this culture has so much to offer everyone.
1
As a boomer, I'd rate a C- & that's generous. The 4 boomer Presidents (Trump - F; Obama - B; Bush - D; Clinton - C-) average a lowly D+. That's also generous, sans Obama, 3 of 4 who were borderline unfit for office in earlier times, not just Trump. The innovations are evolution based less so than attributed to a generation, it's not that simple Brooks. As for coffee and restaurants, meaningless only a dolt would include those items. The very fact that the writer has included celebrities in his most important indicated a very shallow man.
We did a fabulous job decorating the house while studiously ignoring the fact that it fully engulfed in flames. Hard F.
3
Stewardship of the Environment? F
Provision for Future Generations? F
Creating Equal Opportunity for All? F
Looking Out for Ourselves? A+
We'e been good at creating shiny toys... not so good at sharing them and terrible at making sure our kids will have some to play with.
3
I think that there are two major categories that were left out: Finance and Climate. Collectively the boomers have set up, overseen, and/or worsened two of the greatest crises of the last century- both of which will have ramifications well beyond the lifespan of the last boomer.
1
You forgot that we screwed up the planet.
Excellent column by David Brooks. Boomers had it all. The music! Motown and The Beatles for starters, doesn't get better than that and nothing has been that good since. Some fine authors writing around -- Roth, Morrison, etc. Protests that actually stopped a war. A commitment to education -- for example, all community colleges in California were once free.
Then they (we ... I was born in the early 60's) lost our conscience, electing Nixon, Reagan (who started his campaign in a racist, southern city), Bush I and Bush II, and now the worst president in my lifetime in Trump.
Talk about mailing it in. You set the rightful tone in the 60's, then found greed on Wall Street, in real estate, and for some reason think it's a good thing to hinder the younger generation with outrageous college tuition.
Boomers (including my end-of-the-boomer era) get a C- grade.
1
Climate change F
Food quality in this country should get an F - not a "more varied and delicious". We don't even know what we're eating with the allowance of GMO, antibiotics and pesticides in our food. I'm a Boomer (smack in the middle) and am encouraged by the slow, good quality food movement I see with our upcoming generations. Bless them all. I was surprised at the racism in our country which became more evident with Trump's election. Until then, I had thought racism was on the fringe. Yesterday I attended a free outdoor concert of young musicians playing a fiddle, banjo, guitar and 2 rappers - some were in cowboy hats with crewcuts, some in dreads. What a wonderful experience. You go, millennials, X, Y, and Z! We need you.
2
Are you "talkin' 'bout my generation", David? The "peace, love, revolution" generation? How about an F-? That's what I give us. It is our generation of 60+ voters who elected Trump. Enough said.
1
Given that the baby boomer generation in the US encompasses roughly 80 million people, I'm going to take this opinion piece as an incredibly broad generalization lacking nuance, factual bases, and historical context.
8
Ahh but you forgot to grade them on the legacy Boomers leave to later generations - student and national debt, global warming, stagnant lifespans and jobs, permanent kleptocracy.
Overall Rating: D- as later historians will confirm
2
Seems pretty accurate, if generous! Glad that the death of high culture is recognized. I realize I am an outlier, but as a 53 year old woman, I am gobsmacked and bored by the obsession with pop culture. Seems like the more educated and successful many friends are, the more they know about current TV, movies and mass-market books. The vapidness of boomers has destroyed, culture, art, environment, values. I think the younger generations, including millennials, give us hope.
Which generation gave us arms control agreements? Which generation tore them up? Enough said.
3
Please add a rubric for Environmental Stewardship: F-.
1
I'd give the silent generation an F and the boomers (I'm right in the middle) a D-. I'm hopeful, though, because my parents' generation is dying fast, and the boomers are bout to start dropping like flies. And I'm hopeful because my millennial daughters are so much better in just about every way. Sorry and ashamed we've left things in such a mess.
1
@tex andrews I'm a 64-year old Boomer and my parents lived to their mid 80s and their mid-90s, respectively. I seem on track to do the same. You'll have many Boomers around for awhile.
1
At 71 I am a boomer, but also a boomer in having been raised in Australia where kangaroos are referred to as "boomers", possibly referring to their huge bounding leaps. If I was involved in Woodstock it was to view the movie in a Sydney theater. Distinctive of the time, and of a segment of my female college graduate peers, we found an alternative to "getting married". Admittedly, this was partly due to the disillusionment of failed first love. Many of us 21 year old Aussie girls went to the "old countries" of our parents, who were part of the post WW2 migration to Australia from Europe. London had its Aussie section in Earl's Court. I joined my cousins in Holland and promptly met a peripatetic American. It was still safe to hitch hike. We saw [some of] the world. These adventures long fed and nourished the imagination.
1
David seems to skip over another "generation" - that between the "boomers" and the "great" - the ones that did the Korean war, McCarthyism, and started the Vietnam war. In that generation, there was great confusion. Liberals were assassinated, often with very thin coverups for the conservative motivation; at the same time, the very meaning of Conservative and Liberal was shifting drastically, after the passage of the civil rights act. Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms immediately switched from D to R. Those in the South seemed to immediately get it: if you are a racist you are now an R. But in the North, it was not so obvious, so many Northerners still thought R's were OK, and might stop the war in Vietnam. That is how Nixon got elected. And that strategy of splitting the North and South has worked well for the R's for a long time. But the dog-whistles are no longer working. They've gone to straight-out barking. If only the D's had also switched from war-mongers to peacemakers at the same time, things might be different. We "boomers" are not to blame for that. Look to the Koch Brothers (whose father co-founded the John Birch Society), who now seem to control the Republican party.
Spielberg by a mile
Concentrating on the "Boomers" as conventionally defined is somewhat mistimed. The seminal moment of a movement is much more shortlived. It started with the civil rights movement in the south (early 60s) and ended in about 1968. the so-called Boomers shoveled dirt on the ashes and turned it into a fashion statement. The seventies were an empty mannerist exercise, and the eighties were when the old guard nailed the lid on the coffin. Reagan finally succeeded in labeling government as "the problem" and gave the reins back to the 1%. As the Orange One says, Sad.
1
This whole exercise is aimed at finding clicks rather than any useful insights. When I was in college in the early 70s it was clear to me that Boomers were not a monolithic generation. We had hippies mixing with pre-law and pre-med students looking for material success. We had radicals mixing with students in ROTC. Some members of our generation worked for civil rights, women’s rights and the environment, while others our age opposed those efforts. Some fought against the Vietnam War, while others eagerly enlisted to go fight in Vietnam. The fact is, no generation is a homogenized monolith.
However, articles like this are very effective as a distraction from those actually responsible for the mess we’re in: the masters of war, finance and industry who have the actual power to shape this country for the better, but are focused only on their own wealth and power. Those folks would be more than happy to have different generations of “little people” argue over who’s responsible for this mess - as long as nobody looks in *their* direction. Sorry, I’m not buying it.
12
The reaction to civil rights, drugs, antiwar protests, and changes in sexual morality turned out to be more important and influential than the changes themselves. And this reaction was captured and brilliantly used by a political movement bent on turning the clock back to a pre-New-Deal, pre-trust-busting golden age when robber barons and their deals dominated. Their slow-motion coup d'etat is well underway and an activist, progressive government has already been made virtually impossible.
2
Boomers are the first generation where women and minorities had real career opportunities and that's a wonderful legacy. Yes, it's sad that two incomes are frequently needed today. But younger generations didn't hear their science teacher lament that all his A students were girls who would never use what they learned. Boomers opened the door for diversity.
6
Bob Dylan was not a Baby Boomer - he was born in 1941. Turns out many late "Silent Generation" folks (like John Lennon, Joni Mitchell, Jim Morrison, etc.) are credited with the finest cultural products of the Boomers. Either we need to shift the demographic frame back to 1941 - which would make Obama a Gen-X kid - or we toss Dylan from the list. To me Obama is nothing like the other presidents on this list, his consciousness is more elevated despite his shortcomings as a politician.
In the end I hate this kind of generational analysis - it is dull scalpel and almost as offensive as clustering folks by ethnicity.
9
@Melanie
Very, very good observations. Those who influenced us boomers the most and served as models were actually members of the previous generation. We knew them growing up, so we think of them as belonging to our generation, but they were in fact before us. I've never understood why, since we had everything figured out, we failed to achieve all the ideals we espoused. Maybe we were just too lazy to do the work that was left to us by the older generation. Or maybe we just underestimated the size of the task. Events of the past week alone have demonstrated how retrograde a large segment of this country remains.
Wow, talk about polarization. Political and identity polarization isn’t enough? Good job, David, let’s see if we can generate animosity between generations. Hey, here’s an idea, instead of finding fault and pointing fingers every which way, maybe people of good will, regardless of age (or any other factor) could collaborate on solutions to issues.
7
Gosh, any chance David Brooks might recognize that not all boomers enjoyed the same degree of agency and power, and that his categories & comments reflect his assumptions about who mattered?
He's writing about a very limited and specific subset of a generation: white dudes.
That's who set and enforced the rules about who could do what, and who had to live within those rules. The rest of us -- the majority -- who are not white dudes were always peripheral.
You know who would have been the best nominee for the list at the end?
Harvey Weinstein: Embodies the white dude ethos that everything he wants belongs to him, by default.
9
In looking at the list of nominees, it is interesting that it does not include any people of color, only one woman, no LGBT folk (unless one counts Madonna, which we probably should), and all but one is a white man. The point here is that the boomer generation, of which I am one, has not been led by the activist, revolutionary core that defines the generation (unless you want to include Trump as the last gasp and the proto-avatar of the counter revolution). As Brooks notes, this generation has been defined by historically transformational movements but has not grasped the reins of governing. Almost all of the political activity has been derivative, led by various neos, exemplified by neo-liberal Clinton or neo-conservative Bush II. The closest we can come to real political leadership that represents the best boomer values lies with either Sanders or Warner, otherwise, I fear the lasting political legacy of the generation will be Trump's great unwinding of the entire progressive/New Deal/Great Society era, a project unfortunately well underway. Final grade awaits 2020, and one should note the voting allegiances of 60 and 70 year olds. Are we boomers really saying that our lives and experience were all a big mistake, and we want to turn back the clock so our grandkids to grow up in a world like the pre 1900 era?
5
My two oldest children are boomers,1957 and 59. They pushed against the moral fabric of my 50s. All five of my children are loving, and productive. However, their generation took the Red baiting, McCarthy years and proceeded to dump against institutions of all kinds, religious, educational and governmental. They wished to be free and special. Rather than building on the best and correcting the worst of human behavior they embraced individualism, materialism, and moral freedom. Is it relevant, was their cry. Elizabeth
Let’s consider all the destructive policies, practices and wars that Boomers weren’t responsible for, but who have made major efforts to either mitigate, or end.
Jim Crow laws
Vietnam War
No federal or state environmental protections- Nixon established the EPA, but Reagan started the GOP job of taking a wrecking ball to it and it’s statutes and regulations.
Gay discrimination laws
Anti-miscegenation (interracial marriage )laws
Unequal pay for women
Anti- abortion laws
I doubt this list is close to being exhaustive, but it shows that Boomers worked long and hard to dismantle systemic institutional discriminatory practices, to become responsible stewards for natural resources, and were totally committed to realizing the aspiration that All Men Are Created Equal. Considering our past two hundred plus years of myth making, I cannot imagine a grade less than an A.
ps. Don’t blame Trump on Boomers. He’s a throwback in every respect.
pps. How does anyone write a pop culture list and omit the Beatles??
5
As a generation, boomers occupy a certain place in the ongoing historical development of capitalism. Their radicalism was profound and their conservative retrenchment terrifyingly bleak but the blame insofar as you can actually make generational generalizations is more to be laid at the feet of a historical process beyond their control. Is it too much of a disavowal to say, "if it wasn't them, it'd be someone else"? I don't think so, because you have to in the end blame real actor, which is capitalism itself.
The radicalism of the sixties, too, still persists even as a template for the millennials to follow now. This can still be used and it should not be underestimated.
2
Mr. Brooks speaks of the boomers as having it all and leaving far less or the following generations. well yes in someways it is true. What is really at issue is, what did the one percent do? They through Allen Greenspan said, "there was too much democracy." "That they need to keep labor nervous so they can never ask for a raise or anything."
That is what the great baby boom generation brought us, a little boom for the WWII generation and their first children and for everyone else a slide back to the trickle down economics of the worst of conservatism.
We are still fighting among ourselves in stead of focusing on the real problem.
To include trump in any list of achievers makes me retch. The republican party was set on a path of nihilism by Reagan (Ed Meese, followed by Lee Atwater and Karl Rove). A series of tax cuts for the obscenely wealthy has left government unable to function. That's not baby boomers; that's the right wing.
5
People radically underestimate the value of the sixties. My mom is a boomer; she's still fighting the good fight and she taught me how to do it too. I'm really tired of these huge generational generalizations.
8
The get an F on infrastructure, which also happens to F the millennials hoping to own homes within a reasonable commute time of growing cities.
3
Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Mick Jagger, and many of the political and cultural architects of the counterculture that the Boomers have sometimes falsely claimed at their own were not themselves Baby Boomers but were born during World War II as part of the generation that came of age during the Vietnam War.
4
This self-assessment isnt asking some of the more difficult questions that Boomers might ask of themselves:
What are some of the greatest challenges of the boomer generation and how did they face those challenges?
For example, is it possible to measure the Greatest Generation (who helped defeat Nazism)?
In my opinion, Boomers are too busy building their portfolios to address the fundamental issues of our time: they have punted on environmentalism and basic human equality hasnt caught on. Hippies were once agents of change but did they die out?
Of the exemplars Brooks proposes, what were their accomplishments that gave us a greater understanding of ourselves (or their time)?
Why is there no mention of Boomers alias Me Generation? Except for Bob Dylan, most of these high achievers are models of self-aggrandizement. Trump and Clinton? They're a picture of selfishness.
How have Baby Boomers left us with a better world than they inherited? We live in a Second Gilded Age verging on feudalism with a reactionary government committed to division and racist domestic policies.
Did Boomers fear they'd get stuck in the wake of the Greatest Generation? The only way to survive has been to follow the money? Did they leave their ideals in the sixties?
2
Brooks compares the Boomers to the "greatest generation ever" while turning a blind eye as to why the WWII were great. Its simple, the captains of American industry that preceded the WWII generation made it possible to defeat the Axis powers via unparalleled industrial output. The WWII generation was essentially used as expendable cannon fodder by America's military leaders who were from what generation? Yep, the preceding generation. When the WWII generation came of age, they really didn't do so well. This was the generation that gave us unbridled racism, sexism, and the Ford Mustang II. It took the Boomers to undo their mess.
2
Boomers "have not seen technological change on the same order" as previous generations?Are you kidding? Here's just some of it:
- supercomputers in our pockets
- free video and voice calls around the world. Or via virtual reality
- self-driving vehicles
- payments automatically and at our fingertips. Money and bill tracking
- voice and phone control of myriad devices.
Remember when you had to go to a store to buy stuff, dial a phone to call somone, use your fingers to change a channel, get out of your chair to access a radio station or turn on lights or the air conditioner -- and each of those was one-by-one?
Remember when it was a big deal to call across borders, or how hard it could be to stay up on or in touch with relatives and friends around the country or the world? When you and friends would lose touch? When you had to go to the library or spend real time and/or money to figure out how to fix that thing in your home or car? When the recipes you had access to depended on what books or clippings you had in your house? When you had to buy or borrow a record or tape to get music into your home, and you couldn't play any song you wanted at any time?
And what about social media and their ability to motivate and assemble? Remember when some of us doubted reports of police brutality? How much work it was to get protests to happen?
I could go on. Baby boomers may not have seen the physical world changes but I would argue the newer changes have been as transformative
3
I agree with so many others that this is giving boomers way to easy a pass on the depth of our moral malaise. Maybe when you are part of the group, you shouldn't be the judge.
Tom Brokaw's book about the greatest generation overstates how amazing that generation was, and Brooks overstates the boomers. In both cases it is about failing to hold yourself accountable for the failings of your generation. The greatest generation is the group that made the Vietnam decisions, they were poorly made across the board. The boomers made the materialist decisions that, again as so many others point out, are central to the income inequality we now experience. And how is Newt Gingrich not listed here as one of the political movers, I think he holds special responsibility for the degradation of our politics. So as a post boomer no B is way to high and why is C the lowest you can do. As you note in your books David, the moral problems of our country are much worse than a C. And these come from both the Reagan's and Thatchers as well as Gingrich and Clinton. That deserves a D at best.
1
If the Boomer generation had earned a "B" grade there would be no need for articles such as this one. Their achievements would not need to be graded or measured. And no excuses would need to be made for what they did and didn't do.
3
I can't see any value at all in this approach at all. Blaming a generation is not a jot different from blaming an ethnic group. This is brainless. I am no more responsible for a MAGA moron than every Muslim is responsible for Osama Bin Laden. We don't assign collective guilt....or merit. This is a simple-minded, fruitless way tp look at history. You may as well blame the abolitionists of 1810 for fifty-odd more years of slavery. This is the analytic equivalent of the Book of Lists.
8
1. Why do we want to add another dimension to the tribalism spectrum? Race, religion, ethnicity, sexual preference, etc. already divide us into sectors of suspicion. Does our mythical generational identity have to be another source for the "blame game?"
2. Why is everyone down on themselves and/or on others? None of our generations have been sterling or degenerate. I was born in 1940 of parents from the "Greatest Generation" but I and my peers often complained that they left us a legacy of racial intolerance.
3. Is this general dissatisfaction with our condition a reflection of the narcissism that took root in the 1960's, and is being played out in grand fashion by our Narcissist in Chief?
I generally look forward to David Brooks's commentaries, but this one, and the comments it brought forth, leave a disheartening picture of our state of mind that is neither deserved nor constructive.
1
If the millennial generation thinks that baby boomers "ruined" things for them, it's useful to note that (grammar aside) the subject of that sentence is the millennials, not the boomers. If boomers collectively are/were egotists, millennials are no less so.
The sacrifices made by the generation that preceded us (the "Greatest Generation") were massive, and were the products of the combination of the Depression and the hopelessness it engendered and WWII and the huge death and commitment it required.
Boomers did not see our parents that way: we saw them in the 50s, then 60s: first as incredibly conventional people in a staid environment and then reacting strongly (largely, against) to the influences that we grew up with -- Elvis, the Beatles, the Civil Rights era, city riots, assassinations of key leaders and, most importantly, the Vietnam war and Watergate. The latter two were, largely, foisted upon us by our parents' generation and fed our distrust of institutions.
Despite all this, we were nurtured with the understanding that we had infinite possibilities for ourselves and to improve the world. We learned otherwise. Current politics underscore that fact.
Our legacy to our children is, hopefully, less unsettled than our parents' legacy to us. One hopes that millennials will grow to see that they were bequeathed a peaceful world in which they will have to make their own possibilities.
Really David. Your slighting of the rising quality of life for blacks reveals your white privilege. Oh and btw President Obama is also a boomer. I guess you have to be a white conservative to omit him from any credibile list of great boomers
2
Ron Howard? Dude, seriously?
B is not bad I doubt any generation ever earned a A. The WW2 generation fought a war for freedom only to deny it to fellow Americans, many who fought in the same war. Maybe we didn't product great historical world leaders but we didn't produce A Hitler either. Well not yet anyway. Ours has been a world of general peace nt great world or continental wars. As for Culture that is a very objective call. It is way too early to judge the culture boomers produced. Try again in 50 years.
Yo-Yo Ma
5
Another Brooks: it's y'all's fault, all-a-youse, not Trump, not McConnell, not Rep Steve King, not Ted Cruz, not Bob Dole, not Cheney among those who blocked decent things you talk about here. Its Dems boomer's fault. Clinton in particular it seems (no Howard Stern?) And aw jeez .... the silly montage of name dropping... again? Pope J2P2 to Madonna to Ron Howard...Sheesh Edith, put a lid on it!!! (boomer show allusion) And again, with all that your party... from Lee Atwater to Stephen Miller.. gave us just this week alone in violence. Oh right, let's just meander about boomers... this week?....its routine with Mr Brooks now.
3
A in arrogant self-congratulation!
5
David, your bias is showing. "Left-wing" vs. "right-leaning". And "left-wing, elite approved movements"?? I think you mean "educated, thoughtful people" rather than "elite".
3
I would say a C-, due entirely to allowing Trump in and watching whatever good boomers stood for go down the tubes over greed and ignorance.
1
Almost every Boomer I know can tell you the movement of the Dow and what the current tax rates are. Yet they have no idea what the area’s homeless rate is, the high school graduation rate, the % on food stamps or Medicaid, the infant mortality rate, the number of children in foster care or the suicide rate. Everything is about them, every day, all day long. And all about money. I am a boomer and I am appalled at how clueless they are as a group. And how callous. They once cared about things like rivers on fire or war crimes. Now they can not bring themselves to loudly and as a group condemn children ripped from their parents and put in cages. Or to force politicians and the media to correctly distinguish between trying to legally request asylum as refugees and entering the country illegally. And don’t get me started on the environment and climate change. Good grief. An F- is too high a score.
5
The Woodstock Generation (TWG) elected Donald Trump. That is the accomplishment of a generation. It should fix set its grade.
(TWG) sabotaged all efforts to mitigate climate change which is on track to do more harm than WWII.
(TWG) is presiding over the failure of the United States to champion democracy. The US now embraces despots and maligns allies.
(TWG) is teaching us that the constitution will not serve to address 21st century problems because it can be undermined by McConnell and Republican politicians the celebrating the use of bad faith to "win" regardless of the cost to the country and the constitution.
The upper class of my generation gets to dance at the precipice. We can rely on easy travel and medical care, food and an air-conditioned environment as children are caged and a President inspires would be patriots to go to war on his behalf at a Texas Wal Mart against his declareded crisis of the invasion and infestation by brown people.
For me, the ice cream is bitter and a fit prize for how we have squandered all that is most precious.
3
You don’t like what we left you. ?
Go start your own country!
1
A well-written, fun, and clever article. I would add, however, that weights should be added to each category to make it more accurate. Manners and morals should be weighted up, particularly morals. Breaking out morals, I'd give the generation a solid F, making the overall grade closer to a C- or a D. The amorality displayed by this generation was and is still astonishing; they spent the late 1960s protesting in the streets, but by the 1980s and through to today have collectively engaged in the perhaps the greatest intergenerational robbery in the history of the world, stealing from future generations financially, environmentally, and legally. To make it worse, they seemed to be aware of what they were doing, but collectively just shrugged their shoulders. Today they have retired to their monolithic enclaves to play pickle ball, living off the last dregs of their intergenerational heist, happily scolding Gen-X and Millennial children and grandchildren for their silliness as they struggle to afford homes, pay for college, and try to live sustainably in an environmentally devastated world. How quickly the indignation of youth faded. Or perhaps, the late 1960s were just about having fun, and social action really was just a big cover.
4
As a cusp boomer of 1961, I do believe to be a member of the last boomer stage and this report card is much worse than your grading.
While college education was a cornerstone associated to the "boomer" generation, it was the boomers that turned college into such a cash-cow which now burdens their children's generation with unimaginable debt. Where boomers could enter the work force and dream of a house with a white picket fence, just like their post WWII parents, today's kids pray for a three-bedroom split out of a large and cutup one-bedroom. Grade F.
While boomers were behind the original "ecology" movement, their burn to own more and more has torched this planet terribly. The boomer's parents drove gas guzzlers because cars were bulky. The boomers drive gas guzzlers because of status. Grade F.
Many boomers did march and rally to desegregate, save a generation from the jungles of Vietnam, and women 7 gay rights - this is true. But far too many have run from that march, that movement. Luckily, our children or grandchildren know better. Grade D.
As for the hope that is America, you are correct about the "it's about me factor". The boomers are failing so miserably on this scale that we can't even try and get assault weapons off of our streets in hopes of saving the lives of children. Imagine a generation so engrossed in its own certitude, a generation who themselves were shattered by these same weapons, have come to view them as a necessary recreational toy. Grade F.
4
@davidbrooks personally, I would nominate Hillary Clinton rather than Bill. She has always been a true roll model for women, particularly when confronted with the excessive hatred from the men on the Right who were so afraid of her abilities. She would have made a much better President than what we have now.
2
I guess we're conveniently eluding the fact that they were also the first generation with clear, empirical evidence of climate change and how to act against it, but did nothing?
1
@Alex von Nordheim
When the world didn't end in 1970, I was told to wait ten more years.
When the world didn't end in 1980, I was told to wait ten more years.
When the world didn't end in 1990, I was told to wait ten more years.
Then Prince said Party Like It's 1999.
I'm still partying.
I'm still waiting.
Women's contributions really are invisible. I count nineteen male
boomer influencers and only five females. You couldn't do a google search and come up with a female scientist or a supreme court justice or two? Perhaps you could find a few more people of color as well. I give this article a D-. Do more research and re-submit for a better grade. Maybe you could convince a woman to help you.
8
My report card on modern day conservatives:
Ethics: D-
Phony “patriotism”: A
Xenophobia: A
White Nationalism: A
Hypocrisy: A+
Racial Division: A
Slavish Loyalty to the Uber-Rich: A
Gun Fetishism: nrA
Person who most personifies modern conservatism: Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin (tie)
7
Madonna
Good one, Mr. Brooks
Bill Clinton!!!! I like the article and took it kinda tongue in cheek. But. Bill Clinton. He threw this country under the free trade bus. We may never recover. Got BJs in the Oval Office then Looked me in the eye and lied to me on National TV. Sold out this country to donors to their foundation while his wife was head of the state department. Please tell me me your thinking in putting his name here.
"F" The only possible grade because of global warming. All other concerns or topics are immaterial. The boomers love of cars and the oil industry has led us down a path towards catastrophic global warming. We have not only the potential for complete collapse of civilization but the increased chance that humanity may become extinct. There is only one grade to be considered, "F".
2
As a later stage Boomer (born 1956) I was mostly interested in making money..
I also live near a Silicon Valley..
Bingo I’m rich and worth $5 Million +..
I succeeded but I also got up at 4AM for 30 years to go into the Financial District..
Cal Berkeley and higher education delivers..
You lost me when you placed Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher on a pedestal. They promoted greed and selfishness as the greatest of virtues. Reagan failed to address the AIDS epidemic, promoted drug enforcement policies that vastly increased racial disparities in the prison population, endorsed voodoo economics which led to ballooning deficits and widening economic inequality, honored Nazi war criminals, consulted an astrologer for Presidential decisions, and allowed his staff to take the fall for him in the Iran-Contra scandal. Apparently he was too senile to know what was going on under his nose within his administration at the time. But he certainly was politically adept, I'll give you that. And he was indeed fortunate to be President when Gorbachev was the leader of the Soviet Union.
1
Baby Boomers - Planet Destroyers.
F
5
Madonna!
Didn't know that you did the satire thing, David. Hilarious.
1
"the Tea Party movement"
Isn't it obvious by now, as Republicans voted in a trillion dollar deficit, that this was not a movement? It was astroturf, the Rich paying for a fake movement to hurt Obama, the Democrats, and the economy. That hurt Americans as well, but it heled get Trump elected, and then the could take more of the money.
This was obvious enough when it was happening. But by now it is blinding. Years of complaining about an Obama deficit, as the country was coming out of a near great depression. Not a single fricken peep out of the so called Tea Party when the deficit gets far worse, due to tax cuts, in a healthy economy.
How can you write stuff like that? You really still think the tea party was real? You are well aware that it wasn't real but are part of the Red Propaganda machine?
You are embarrassing yourself and hurting America.
2
Agree - although the list looks awfully American. What happened to the rest of the world? There are boomers in France, India, Singapore, Argentina, and Nairobi - to name a few.
Baby boomers get F’s on everything. When you destroy the planet nothing else matters.
3
Boomers turned into Yuppies in the 1980s.
Yuppies started to wreck things due to unbridled greed.
Then they raised kids.
Motto of the kids: "move fast and break things".
Correct Boomer grades:
Popular Music (up to about 1980): A
Almost everything else: F!
Signed, a Boomer
Safeguarding the ecological safety of the planet | F |
1
Since being a teenager in the 60's I have always felt there are two boomer personalities, very liberal and very conservative. I fall in the very liberal camp and it was the divide over Vietnam that I found totally incomprehensible. To this day I have no understanding of how someone my age with similar experiences could support that war. It has always felt like there are parallel universes.
1
Dylan is too old to be a baby boomer. Cher and Jeff Bridges might personify the "Best Boomer" title. Cher overcame so much and worked harder than Madonna. She lived the life and succeeded. Jeff Bridges too. Not much to add. They were successful because of their work ethic and belief in helping others.
1
Bob Dylan was born on May 21, 1941. He is part of the Silent Generation not the Boomer generation.
2
Many of the aspects created by essentially Leftist Boomer culture have Been adopted by the Right for their own agenda. In 1965 sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll were entirely anathema to Christian religious groups which considered them the work of the Devil. Thirty years later, often cleverly placed next to N.P.R. stations on the FM dial, there were Christian stations openly advocating the joys of sex and rock'n roll, though naturally within their own religious paradigms. And even drugs were openly talked about. In
1970 the political and cultural Left had numerous alternative newspapers blatantly showing disrespect for most public institutions, and often doing so with very creative style and substance. Sensing a profitable market, even TV was getting in on the act. Then the Right did the same with talk-radio, more recently adding TV and the internet. Tools are tools, with no morality of their own, even when created by a moral cohort and/or for a moral purpose.
1
David, you've included people from other countries only in the Politics section. Is not the behavior of any generation of Americans heavily determined by the need to react to what the other influential cultures on this planet are doing either on their own or in reaction to what we Americans have been up to?
1
Hm... Unlike many people I meet, I had the same set of parents and grandparents all my life. Full sets. No substitutions. Life on the farm for them wasn't all that great - it was tough and unpleasant. Moving to the cities was an adventure, but no place is perfect. They saw and lived in a world with no civil rights, new civil rights, and, arguable outcomes. They spent a lot of their early lives simply being hungry and unhappy. All that "can do" stuff you see in the movies? Desperation. Grown ups climbing any ladder to get "anywhere but here." After the war, the US had the only intact industrial economy and enjoyed "seller" status for a generation. Things changed as the world caught back up. Vietnam had it's good outcomes - it's popular to ignore it. Every "vet" somehow became a hero. Heroism was devalued in the process. Increasingly, I see people arguing all the time - because they have time to argue and nothing so pressing to get them to stop. Comparing and grading generations. Sigh. You can play that game forever - and find out there are no points on the board for either side. The world isn't going to end - and it won't miss us. Will we? I don't see how. We won't be here. We may not be here no matter what we do. Something else will eventually evolve to debate all this again. Good luck to them, or, it, or, whatever. I have no reason to wish ill on the future of the universe. Not a generational notion. Nor do I give myself a grade. Plenty of other folks for that. Oh, well...
1
The fallacy of this article is that every generation blames the one before it. Boomers blamed the Greatest Generation for giving them the Vietnam war and the Cold War with duck-and-cover drills for the bomb (compare to active shooter drills of today)--no one called them Greatest until much later. As a boomer I have criticized our own failures, but this tendency to blame those before us as solely responsible for giving us the world we inherited is universal throughout history. Likewise for adults who routinely criticize the younger generation that comes after them. Each generation is made by circumstances beyond its control; e.g. what made the "Greatest Generation" great was the Great Depression and world war that forced them to grow up more quickly, not any innate difference in their nature. The boomer generation was spoiled by prosperity, but they also led many social activist causes such as civil rights, women's rights, the anti-nuclear peace movement and the environment which their elders looked away from, as many commenters here have noted.
Brooks (b. 1961) may try to exempt himself from the boomer generation by artificially moving the date forward from 1964 so he can criticize it, but such criticism is nothing new and only reflects a narrow, self-regarding focus.
1
One very important element Brooks ignores in his discussion of Popular Culture is country music, which evolved from a fairly rural base to a mass cultural "movement" capable (especially in the 80's and 90's) of expressing fundamental human realities pop music couldn't or wouldn't touch.
Reading many of the Readers Picks and Times Picks I see a lot of ahistorical, self-righteous whining. For many, history seems to have miraculously jumped from the Boomers to Today, with those inbetween accepting no responsibility for current realities.
I will take the complaints of the current self-righteous generation more seriously, when they get off their gadgets and get into the streets, when they stop complaining about the state of the world and make personal sacrifices to do something about it. (How many post-Boomers opposed to anthropogenic global warming advocate a huge fuel-saving 55 mph speed limit?) Yes, Boomers could be as self-righteously myopic as any subsequent generation. But, that is no excuse for current young people. Stop already with the "it's all my mommy's and daddy's fault" routine. All it does is display your own weakness. Every generation has to deal with the hand they're dealt. So deal with it!
2
I'm an old guy whose father and uncles fought in WWII and some never made it home. Neighborhood friends went to fight in Korea and some never made it home. I fought in the disastrous Vietnam War and had buddies who never made it home. With the help of the GI Bill, I finished college. Like so many others, I raised a family as best I could with the hope they too could do the same without going to war and maybe not coming home.
It seems to me we (the world) live in a paradox. The world is filled with people going about their lives doing the day-in and day-out activities necessary to cherish and love their family while fearing someday they may never come home.
1
We boomers did not use the government we inherited to legislatively balance the brute force of capitalism with social justice and environmental protection. Why? Self-interest among those of us who got our hands on opportunity and power.
Opportunity squandered - probably irreversibly.
4
I think Boomers are split just like the rest of the nation. Some of us went to school, studied hard, graduated, worked hard and are now happily retired. Many are more liberal than our parents, influenced by our children, but many are stuck in the status of grumpy old men and women for some unknown reason. We mostly made peace with integration, even if some of us resented it. Some still crusade for beloved causes (note all the old women in pussy hats at the women's marches) but some are still influenced by their husbands opinions gleaned from a steady diet of Fox News. To me, b. 1944, just outside the technical definition of boomer, our generation deserves a B+. We made it through a dumb war (Viet Nam) and mostly reared healthy, happy families, some after a practice marriage or two. We deserve the retirement we've earned, not the chaos that's brewing all around us due to the current eruption of underlying racial tensions. We'll vote and crusade till they put us in a box, though. We still care about this wonderful nation of ours. We get extra credit for that.
2
For starters there is no such animal as a monolithic generational personality and character.
And the antagonistic blaming attitudes of the subsequent generations say more about them than us boomers who had Brooks been honest brought the nation and the world light years forward in pretty much every arena.
Argument full of holes
full of holes. Fig. [of an argument or plan] that cannot stand up to challenge or scrutiny. (See also not hold water; pick holes in something) Your argument is full of holes. This plan is full of holes and won't work.
Mr Brooks, where is the category for economics? Boomers have lead the charge for supply side economics, unnecessary tax cuts and at a personal level a failure to save for retirement (more fun for to spend for today, tomorrow be damned) pushing their burden on future generations. I’d give them an F for economics.
2
@robbcordack u I think you should give credit where it is due. Republican boomers for the most part are responsible for the terrible economic policies that you have enumerated.
1
Was it the dinosaurs, or was it the asteroid?
No science deniers, we, Times readers are proud of our expensively trained minds. It is as salient as the noses on our faces that global temperature is ascending the steep “hockey stick” shaped curve of which scientists warn us. It is equally obvious to smart primates like us that our ancestors were monkeys, and their ancestors were protoplasmal primordial atomic globules. But the second leg of that evolution took about six million years, and those for whom science is more than a socially useful signal of virtue realize that the human genome did not (and does not) evolve as rapidly as the achievements and blunders of those who possess it. Each generation reacts to the conditions in which nature and the actions of prior generations have placed it, and the legacy which that generation adds to the human condition, when seen from afar, accretes the impacts of a more or less constant mix of human virtues and flaws. Human history is a car moving along an assembly line, and it is no easy task to assess the importance of the bolt we have installed, nor to say whether we have screwed it in or screwed it up. Our greatest prejudice is against the deceased. As we prepare to join them, let us forgive them, that we too may one day be forgiven.
3
Good, but a little thin on analysis.
Politics B: while the generation didn't produce historically memorable leaders, it's influence was huge in the 60s and 70s. The fundamental uprising of the 60s against the "system" was not electoral. It was a generation that largely eschewed electoral politics almost entirely in favor of creating alternative institutions (e.g. free clinics, food conspiracies, tenants unions, alternative newspapers, etc.) and obstructing business as usual (e.g. sit-ins, mass demonstrations, boycotts, civil disobedience, etc.) Those were the dynamics that eventually pushed politicians to come around. The electoral system did not lead; it followed. The propelling struggles for civil rights and against the Viet Nam War (which served as catalysts for the women's and gay movements) did not occur on TV or in the halls of Congress but in the streets.
Social Movements B-: while Boomers did an excellent job breaking down the traditional constraints of family, religion, and government, it did a lousy job at the much more difficult task of refashioning institutions to meet the fundamental human needs the institutions had embodied.
Morals C: they did not understand their highly "communal" rhetoric was basically voluntary. You joined a group/commune/collective because you chose to. Choice was your highly individualistic right. And, they arrogantly believed in the self-evident virtue of their beliefs.
Dylan: his music, not his antics, was the zeitgeist of the Times.
1
Whether I belong to the baby boomer generation or not (technically I do, my dad was a WWII veteran, but I was born the year after Barack Obama), I think this kind of report card isn't very valuable, it somehow claims that the boomers are responsible for everything we see is a bit much. Like any generation, the boomer generation has its ups and downs, and it isn't monocultural, many of the boomer generation were responsible for the social justice movement, the civil rights laws, the ecological movement that until St. Reagan came into power literally changed the landscape, and not all boomers 'sold out' to Wall Street.
And to mention the pre boomer leaders as being giants is a bit disingenuous, mentioning Reagan and Thatcher and Gorbachev and JPII and Mitterand is silly. Mitterand didn't exactly make France great again, Thatcher's legacy is a Britain dominated by what you claim to hate, the greed and materialsm of the boomers, and Reagan's GOP led the groundwork for Trump, less crude and crass, but basically the party of racism, hate and yes, corporate greed. More importantly, compare those leaders against FDR, Churchilll, and to a certain extent Stalin, do they compare? I don't think so (Gorbachev is the only one I can agree on; he truly caused massive change in a system no one thought could).
3
Bob Dylan is not a Boomer.
Born Robert Allen Zimmerman
May 24, 1941 (age 78)
Duluth, Minnesota, U.S.
The Boomers are different than the "War Babies." I remember college administrators being concerned about campus apathy, which did not occur with our younger brothers and sisters. While Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were spiritual leaders of Boomers' social activism, they came from an older group.
To
Reagan's policies led to the unwinding and deterioration of Amerca's great institutions and a massive budget deficit caused by the insistence that supply side economics work. Reagan left a legacy that burdened future Boomer presidents. No talent just hubris.
What ever happened to Pass/Fail?
Boomer here. Yes we screwed up on lots of things, as did every generation before and after us. We did do one thing very well...questioning. We rejected many of the assumed truths that were feed to us by elders and institutions. We demanded that dogmas be substantiated by truth based on facts. Today, one can not get away with spouting off without being questioned. This was not a small undertaking. We put right and wrong under the microscope for all to see, if they were so inclined.
2
Professor Brooks,
I haven't felt this giddy since I Monsieur Durand awarded me a C----, or as he called it, a conditional C. This generosity meant that I graduated from college. His condition was my promise to never attempt to speak French again.
Likewise, I click my heels at the B that you have bestowed upon my generation. I mean we are leaving behind a broken democracy, 22 trillion in debt, an environmental disaster, and an economy that caters to oligarchs and corporations.
In 1971, I took my conditional C and got out of town.
Professor Brooks, thanks for the B. It should come with a condition. To wit: move over, get out of the way, and cheer on the energy and aspirations of a younger generation.
4
sorry. that grading must be on a serious curve where no one fails.
social movements A? seriously? just look at who is fighting progress now.
you also left out the environment. and that's a serious F. that's an F so bad that it brings the final grade down to a D.
answer to the bonus question: TRUMP. (and that little period there answers the second part of the question.)
Bob Dylan is not pop culture. Bob Dylan is Bob Dylan.
Secondly, as a Gen-X child of divorced Boomers, I can say with absolute certainty that in the manners department the Baby Boomers get an F... sorry but we get to write the judgment on that one.
Boomers get an F because they have taken all the wealth and stick their children and grandchildren with the bill. They neglected infrastructure, privatized and profiteered off everything and then bankrupted a generation with education and payday loans. A big fat F.
2
Dear Will-Please don’t generalize and give us all baby boomers the same characteristics.....as if we were all the same. I do support free college. We earned those pensions, you disparage. it wasn’t just a freebie. I worked my way through college, part time. It took me years to get my BS, MS and doctorate. All paid “out of pocket”. No scholarships np parental support in a family of five kids, and a father who was a lineman. I was 59 years old by the time I got my doctorate. I made a salary after my doctorate that was lower than what my 22 year old nephew is starting out at next month. I worked hard, saved my money, did not buy every new gadget that came out and finally retired partially at 70. I paid off all my bills and home by 62. Every generation blames the one before. If you need someone to blame.....look at the 1%, ask B. Sanders . I don’t belong to the 1% club and neither do most of my baby boomer generation.
3
I get so tired of being shoved into a category, especially an age-related category. Good grief - grow up, media.
There is no such thing as "The Greatest Generation." My father fought in WWII but he was a frightening and borderline abusive father and his war-hero brother was completely horribly abusive to my cousins. That was, in fact, rather common parenting back then. Nothing "great" about that.
"Baby Boomers" were only the result of those same fathers returning from that war at about the same time - the fact that five years later so many of us crowded into first-grade classrooms that, only a year before, were rather empty, says NOTHING about the diverse personalities, cultures, and parents we had. And if you think the 60s rebellions came about because of our birthrates, think again - it came about because of the DRAFT into (unlike WWII) an unjust war.
No, the "Millennials" are not lazy as a group nor are any of the other labels media puts on other generations accurate or meaningful in any way. So stop it. Just stop trying to paint us all with one broad brush. It's called stereotyping and it's not just stupidly wrongheaded, it's just plain wrong.
3
David, you missed the biggest elephant in the room, economy.
The biggest winner in the Baby Boomer generation is Greed,
which , not surprisingly, is the root cause of today's problems.
Some smart boomers ride with the rise of wave, but most are left behind even though the national GDP rose over 2 folds.
And the time has come for a change in the outdate economical model. That is why Sanders and Warren , once considered radicals, are the mainstream of Democratic Party.
And that is why Andrew Yang should win in 2020 because he is the best we get for this country. The question is "do we deserve him".
1
Nice Game, David. How about this (a girls version):
Politics: B+, passed the ACA (thx Pelosi), European Union has had a good run (thx, Merkel)
Social Movements: agreed, A, holding strong on Roe v Wade, high heels are optional now,
Pop Culture: A+...Joni Mitchell, Oprah, Brandi Chastain
High Culture: since art generally needs to marinate, I'll give you Adrienne Rich, Joan Didion, too early to grade
Tech: B+, Adele Goldberg. yep, we're still behind the pack on this revolution
Lifestyle: A+...Alice Waters...need I say more
Manners and Morals: It's complicated...but I'd move Madonna to this category.
Overall Grade: A, if money is no object; C- if it is.
Bonus: Quintessential boomer: Meryl Streep...successful at her craft, raised a good family, maintained her sense of humor, all while living in Connecticut of all places.
One critique on the Popular Culture part: most of the boomers' beloved rock musicians at that time were Silent Generation, not fellow boomers. Bob Dylan was born in 1941, Hendrix was born 1942, as was Paul McCartney, Joplin was born 1943, etc.
Most of them were influenced by blues and rock that were popular when your average boomer was in short pants. The Beatles maintained that Chuck Berry was the biggest musical genius of the century.
Just a small nitpick.
The Baby Boomers will be remembered as the generation that ran up a gigantic national debt and shrugged in the face of climate change.
1
@Homer
Oh, I thought that started with Ronald Reagan from the Greatest Generation.
Pure popcorn, good for a Friday. Thanks, David!
"How could we have let this happen on our watch?". I've asked many of my '70's high school and college pals. What happened to drive enough people in this country to vote in Donald Trump to succeed Barack Obama? How could the US and the world lurch into authoritarianism this quickly and easily? How could we be so greedy that we allow business leaders (CEO's) claiming pay and bonus of 2,000x a workers salary? Or declare shareholders the prime benefactor of a companies efforts and not the workers and management? Or forget the hard lessons learned from embracing monopolistic practices with today's merger mania?
We deserve an F, or D- if you want to generous. It's as if we forgot all the lessons of 20th-century history. Or maybe we just skipped that class altogether.
1
Much as I would love to claim him, Bob Dylan (b. 1941) is not a boomer. The folk revival movement from whence he sprang was one of the silent generation's few significant cultural contributions to postwar modernity (early rock'n'roll being another). Give credit where it's due.
It's hard to avoid the verdict that the ultimate boomers are the Clintons and Trump. I tend to agree with those who think that means we deserve an F, but fortunately our generation still has some years to go before the final exam.
1
David says the underachieving Boomer generation extends up to 1960? Good. Glad to hear it. I’m tired of being roped in and blamed for all of the ills associated with this demographic.
I was born at the very end of the cohort. I have NOTHING to do with this demographic and what it did or didn’t do, what it got or didn’t. I was born waaaaaay at the end and had none of their “power” to change or just mess around and fail to make lasting change that someone things they were responsible for.
My life? It did NOT involve “dropping out,” drugs, marching, the military draft, or an economy that swept upward. (I graduated from college into a recession in the late 70s).
2
Why Bill Clinton and not Hillary? She broke many of the barriers that were previously barred to women.
1
I'm a boomer and I fit none of these stereotypes. We have our faults but are as sick of being stereotyped as millennials are. Regarding the ugly politics of today, McConnell (1942) is a pre-boomer, and Trump (1946) is right on the border by a mere 6 months.
It is self-serving for Brooks, born in 1961, to decide to move the census bureau's cutoff of 1964 to 1960 so he could put himself in a position to self-righteously criticize a generation.
4
That grade is too high - they deserve a C- at BEST! The Boomers, collectively, were handed the keys to family businesses and farms, intended to foster the continuation of their families. Instead, they sold those off and invested the money in their own security. They played and partied through their youth, and then couldn’t manage to keep marriages together long enough to raise their latch-key GenX kids. They went to work for corporate concerns, filled their savings accounts, and bought lake homes and Corvettes in their fifties, instead of investing in the college costs of GenX. When MY generation, GenX, hit the ground running at 18, we had no money for college unless we qualified for grants and earned it ourselves. Minimum wage was $2.00 per hour.
In all the intervening years, my generation never managed to earn enough to get out of the paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle. I know grown men in their fifties working today with less than $500 in savings. HOW were we supposed to raise the Millennials on such a pittance? With no family support, no family business to work through, no inheritance to pass on? And of course, THEIR college costs are ten times what we had to pay, and they are forced to go into debt just to reach the degreed work force. And my generation has been so busy trying to survive, we haven’t had any time for political involvement. I see all of this as part of the plan, and part pf the scam.
1
Baby Boomers. The generation who were standard bearers of peace, love, Rock 'n Roll and freedom from entrenched prejudices and antique social structures. Fast forward into the 1970s. Woke up one more morning hit with the reality times they are changing, party over. Time to become an investment banker.
1
"A new, lower grade below F should be invented for us, for our materialism and the perpetuation of greed as the determining value of the ethos in all major dimensions in life. "
I'm one of them & I've been saying this about our generation for much of the latter part of my life.
Someone here talked about being born in 1900 & dying in 1970 & what changes they saw. Then they try to compare the changes we've seen (The Tech revolution) as being as great. Really ? Getting rid of quality audio & film ? Is an advance ? All the revolution produced was Dick Tracy tiny video screens in phones. Its nothing more than glorified radio ! And basically throwing out everything that worked well in favor of endless upgrades of everything, that usually don't work & are no better. The loss & theft of all personal privacy. All in service of Greed. The lust for money. Wow -what advances ... Right
1
For Social Movements Boomers received an A? I live in a country where it's dangerous to go to the grocery store, or school, or a concert, or a festival or really anywhere. It doesn't matter how hard you try to change something if it doesn't change - for a generation that derided mine for participation trophies (btw you're our parents, no child cares about a participation trophy, you bought them) you seem to want to be patted on the head for trying. Has global warming been stopped or even slowed? Are women equal to men in the workplace? Is racism over because we had a Black president? No, no to all, but you sure did try didn't you?
Note that all the "quintessential boomers" are white. What does this say about viewing history through the lens of our (rather self-satisfied--according to Brooks) identities?
3
Good try Mr. Brooks. But to properly examine (not to mention, grade) the ethos of a generation would take more time and energy than you could have devoted to this column.
¿B? They only succeeded at making life more confortable, but that also led to the development of habits that are now contributing terribly to global warming. They also failed at ethics, politics AND philosophy. They deserve a D at most.
This article completely ignores the impact of our economic system, totally boomer championed, which has produced the vast inequality we now understand to be thoroughly destabilizing. Runaway Capitalism is ruinous. The greed we boomers take for granted has brought us to the edge of ecological sustainability. Overall grade: F- for sure
Three areas where Boomers have failed the most spectacularly (environment, education, wealth inequality) are barely touched upon here. I'd give them D, F, and D respectively. Health care ought to be in the mix, too (F).
The Boomers will be known less for what they created and more for what they squandered—though they may ultimately be known as the last great generation of dupes. The last chapter may be one of the saddest generational conclusions in history: angry, bitter, misinformed. That said... there is still time and voices in the Boomer generation that can shift the narrative, even this late in the game.
David, Wait. Who says we're done yet? I'm cramming for finals myself.
5
This "report card" is as inane as the list of "quintessential boomers" at the end. What do Clinton, Jobs, Madonna, Dylan, Spielberg, and Trump have in common? Just about nothing, except that they happen to have been born in the period journalists have come to label the "Boomer" era. So was I, and I can attest to the fact that the people I grew up with have never spoken with one voice or represented one trend. They're just a bunch of people—millions of them—with widely varying accomplishments, views, and lifestyles. To try to collectively grade all the people born over a period of about 15 years on politics, popular culture, etc. is ridiculous.
This Baby Boomer, for one, resents being lumped in with a political legacy of inequality, climate change, etc., which in recent years, has been shaped by our Republican politicians. What I remember of growing up in the Sixties is seeing black people being gunned downed by fire hoses while walking down the street, the hatred of George Wallace and the Vietnam War every night on the 7:00 news. I am not one of the 1%-ers.
3
This exercise is almost as dumb as a show of hands at Democratic debates.
I am a boomer. Boomers are not a monolith. My smug little suburban classmates, who elevated consumption and conformity to an art form, deserve an F. They were the heirs of wealth and power and used their inheritance to further divide haves and have nots. They paid lip service to anti-war activism and racial justice, but they basically abandoned any pretense of social justice in order to perpetuate their privilege. They voted for St. Ronnie, accelerating the demise of democracy and now go tut-tut at Trump's crudeness while holding lovely parties in the Hamptons, Shaker Heights and Grosse Pointe.
The rest of us tried. Really we did. We became educators and grew more progressive, not less. We fought for real equity and justice, supported the arts, moved to integrated communities and continue to rail against bigotry, environmental degradation and corporate domination.
3
"the conservative movement, the religious right, the Tea Party movement, the pro-life and gun rights movements, the populist revolt."
For this, Brooks gives the booMEr's an A???
Seriously?
So... how did the "greatest generation" which surely would have straight A's in Brook's categories, produce such a failed next "baby boomer" generation.
1
Bill Clinton, because of the profound effect he had on our country because of his position as president. He also embodied all the boomer attributes that David mentioned, profound selfishness combined with a lust for life.
Brooks is too generous. For one thing, it’s odd he doesn’t mention the environment. Or would be, if he wasn’t the Times’ poster boy for misreading the record.
I wouldn’t describe Reagan or Thatcher as “talent”, but boomer presidents include the worst two in history: Bush and Trump. Obama was born in 1961, on the trailing edge of the baby boom; he appears to have been a transitional figure to a new progressive era.
But the real super major failure and shame of the baby boomers is on the environment.
We got recycling. Yay. Inconvenient, small-bore, and a mixed success at best. Landfills continue to grow.
Nearly all the efficiency gains in cars went to making them faster and bigger. Today’s Civic or Camry does 0-60 faster than a supercharged Camaro. The 1990s brought us the SUV, the biggest stupidest environmental disaster in the history of technology. We could have spent that time developing the 100-mpg car. Imagine the savings at the pump, and in carbon emissions, had we done that instead.
We perpetuated the industrial agriculture developed in the 30s and 40s. The EPA is unchanged from Nixon’s time. Organic methods remain a fringe operation. We know the harm of industrial farming, from the oil-based fertilizers and pesticides the the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Yet we did nothing.
No, on the environment the boomers were an abject failure. It’s a record of missed opportunity, stasis, and selfish consumerism. I would grant a C- only if they take the makeup exam.
You are so off the mark with your choices of boomer icons (though maybe Spielberg)
Stevie Wonder, for music and ideas
Arnold Schwarzenegger, for thrils and pop culture to politics
Kim Stanley Robinson, for writing about the future we want
Sally Ride, doing it
Ray Kurzweil, making life better for the visually impaired and scaring the rest of us about the future we might get
Tom Friedman described the Boomers best as the locust generation. They inherited a nation at the peak of its power thanks to the hard work and sacrifice of their parents. And what did they do with it? What have they left behind- a mess. They never worried about those who came after. They just grabbed it all for themselves. The Clintons are the archetype. Talented but selfish and morally bankrupt. The crime bill devastated communities of color. Countless women sexually abused. Repealing Glass-Steigel led to the financial crisis of 2008. All while they amassed a fortune.
1
Thank you for the B.Super generous.
David - You should give a separate A+++ grade for Boomers' amazing sense of humor, as embodied by ceaseless cartoon strips and grandma-tier Facebook memes riffing on timeless themes like:
- I hate my wife!
- Kids these days!
- I don't understand technology!
- Modern music is bad and also I don't like black people.
Boomers' cultural contributions cannot be overstated. In addition to their impeccable wit, they also brought us:
- 24-hour news channels
- Unprecedented levels of environmental damage
- McMansions
- Crocs
- Reaganomics
- President Donald Trump
Let's all give a great big special salute to our elders, our betters, and our favorite complainers - the Boomers!
1
There are two groups of Baby Boomers. The Grateful Dead baby boomers. And the Madonna Baby boomers.
The Partridge Family, H.R. Puffinstuff? Not much legacy girth there. And never cared for Madonna. All show, no talent. Pretty much what we have today.
Boomers are a divided generation. Politically and morally we run the gambit from conservative, moderate, liberal and progressive. Ours, regardless of the continent of our births, is a generation shaped by the collapse of Victorian institutions (for all their faults) during World I and the final destruction of those institutions during WWII that continued to play out in our lives. Ours is a generation shaped by the revolutionary political upheavals during the early stages of the construction of a new world order over which hung and hangs the constant threat of both nuclear and environmental destruction. It is easy for us to forget the “apparentation-and-affiliation” (the relationship of old and new civilizations”) crosswinds we were caught in and witnessed. The social circumstances in which we came of age both inhibited and enabled us. History will demand those who follow us to make difficult choices. The generations behind us have legitimate criticisms of our actions. However easy it is to point to our failures it is more difficult to learn from them. At the heart of the Boomers’ overall struggle has been the issue of human dignity. The question placed before the emerging generations is what will you learn from history and how will you apply it? Another question, is how will you conduct the ethical, legal and political discourse. with all their tensions. as it pertains to human dignity?
1
Baby boomer made it acceptable for men to wear their hair long.
You can’t beat that with tattoos
I give us a B+
2
where is this boomer environmental activist of whom you speak?
Hippy communes were into organics, communal farms, gardens....awareness of forgotten practices- Native Americans- forgotten lore.....
1
Our political era began in 1992? No, our political era began in the 60s- but maybe you just want to gloss over our civil rights marches, questioning of colonial wars lipsticked as a domino. Maybe the feminist movement, spurred by Betty Friedan (see, greatest generation) et al, was left out due to a senior moment? Ralph Nader, consumer awareness- ecology, black history classes demanded, school desegregation....’do you remember these’?
Distrust of institutions? I guess all those movements, designed to put laws in place, regulations, still fighting to clean our...institutions....of corporate domination- were what- hobbies?
Selling out to money, acquisitions. Maybe, after Reagan, watching everything worked for disappear in a cloud of greed, superficial, hollow pseudo-machismo- (the first cult of personality)- maybe we got....tired. Kind of like we’re tired of fighting terrorism in Afghanistan, tired of, quiet on, Saudi Arabia, et al, treating women as property, .....just, tired.
Grade? A . For raising awareness of what the world should be. Could be, if we hadn’t aged, hadn’t been outspent by conservative baby boomers who sat out the 60s, 70s buying, selling real estate, stocks, bonds.....
As a Boomer (b. 1948), I have to give us no better than a “C.” We came after the “Greatest Generation after all, so graded on the curve it’s tough.
We started out with promise - Age of Aquarius, etc. - but gradually slipped back through mostly self-indulgence. Bill Clinton is probably the poster child for all of it. With Donald Trump as the lop-sided black sheep of the family.
Hopefully, succeeding generations will do better. And save America from itself while they’re at it.
So David Brooks has hopped on the lucrative bandwagon of generational identity politics--create arbitrary categories by age group, then pit them against each other. Ask all the non-white boomers if they got free college and then sold out to the corporations. Ask the women--the majority of boomers--with no prospects other than mommy or teacher after college (or no college at all), and no abortion rights--not even the pill, outside of marriage--until the 70s, who nevertheless carved out real choices for the next generation of women. As the list of supposedly typical boomers at the end indicates, the real power and blame, as always, lies with the elite class of well-off white males at the top. There's a blame game I can unite behind, especially as regards cutting their Wall Street, corporate-subsidized privileges out from under them. Vote.
2
Music. Check. Medical and technological innovation. Check. Movies, literature, dance, art. Check, check, check and check. Civil rights. Check. LGBQT rights. Check. Women's rights. Check. Environmental awareness. Check. Better understanding of nutrition. Check. What's not to like? Best generation ever.
Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix were born during WWII. Baby Boomers didn't invent Rock n' Roll, but they do have to answer for disco.
Taking Credit for Everything, and Shirking Blame?
A+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1
What do you think all those GIs were doing, during the war- safe sex? Leaves, transfers, transitions to different fronts....And Bob Dylan may be associated with many things (troubadours, folk), but rock and roll? Not.
"The specialization and ghettoization of intellectual and artistic life took its toll on the nation’s culture." Why do we see that carried over in the NYT's writing and reporting?
Perhaps that stunting is not just limited to a generation but endemic in our culture today.
Well, as a Boomer at 70, if "we" brought "Im special"into the lexicon....then Gen X-ers and Millennials have taken it as their drug of choice. After the last election results, news about kids across the country having to be
"emotionally sedated" in college classes with "play dough and cookies"; being so addicted to their cellphone life in classrooms that teachers and schools are giving up the fight; and their politics like: "AOC-its all about MEEE" and her twitter world. Hollywood glorifies this as well.
We are killing ourselves by today's culture of NARCISIM.
2
You forgot to mention how we have condemned our children and grandchildren to a likely horrific future in a climate changed beyond what the human species has ever experienced. And even when warned repeatedly by science we chose to ignore it so we could continue to enjoy our excess consumption. Grade F.
Boomer here. Born in 51. Dad was a WW2 veteran and infantry officer. Mom was a WAVE in the US Navy. Their experiences formed their anti war sentiment. None of their 5 kids was "going to war". They were all set to send us to Canada. So, my vote goes to Spielberg. He captured the brutality of war in Saving Private Ryan. But he also exposed the camaraderie that came with it....With Schindler's List he graphically depicted the Holocaust. As an American Jew, for me, it was freeing to have this factual account presented to the larger public. Then there is Lincoln. An amazing gift to baby boomers spoon fed Lincoln mythology in grade school...but lacking in the details of the arduous work necessary to change a nations reliance on slavery...The work goes on...
I completely reject the idea of stereotyping people simply because they were born between two arbitrary dates. Humans always have heroes and cowards, visionaries and followers, successes and failures, no matter when they were born. I blame Tom Brokaw for this foolishness.
1
Of course a baby boomer would give themselves a passing grade. How about the drug epidemic? Or the break up of the nuclear family? Or all the wars they started after they aged out of the draft?
It is a generation that was given the most successful country on earth and through their own narcissism and laziness brought it to the edge of moral and financial bankruptcy.
It is fitting that one of the last boomer leaders is inspiring mass shootings, putting children in concentration camps and sowing the seeds of a mass planetary die off.
B+? Whatever helps you sleep at night.
1
Of course a baby boomer would give themselves a passing grade. How about the drug epidemic? Or the break up of the nuclear family? Or all the wars they started after they aged out of the draft?
It is a generation that was given the most successful country on earth and through their own narcissism and laziness brought it to the edge of moral and financial bankruptcy.
It is fitting that one of the last boomer leaders is inspiring mass shootings, putting children in concentration camps and sowing the seeds of a mass planetary die off.
B+? Whatever helps you sleep at night.
@Charlie Brashears Personally, I think the breakup of the nuclear family is progress. When I was growing up, legions of people who hated each other had to stay married "for the children" and because divorce was scandalous.
I nominate Jeffrey Epstein as the quintessential boomer most representative of what boomerism has led to in 2019. Now it's almost time for my nap.
Ha, ha. Anyone else notice how David Brooks has redefined Baby Boomer to eliminate the year of his birth, 1961? The term has always previously been used to encompass births from 1946-1964. As always, Brooks presents his own world view as universal and meaningful. Popular culture vs. "high culture"? Give me a break.
5
The boomers are sticking the kids with $20-30 trillion in debt, dilapidated infrastructure, a hypocritical moral structure that puts stock prices above all and a trashed planet...and Krugman gives them a B because of Starbucks, Shake Shack, Woodstock and The Boss?
That is a seriously whacked curve, Paul!!
David, I wish you would stop referring to educated people as “elites.”
7
I suppose you deserve credit for addressing the span of years covered by my generation (just turned 70). But considering where we are now, any accomplishments pale in relation to a culture dominated by right wing propaganda and grievance, and led by a whining know-nothing, an F is the only grade warranted.
1
Writing this must have been a fun exercise. Reading it was as well. I would certainly add Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to Mr. Brooks' nominees for quintessential Boomer. I'd leaven and lower our grade on manners and morals. While Boomer predecessors shed Taylorism and Theory X in favor of consensual leadership styles, Boomers and our reverence for Steve Jobs or Donald Trump set the stage for X Gen leaders like Elon Musk who seem to delight in tantrums and public debasement of employees. I'd also raise Boomers' grade on technology and innovation. Progress in life sciences may in fact be as dizzying as Mr. Brooks' horseless carriage-to-moonshot example. My ancient B.S. in Biology would likely take me today through week 3 of any high school curriculum.
One thing is certain - for worse and better - Boomers have not tread lightly on this earth.
1
I would pick Steve Jobs. When the original Mac appeared in the early 1980’s it changed the entire World. As much as I loved the moon landing, to me the creation of the PC is the most consequential human invention probably since the internal combustion engine. 100 years from now school children will be taught the name “Steve Jobs”, the others on the list not so much.
4
Not sure the Boomers can take credit for lifestyle. It's true that things like restaurants and ice cream are better now. But that's assuming that Baby Boomers are behind these little quality improvements. Many innovative chefs are Gen Xers or Millennials. Same story with social change. Baby Boomers aren't leading the protests anymore. They're the people telling everyone else to sit down and be grateful for what they've got. But that's beside the point.
The entire premise of this "report card" is flawed because it's assigning Baby Boomers a grade based on the state of the world as it is today. It presupposes that Boomers still run the world and that they are behind the changes we see around us. Some of them are, but some are not. This time we're living in now--this isn't their time. Not anymore. In fact, most Boomers should have (note SHOULD have) retired by now and left the workforce to Gen Xers and Millennials. But as Joe Biden says, they're "still holding onto that torch."
1
Special Bonus Question Answer: None of the above. And that is the reason I agree with the low overall assessment. My generation could have but just could not be bothered after Civil Rights and Vietnam were no longer the pressing issues of our youth. We had families to raise and ignored everything else because we could...and did. All three of my generation's presidents were draft dodgers in one form or another when their nation called them. After such an auspicious start, we did nothing more to keep things getting better. The Greatest Generation preceded us and hopefully an even greater generation will follow. We did nothing in between but bask in the fame and results of our fathers and have done nothing to improve the future for our grandkids. We are the real ME ME ME Generation and Trump is the result we deserve.
1
As a boomer who once had high hopes for the future, I find what has happened politically to be surprising, disappointing and tragic. But is it really due to boomers? What about our shadow kings? Are people like Adelson, Kochs, Mercers, Murdochs, etc. boomers? They have effectively rigged the game with gerrymandering, voter suppression, cheating (stripping democratic governors of powers, not allowing Merrick Garland to be even voted on, suppressing reports about climate change), lying (whenever Trump and McConnell open their mouths), generally ignoring what the majority of the population wants (health care, gun control, education) and now even allowing Russia to influence our elections.
4
Who wiped out private employee pensions and introduced “tiers” in public pensions. Who said that to preserve my own the younger should pay more and get less.
156
@kevin
Separate issues.
5
@kevin In my world, I would say that was the "greatest generation" or perhaps the earliest of the boomers that accomplished that feat in the early 1990s.
14
@kevin
I credit the greatest generation with part of that legacy. The greatest set up everything for themselves. Came back from war (thank you for your sacrifice there) and get themselves GI bill, cheap college, cheap housing, great pensions, suburbs, white flight, redlining, systematic racism, union corruption then union busting. Then as they aged, voted to keep it all and not pay for it. I could rant on.
286
One small phrase from this essay both enables and explains every failure of the Boomer generation: "debt has soared".
Unlimited borrowing - and (after 2008) unlimited money printing in hopes of funding that borrowing - epitomizes the short-sighted, easy-street attitudes of so many Boomers. Millennials are mad because they know they're stuck with the bill.
1
Nope. Today’s problem is private debt, both for boomers whose houses can’t finance retirement like their parents and whose 401(k)s are insufficient especially compared with their parents. Concerns about public debt have been used and are being used to throttle solutions for all generations. Did the Civil War debt cripple the late 19th c. economy? Did the WWII debt cripple the post war? Did the Clinton surplus lead to 2000s prosperity? No, it led to a recession and the Great Recession. Why cut your own throat (by austerity) in the name of a phantom threat?
@PJ Let me point out that many corporations are now forcibly retiring people in their 50s. When longer lifespans mean most people will live into their 80s. That's maybe 30 years of forced retirement. We Boomers who expected to work till 65 are now needing to dip into our retirement savings much earlier. Our problem, not our fault.
1
@Frances Grimble I totally agree, and would add that many can't afford to retire completely and work at much lower paying jobs. At the same time, social security has lagged the cost of living, 401(k)s are way below what pensions paid and 2008, plus other factors have limited home equity. All combined paint a bleak picture for many boomers.
My point about debt was just responding to c smith. Follish public debt hawkishness is a prime reasons for the plight of the boomers (and the generations behind them).
Ending that piece with Trump was a little jarring. But not so much, in testament to how numb we have become to any mention of the Antic in Chief. He simply represents the very worst of us boomers - self centered, greedy, shallow, insecure, functionally illiterate, callous and dangerous. I cannot get his cynical smiling response to his sick groupies’ call to “shoot them” out of my head.
2
Boomers are a divided generation. Politically and morally we run the gambit from conservative, moderate, liberal and progressive. Ours, regardless of the continent of our births, is a generation shaped by the collapse of Victorian institutions (for all their faults) during World I and the final destruction of those institutions during WWII that continued to play out in our lives. Ours is a generation shaped by the revolutionary political upheavals of the construction of a new world order over which hung and hangs the constant threat of both nuclear and environmental destruction. It is easy for us to forget the “apparentation-and-affiliation” (the relationship of old and new civilizations”) crosswinds we were caught in and witnessed. The social circumstances in which we came of age both inhibited and enabled us. History will demand those who follow us to make difficult choices. The generations behind us have legitimate criticisms of our actions. However easy it is to point to our failures it is more difficult to learn from them. At the heart of the Boomers’ overall struggle has been the issue of human dignity. The question placed before the emerging generations is what will you learn from history and how will you apply it? Another question, is how will you conduct the ethical, legal and political discourse. with all their tensions. as it pertains to human dignity?
119
@Charles van Heck
I agree. The Boomer generation contained both the Yen and the Yang of the country and humanity at large. Our coming of age in the Sixties & Seventies was the best of times and the worst of times.
8
This has been mentioned before when "generations" have been brought up and stereotyped. Naming, grading, and yes, sometimes shaming entire generations is, well, shameful and divisive. There is no one generation in existence/in play at one time. We're all in this (and creating and fixing messes) together. Sigh.
1
Although I suspect he would decline the "honor," I think we Boomers should invite the great and sorely-missed Barack Obama to become an honorary member. I believe he alone would improve our average grade in several categories.
Years and Years speech in the final episode says it best:
https://youtu.be/lX0kwVLPmD4
Wait, aren"t "the conservative movement, the religious right, the Tea Party movement, the pro-life and gun rights movements" indulgences of economic elites? How else could they exert the enormous power now wielded?
1
Gen Xer here, born in August of '65, the very first among the post-Boomer generation. I have mixed feelings about the Boomers, or to be fair, the era they represent.
I miss the hippie ethos, the ones who lived in communes and farmed together, their "out there" spiritualism, love-first, of the earth friendly, tree-hugging types for whom peace was not just something they wanted in the world, but lived personally. They really were trying to raise consciousness.
Watch a Woodstock documentary, or a McGovern speech. Their their opennes and willingness to embrace those who disagreed with them is enough to make you weep.
Older and mainstream America mocked and dismissed them of course, but in reality, so ultimately did the bulk of their own generation, who seemed to become addicted to the power of anger and the protests over Vietnam and Nixon. It seems rage and wholesale indict of The System has been the only form of activist expression ever since.
I agree that the Boomers brought us a longer, funner, easier and more materially enjoyable way of life. I am not sure if they brought is the kinder, more loving society they started out working towards.
2
This was a good, pretty fair article until you brought up Bill Clinton and forgot what a really loathsome character he was. Yes, super smart, maybe talented, but a good human being? A man who cheated on his wife since Arkansas? A man who, supposedly took over twenty trips on Epstein’s plane? A man, and his staff, and the media who, basically ruined a young woman’s life? A woman who has bounced back remarkedly and is now, finally, seen as his victim? A man who led Monica Lewinsky for two years into his lair...even though he could have said “ this is not appropriate and never going to be an affair??” David Brooks, the philosophical, brilliant, writer, who can honestly overlook Clintons character as a zero?? I’m appalled
1
Mr Brooks. Bob Dylan is not a boomer
1
I wouldn't include Reagan, Thatcher or JP2 among the greats. The latter supported the greatest pedophiles in history, Thatcher policies have almost destroyed Britain and Reagan while ushering out the cold war did little else. I am disappointed in the Boomers though. How could such a great generation allow what we have in the White House today.
1
Spielberg in a runaway.
1992 for politics? No. Reagan and Tatcher and John Paul II. talented? By talented you mean able to spin their policies and fool people? That is surely Brook's political leaning talking. They were abysmal and started us on the trajectory we are on now. Bill Clinton despite his shortcomings was arguably the best president we had after Kennedy. His cabinet members were also outstanding. Janet Reno,Madeleine Albright and the rest. This article is just another waste of ink.
This is a shallow, self indulgent, foolish article written by a “boomer” evaluating millions of people (also boomers) who, through no fault of their own, happen to be born between 1946 and 1964. History will make vague statements about our contributions and our flaws. Have we left the world a better place than the one we were born in to? That is the only question. My answer would be no. The world is not better because of our generation, it simply is not. We failed to act as good stewards of the environment and unfortunately, that might be all that matters.
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Donald Trump??? No way! Bone Spurs never saw anything of Viet Nam or Woodstock. A "Top Boomer?" Robert Mueller III.
Ecological Stewardship? DNC
What needs to be mentioned is that Boomers were responsible for deliberately destroying the nuclear family. Our slogans were: “Smash Monogamy!”, “Smash Bourgeois Morality!”, “Smash the Nuclear Family!”, “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Civ Has Got To Go!”.
The destruction of the nuclear family led to generations of men raised without a father. This is what is responsible for the current epidemic of young, alienated, sociopathic men shooting people down in the street.
2
"a string of greats . . .Oprah . . .Madonna . . ."
?????????
2
Why are the nominees all white? Why is only one a woman? The quintessential boomer might be Hillary Clinton, Toni Morrison, Stevie Wonder....
2
From a baby boomer, born in 1952, the political grade deserves no better than an F. The 2016 election was a total embarrassment for our generation and our country. With Obama, my hope was that the future elections would feature the coming generation's leaders, but instead it only continued the decade old disagreements between the Vietnam protesters and the war's supporters, many of whom worked hard to avoid the conflict. On top of that we are still fighting the battles which lead to the civil war. It's more than time to pass the torch to the next generations. To this moment, our genertion's attempts at national leadership has been a disaster.
On the day the federal government launched cruel, heartless, pointless, counterproductive raids against hard working immigrants and tore young children from their parents, maybe forever - again! - and the day after the President demonstrated so little empathy and common human decency that after visiting mass murder victims he tweeted political attacks and chatted light-heartedly about his own crowd sizes rather than about the families of the innocent murdered innocent people on whose behalf he was supposedly traveling, we, the intelligent, perceptive, shocked and disgusted readership of the NY times, are delivered a fun little opinion column grading the baby boomer generation? NY Times, when is enough enough?
Overall Grade | Fail |
Special Bonus Question: Which columnist is a quintessential fake-moderate while ignoring all aspects of the corrupt, science- and fact-ignoring, cruel and ineffectual Republican Party which he played a part in creating?
Greetings earthlings. I represent a sentient race that prizes continuity of time and consciousness. Can you explain to me why you chop up your people and your time periods into these unintelligible chunks called "the 1970's" or "millennials"?
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Who, exactly, are the “elites” who approve of the social movements favored by the left wing? Those with money? The highly educated? Readers of the New York Times? This term is being used as a smear by conservative media. Explain or stop repeating it.
1
This should be a project, not a column.
The 'Boomers' are the world's largest population group. You swayed everything your way. When you were young, institutions & stability was there to rear you. When you were coming of age you had free love & rebellion. A 'fresh look at market economics' when you had to grab your part of the pie. A return to 'family values' when you needed your kids to behave & pharmaceuticals to help you. An ever expanding globalized economy when you solidified your gains. And now a horrific retraction as you pull up the ladder for the rest of us. You can burn that report card like you did your draft card. Nobody will ever call you the greatest generation.
Your report card showed a most boomer-like quality, Grade Inflation. Read your description under politics. Really, you would give that a C-? That is a gentleman's C, if I have ever seen it. Clearly an F. Looking just at the US, our boomer presidents are Clinton, W, and Trump. F-
And Social Movements: A? As someone who grades people for a living, sure, I'll give credit for the vast energy of the boomer social movements. But if you measure social movements by effective change .... the massive environmental victories of the late 60s and early 70s owed as much to the political skills of the silent generation as it did to the street power of the boomers. And as the silent generation moved off screen, the boomers social movements have led to political and cultural gridlock and disintegration.
1
Trump: greed and narcissism and self over society
Well, the "greatest generation" spanned Hitler & Gandhi...
Ours started idealistic as the young always are. The blow-back against the summer of love, Woodstock, etc. gave us Nixon & Reagan. Sadly, I think the Brooks grades are fair.
Don't conflate Republicans with Boomers. During the boomer era, we had George H.W. Willie Horton Iran Contra Coverup Bush; Ronald They Are All Monkies Philadelphia Mississipi Trickle Down Economics Reagan; George W. Weapons of Mass Destruction War on Credit Card Torture Bush and now Donald Bankrupt Financially and Morally Trump.
@Anam Cara and the Boomers voted them all into office. Thanks for nothing.
“No axe to grind” lol
David, you grind it so much and so often it should be “no axe left to grind!”
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Natal boomer class of ‘52 here. First in my family to graduate.....without student loans too. I look back and do not think we were the “spoiled” generation as many have called us. Viet Nam proved otherwise. But anyway, sometimes I think it mattered where you grew up as to your outlook. That is why I would give ourselves a C-. The effort was there but somewhere along the way, a lot of boomers got scared. I see it in the way many cling to ideas that should no longer exist. Move forward boomers! Help our planet...it’s for our grandkids.
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Steve Jobs
Don't pull a muscle patting yourselves on the back, boomers. Thanks for the never-ending drug war, AIDS, homelessness, bankrupting the nation, the war on terror, swiss-cheesing our constitution, stealing elections, selling out on civil rights as well as selling your children's future for a bowl of pottage. But hey at least we have avacado toast and cat memes.
where were you in the 1950s through the 1970s when Nixon was casting his black shadow over the nation? how could you possibly leave him off your list?
HAHAHA! Trump, you must be joking? The only thing quintessential about him is his own ego.
Boomer - launched in 1947. I give us an F-
We traded convenience, comfort and toys for the destruction of the Earth. We lorded over the extinction of our fellow inhabitants.
Extreme religion, misinformation and bigotry got traction. And the disenfranchised used those tools to fight back. We demonized each other. We starved each other. We slaughtered each other. We slid back into ignorance instead of climbing a wall of education.
I am generally irritated by sweeping generalizations about generations. But I think we will be remembered as the the tipping point generation. We could have made the Earth a better place.
But we were more interested in staring at screens and eating the latest quick and easy or fashionable food. Many of us tried to help turn the tide. But we were whistling in a hurricane. Now the tide will come and get us.
And I suspect Gen X is going to be worse at life than we are. After all, we raised them. They'll condemn us. But they haven't made the commitment to the planet either.
Maybe there's hope for Y and Z on a planet that has less humans - ones that can use their brains to band together and act more intelligent than all the other species that have over populated and seen a decline. We have not demonstrated intelligence that is superior to most other animals. Maybe we should get started on that...
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All your candidates for quintessential boomer are white folks?? What about, say, Oprah?
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EVERY Generations's lpolitical activism has been derailed by illuminati social engineers' push of Drugs. Pot derailed anti Vietnam war activism – pot makes people apathetic – YEAH WHATEVER.
They did this to the Occupy movement and NOW they are pushing legal pot to undo the BLM – get em high instead
The purpose of DRUGS is mind control.
Pharmacy comes from Pharmakia which means Drugs, Sorcery
SORCERY means USING DRUGS TO INVOKE DEMONS TO CONTROL PEOPLE
The music also does this since whatever spirits are on musicians transmits THRU the music.
AND the music business is run by illuminati devil worshippers. They pray demons onto the masters of all the records to put demons on every record. David Crosby talked about his.
See video
DEMONS BEHIND THE MUSIC BUSINESS – John Todd
He came from an illuminat bloodline & made this video in the 70s when he became a Christian.
I talked to Tony Bennett 3 years ago & said “I want to save the musicians who worship Lucifer”
He said THEY ALL DO.
ALL the millenials have HEARD about Illuminati. The musicians make illuminati hand signs in their videos, exposing it.
The music bus execs invested in private prisons and promoted Gangsta Rap to fill the jails. A music ex told a rapper “Your job is to fill the jails”
legal Pot will put more people into the prison industrial complex & the mental health industrial complex
What happened to OUR geneeration is a warning to the millenials
It seems to me that a grade lower than F would be appropriate for these greedy self aggrandizing members of the baby boom generation. With phony flower power and the symbolic peace sign they avoided serving in Viet Nam only to turn from their love and sharing ways when the war ended in to Hogs at the trough.
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I’m a late boomer. lets Not forget how the ‘establishment’ killed the future, left millions of boomers dead around the world, you again.
The establishment, mad men with bombs, did everything it could to kill social development. More guns, more war, more social regression.
Some boomers are traitors. They forsook the principles and bought the corporate crime playbook because the corporation is the American Trojan Horse, hollow our the inside and let everyone who relies on work gets shafted. Romney comes to mind.
The boomers were abandoned by the greatest generation to corporatism, triumphalism and exceptionalism.
Unfortunately the boomers drank the cool aid.
The one factor not covered is the Media and manipulation of.
The boomer gen sure learned propaganda.
Of course that was after importing thousands of nazis for the advertising world.
Aw the greatest generation. Not. Respectfully.
David, you missed one critical word: NARCISISM
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Assuming that baby boomers were no angels, the following generations had three presidential elections, mid term elections, freedom of speech and the mobilizing power of the internet to correct their predecessors misdeeds. Where are the report cards of Gen X and Gen Y?
Let me think...Facebook, Amazon, Uber, Instagram, Google, Silicon Valley, rise in homelessness, private schools for privileged whites children? racism? gun violence? women degradation in rap music? Rape on college campuses? excessive consumption? Opioid crisis? Feel free to add.
Dear X and Y, you are as much to blame for perpetuating that what you now condemn.
It falls on Gen Z to clean the planet from Amazon boxes, cheap synthetic active wear, cheap airfare travel, plastic packaged cut fruit, car pollution etc.
At best blaming Boomers smell of Ageism at worse it smells of deflecting responsibly. Pitting Gen Z against their grandparents generation is a cheap shot and it will not solve anything.
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@Zuzka. No, it falls on all of us, every generation working together, to solve these problems and deal with these issues. One generation is not responsible, and another one can not correct things alone. Only working together, rather than pointing fingers, can we do that.
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Who is the quintessential boomer? Answer: David Brooks.
Brooks is the perfect representative of how the boomer generation actually turned out – someone who thinks that Ronald Reagan, who spurred neoliberal policies that brought us to Donald Trump, and Margaret Thatcher, who said “there is no such thing as society, only individuals,” were exemplary leaders worthy of demigod status.
We (white) boomers were born into an anomalous economic era of prosperity fueled by WWII momentum. We thought that prosperity was normal. But we quickly learned that capitalism had no conscience, and that it can only make profits if it passes on massive environmental, infrastructural, and social costs of its operations to society. And we learned that politicians lie, that they are willing to fabricate wars; and we realized that racism was deeply embedded in the American character.
We began with great idealism and opportunity. Viet Nam brought us to our knees and disillusioned that idealism. Many boomers bought into the American creed of individualism, drank the Kool-Aid of capitalism and pursued the Dream. We became the Democrats and Republicans who abandoned the backbone of our society – the middle class.
Our grade: F
From his conservative ivory tower, Brooks blithely grades his generation. But, he fails to take any credit for his role in supporting conservative policies that privileged the individual over the collective and ultimately doomed his generation - and produced Donald Trump.
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More than a third of the boys in my high school class served in Vietnam...a thankless (literally) and bloody task handed to us by the Greatest Generation. Another third of the class was in the streets protesting Vietnam and/or Civil Rights issues and getting beaten over the head (literally and figuratively) by the Greatest Generation for doing it. Only a very small percentage of Boomers like Bush 43 and Trump 45 skated by on Daddy's coat-tails and bank accounts. Then the Greatest Generation gave us Nixon and Reagan. All the Boomers I know are still fighting to make America a better place for everyone. I invite the younger generations to join us...or at least improve their voting participation levels.
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1) Bob Dylan is not a Baby Boomer, He was born in 1941. 2) I think that David Brooks is a little too kind to Boomers. For example, a grade of A- on technological and scientific advancement is too generous. Apart from computers and communications, progress has been much slower in the last 40 years than in the period from World War I to about 1975. Even regarding computers and communications, the last major advance was the smart phone. Desktop and laptop computers have not increased in computing power nearly as much in the last 6 or 7 years as in 2000 through 2010.
Put trillions on the national credit card, cleaned up the environment while simultaneously wrecking the climate, taking the "me me me" position into retirement to the detriment of younger generations, fielding terrible politicians, 2007/2008 financial crisis, ..
Honestly, this generation needs to get out of politics. They can advise, but we've suffered through their leadership long enough.
Can we reframe the, Boomers elected 45 or got us into the Iraq war and only cared about tax cuts.
Change that to REPUBLICAN BOOMERS did these things.
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Woof! Maybe I’m totally off base, but Brooks’s comments seem like a much fairer assessment than the boomers here are making of ourselves. Although I just miss Brooks’s cutoff here, I am a baby boomer.
The attacks are not entirely just. Yes, we’ve made mistakes, but I’m not sure it’s our personal greed that has led to our decline. We have subverted the system at times to benefit our children, but I wonder if that was a gut response to what parents saw slipping away from their kids.
We’re not rich. As boomers we were lucky to afford life, but the ones who are upending our economy are a small percentage, not the majority. The Trumps of our world seem to define our problems, born on the cusp of the boom, angry and frightened by two wars, Spanish Influenza, the stock market crash among other things, they became greedy. They were going to make sure they had all the money and power in order to protect themselves from those earlier ills.
That doesn’t describe the majority of us. No generation is perfect, but does our role in climate change, for instance, compare with the fossil fuel people who have been lying for decades and the government which was complicit?
Across generations, the vast majority or people although holding sometimes wildly different beliefs are good and generous and vulnerable to snake oil salesmen, and maybe more responsive to authority than we like. Historically we were a people ready and wanting to fight injustice; today we seem to have forgotten how.
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David failed to include a category for "Fiscal Stewardship."
For 200 years, it was an unspoken rule that each generation is obligated to satisfy its own debts, or put in place the means for satisfying those debts created during our lifetime.
Our founders believed that to do otherwise was immoral.
Oblivious to the rights of unborn millions, my generation has violated this fundamental rule. During the past 40 years, the Boomers have gone on a spending spree and charged everything to the grandkids’ credit card.
Notwithstanding the rationale of "modern monetary theory," anything that can't go on forever, won't go on forever.
We are leaving a horrible fiscal mess for those who follow us.
1
Yet again, Mr. Brooks, so often by omission, demonstrates a rather narrow view of so many things--including the fact that white people weren't the members of a post-war boomer generation. The list at the end says it all yet is incredibly non-representational of a generation, let alone of those whose "accomplishments" matter. And no names mentioned in some categories--like social movements--that scream to be addressed. A few like Mandela listed (not sure the "boomer" title applies quite as globally as these throw-ins on Mr. Brooks' part suggest), making them appear more like the exception that proves the rule. And I won't elaborate on insulting decades-worth of writers, scientists, culinary revolutionaries, and more.
It appears Mr. Brooks tends to have good intent but perhaps his own status continues to inhibit a wider lens through which to better-understand history, what "counts" from people born over a 20 year span, and so much more.
This is a very judicious assessment. Good analysis.
One caveat: excluding Barack Obama, the Boomer politicians who took the White House have all been born in the 1940s, the first years of the Baby Boom.
I’m still waiting for a Boomer president born in the 1950s— the decade that produced most of the Boomers.
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Both Mr. Brooks and many of the commenters here seem to have forgotten that the Boomers started out life with post-war rationing still in place.
@Cynthia They also started life with a pristine infrastructure, a soaring post-war economy, and an affordable educational system none of which are available today. Our infrastructure is failing, our economy crashed just as millennials were entering it, and educational costs are so high, millennials will be paying that debt until death. Many baby boomers may have started life with post-war rationing in place, but many Millennials started life under threat of nuclear annihilation.
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@Stephen Please check your history. The infrastructure to which you refer was not pristine, it was nonexistent. For example, the interstate system wasn't complete until the late 60s - several boomers I know worked on it. Many baby boomers are still paying college debt, as several commenters here have remarked. As for the risk of nuclear annihilation, it has never been lower; stockpiles are lower now than in the 80s.
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@Cynthia I absolutely adore history. The interstate, the electrical grid, our major dams, including Hoover, were all constructed under several pieces of legislation collectively called The New Deal. They were passed between 1933 and 1936 by FDR as a tool to get us out of the Great Depression. Many of the longer running projects, like the interstate, were finished in the 60s, but I don't know a single historian who credits the interstate to baby boomers. Currently, under baby boomer watch, the American Society of Civil Engineers is saying it will cost about $2 trillion to fix our infrastructure. That can be credited to baby boomers.Concerning educational costs, tell me what baby boomer has a college debt as high as $50,000 for a bachelor's degree? That's common for millennials. As for nuclear annihilation, many of us, like myself, were born before the cold war ended, so when we started life, the threat was really high.
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There is something profoundly broken in the moral fabric of the boomer generation. The evidence is in the wreckage they’ve left for younger generations (the quality of ice cream flavors notwithstanding). I hope that X, millennials, and younger are able to fix some of these messes and leave the world better than we found it. The boomers cannot claim to have done the same.
Bob Dylan was born in 1941. He is not a boomer. Boomers were born between 1946 and 1964. David says 1960. I won't quibble.
Since you asked, I'd nominate Steve Spielberg.
1
I don’t know about the grade we deserve; I’ll leave that to history. As for the exemplar of our generation, I propose not Bill but Hillary Clinton. In her, I see the arc of our generation (the female half anyway) from idealism to wedded unbliss to self-discovery to materialism to self-disclosure to punishment, to (I dearly hope) contentment, all underscored by exceptionally hard work and devotion to duty. But perhaps I’m extrapolating.
Did you forget that, although baby boomers weren't fully in power until 1992, they'd been electing leaders since Reagan? I would argue that 1980 is when they began running the country. Including Reagan, and Bush Sr. would drastically change the metric.
They deserve an F for politics. We're talking about a generation who completely ignored climate change and gave themselves tax cuts every year rather than investing in infrastructure, healthcare and education. My student loans alone could have paid for five four-year degrees in 1980 when adjusted for inflation. What happened baby boomers?
And an A for lifestyle is a bit of a stretch. Just look at what they do when they have mid-life crises. They buy sports cars. Millennials can't afford sports cars.
2
I would, as a boomer, vote for Springsteen; his artistry which made him a rich man didn't impact his social conscience as a Liberal Democratic individual and although his state has produced many other iconic musicians, he's not an acquired taste, he's an original. I make this point because in many other instances what happened to the idealism Boomers used to have;the ones that became GOP reactionaries are just materialistic mammon-worshipers. I'm frugal but I eschew Conservative policies as too self-serving and oblivious to the needs of the country.
2
I've always wondered whether the Boomers succumbed to capitalist materialism or whether they were manipulated by the same forces that assassinated JFK, MLK and RFK.
Certainly the dark force of extreme capitalism won with the resulting colossal income/wealth inequality.
Many Boomers were serious environmentalists, until it conflicted with their self interest.
If either JFK, MLK, or RFK had not been assassinated, the Boomers would have had leadership that inspired
different choices and actions.
I am grateful that Bernie Sanders has not been assassinated.
Redemption is possible
1
I am a boomer. It was boomers who served in the Peace Corp.
Boomers were drafted, gen x, y and z did (do) not have that burden to bear.
Boomers protested the Vietnam War. Where is today’s generation? Not protesting inequality, cruelty to immigrants or Donald Trump!
Many of us were children of post World War 2 parents, many of us were first generation college graduates who went to CUNY or Brooklyn College, or state colleges, studied hard, worked while in college and went on to become physicians, lawyers, teachers and entrepreneurs.
When XY and Z attain what many of my generation have done, then they can point fingers at us.
To indict an entire generation is ludicrous!
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@joan If you are watching the news, you will know that this generation is indeed protesting and very politically active. The Gen Z Parkland kids pushed the boundaries on the gun-control debate. Millennials have shifted the debate on Climate Change, Justice reform, and healthcare after decades of no movement by supporting more expansive, universal, and structural reforms.
Also, more people have college degrees than ever. The problem is the crippling debt associated with it. That is an issue your generation did not have to deal with.
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@joan When young people protest about those issues, the Boomers tell them to sit down and shut up. Young people are protesting the proliferation of guns that is getting them killed in schools all across the country, and all Boomers have to say on the subject is to whine about how their freedoms are being taken away.
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@joan If Millennials were protesting every day, their Boomer landlords would evict them.
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Who is Brooks that he qualifies to pass judgment on a whole generation? He is so myopic and forgetful that he neglects the major legislation (now being undone by Trump and the Senate) that was passed because of the actions of the young in the 1960's-1970's: Occupational Health and Safety Act, the foundational civil rights laws, National Environmental Protection Act, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, etc.
Additionally, many of the court suits that led to important rulings such as which sex acts we may perform in our own homes without danger of being arrested for a felony came from suits with boomer plaintiffs.
I was active in my 20's and 30's in the peace movement and still am. I have an FBI file on me. I was subject to surveillance; my phone was tapped; my mail was read.Was Brooks subject to any of that? If not, he should leave this subject alone.
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Perhaps a more accurate analysis of a generation should not come from those who are part of it, but from those who are from another generation. Also, one generation is deeply affected by the prior generation, and this can't be ignored. Lucky baby boomers. Unlucky Gen X.
2
Bob Dylan is not a Boomer, he is Silent Generation (1941)
Trump, Spielberg and Clinton barely make the Boomer cut, all born 1946.
Jobs is right in that sweet spot, born 1955.
Madonna - seriously, this is the only post-war worthy mover-shaker female you could think of? Nonetheless, she is a Boomer, born 1958.
So, between Steve Jobs and Madonna, the top Boomer is Jobs.
3
I was born in the early 60's. As a child I not only sang the Age of Aquarius, I believed in the Age of Aquarius. I thought we were all on the path to a more just, less destructive world.
Then in when I was in high school Ronald Reagan was elected and I realized it was not to be. For years I've been furious with those just a few years ahead of me- those Boomers- for wasting opportunity and letting the moment slip away.
Now I'm not so angry. I realize the forces against them were awfully powerful and they just didn't have the leaders needed to make true societal change. But, I still dream of the Age of Aquarius and my Millennial children are ready to fight for the vision- so maybe the Boomers didn't totally fail after all!
1
I'll be generous and and give the Baby Boomer generation an F, as in Failed.
The true measure of a generation is what they were given by the previous generation compared to what they will leave the next generation(s).
Contrast the "greatest generation" who won world wars with humility and gratitude, and built a country civilization can be proud,of, versus the baby boomers who have have left my son and I:
Lost wars killing our youth, suffocating debt, education and housing which is out of reach, mind-numbing escalating violence in our cities, and a drug epidemic which has led to a increase in deaths by five hundred percent in the last twenty years .
The only passing grade I see is if there was a category for self-absorption and narcissism.
1
@Jim T The Greatest Generation put Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan in. End of story. You get an A+ for your list of many tried and worn fanciful cliches for both the Boomers and the so-called "Greatest Generation."
1
I think history will look on the Boomers much more kindly than Brooks and many of the commenters think. We are old people now, the vast majority just getting by...or not... financially, but when we wanted change in our youth, we took to the streets and made it happen. Hopefully today's younger Americans will do the same...it's a lot more than just complaining or going to a Bernie rally.
3
David: You are again falling into the trap of categorizing the human race because that is what humans like to do in order to "understand" our world and the universe. However, it results in social division and worse on our planet. Why classify groups of people when we are really all connected and the same and just look at the individual and what they are about?
2
I think we can attribute the low marks to the political class. To quote political strategist Roger Stone, "Hate works." See documentary, "Get Me Roger Stone". The quest for power has no limits nor morals. If its pursuit means the destruction of our social fabric, the prevailing political thought appears to be, "so be it."
1
"the conservative movement, the religious right, the Tea Party movement, the pro-life and gun rights movements"? Don't the pious "pro-life" and "gun rights" movers and shakers of the right kind of make them all a bunch of hypocrites (along with the religious right)? Whatever happened to the Tea Party?
Not only did the 1993 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 balance the federal budget, but the last five years of Clinton's term produce 5 consecutive years of surpluses (there was a $1.6-trillion surplus when GWB took over, even though we still owed $5.7-trillion in debt). GWB could have taken that substantial surplus and used it to shore up Medicare and Medicaid, or provide tax cuts to the bottom 10% of income earners, or -- gasp -- the middle class, or he could have used it to spend down the debt. But GWB gave it all back to us in the form of a tax cut (the majority of those tax cuts going to the already ultra-wealthy among us). And how did GWB pay for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Did he raise taxes? Did he cut spending? No. He put those wars on the national credit card and continued with more tax cuts (just ask Paul O'Neil, his first treasury secretary about this).
2
First, Bob Dylan is not a "baby-boomer." He was born in 1941, not after World War II. Second: If Dylan can be a baby-boomer, why can't Barack Obama? Third: If Brooks had used the generally accepted definition of boomers (1946-64), he would have had four presidential examples, but that wouldn't have enabled him to omit Obama, whose calm reasoned presence reflected a much different reality than the other three, all of whom belong to the "look at me, look at me" category.
3
I’ll vote for Bob Dylan as the quintessential boomer. Here are my reasons:
As with the boomers in general Dylan emerged stirring high hopes among his fans that the revolutionary style he brought would somehow keep evolving into ever more fresh ideas. That, excepting the change from acoustic folkie to electric surrealist never happened. If Jimi, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin had lived to old age we would probably have the same complaint: Started bold out of the blocks and faded quickly thereafter.
At best, this is an evaluation of eras, not generations, which contain way too much variation to be generalized. Enjoy it for its entertainment value, but don't take it too seriously.
2
I am a boomer, but a person first just as we all are. Boomers are not only the protesters, but those millions who went off to war thinking they were serving their country. They are also the single women in the inner cities who fought to raise children on their own against all odds. They are the farmers who inherited their father's farms and struggled to continue. they are native Americans who struggled to maintain their cultural identity. They are people of all colors and countries, the lady doctor from India who often work in our poorest hospitals. They are Donald Trump who continued the tradition of american greed. We began trends that continue today both good and bad. And we will pass away as all generations have. Good luck guys, and I sincerely apologize for the worst we are leaving you.
4
I am a boomer, but a person first just as we all are. Boomers are not only the protesters, but those millions who went off to war thinking they were serving their country. They are also the single women in the inner cities who fought to raise children on their own against all odds. They are the farmers who inherited their father's farms and struggled to continue. they are native Americans who struggled to maintain their cultural identity. They are people of all colors and countries, the lady doctor from India who often work in our poorest hospitals. They are Donald Trump who continued the tradition of american greed. We began trends that continue today both good and bad. And we will pass away as all generations have. Good luck guys, and I sincerely apologize for the worst we are leaving you.
I am a Boomer; and I, along with my generation, have failed.
"Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind's true liberation" - Aquarius, Words and Music by Galt Mac Dermot (from HAIR)
We have neither harmony, nor understanding. Many, but obviously not all, have (false?) sympathy ("thoughts and Prayers") but there is little trust. Falsehoods abound and derision has been raised to a political art form. Our dreams have become nightmares of dystopia, mysticism and crystals are sold on the internet of everything as fake panaceas.
Liberation of the mind? Don't make me laugh as we are more and more bound to rigid ways of thinking.
Maybe Dylan was right "the answer is blowing in the wind." And it is just as ephemeral and ungraspable as the wind.
We just failed. Life happened.
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@LesISmore Music by Galt Mac Dermot; Lyrics by Jerome Ragni and James Rado. db
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In 1962 my father was on strike to obtain employer sponsored health insurance for the first time. I remember seeing on T.V. that there strikes in a lot of industries. The issues involved getting health insurance, pensions, and wage increases.
It wasn't the Boomers who won workplace concessions. The parents of the Boomers made the beds for the Boomers so that compensation and conditions were better for them when they started working. Parents of the Boomers were focused on their achievements and were less concerned with spreading the wealth around because they had sacrificed so much to achieve them.
The Boomers, on the other hand, were more socially conscious. Boomers provided support for movements that a small number from their parents' generation were trying to nurture. Boomers felt that everyone should have an equal shot.
Boomers never fought for their economic advantage; so they didn't know how to keep it. They did not recognize clear signs that a movement had begun to undermine the social contract. They did not understand the price that was paid by their parents for the benefits they inherited. When many Boomers began to become jaded by their losses, they bought into an explanation crafted by the very elite that had suppressed their parents. Boomers adopted the idea that the decline in their prosperity was caused by "the other" - the minority or the immigrant. The elites won the class war by turning it into a culture war. Grade: D - knowledge of history.
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In this case, I'm proud to be counted out of the Baby Boomer ('62 model). I've never really felt like a Boomer because I was so young when the things they get credit (or blame) for happened. It's nice to be counted out by others, too.
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This article made me reflect upon why our generation did so poorly in politics. To a degree, it almost seems counter intuitive. As a political science major, I remember how popular those classes were at the time. They were packed. Political debate was rampant on campus. We were all inspired buy JFK and his famous quote about "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." It seemed we were much more politically aware than our parents. Frankly, I do not see that level of political interest and involvement in the later generations. Perhaps our failure was that we were too idealistic, too willing to discount the more practical politics of our parents, too jaded by Watergate and RMN, and finally, largely due to our skepticism, unable to build a progressive consensus.
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I enjoying Mr. Brooks writings, here and elsewhere. But in this piece he has conveniently ignored (denied) data to suit his thesis. The postwar "Baby Boom" began in 1946 and continued through mid-1964. So like it or not, Barack Obama (b. 1961), is a Boomer, as is Brooks himself (born just one week after Obama).
Full disclosure: I was born in 1960, i.e., Obama was the first President in my lifetime younger than I, which was striking for me in a personal way as it could not have been for Mr. Brooks or anyone else younger than Obama. If we say "Baby Boomer", then I am one, and so is Obama, Mr. Brooks, and anyone born at least through 6/30/1964.
With regard to Presidents, Mr. Brooks correctly includes Clinton and Trump (both b. 1946), and conveniently excludes Obama. As for the pop cultural figures, Bob Dylan was born before Pearl Harbor, i.e., even before U.S. entry into WWII, so he could not possibly be a Baby Boomer. However, his music appealed to many Boomers, particularly the older ones. Fewer of my contemporaries, i.e., those born 1/1/1957 - 6/30/1964, i.e., the tail end of the Boomer cohort, appreciate Dylan's music.
Clinton and Trump are two sides of the same (birth year) coin. So if they together represent the best Boomer politicians we can ever expect, then that is sorry indeed. But many Boomers came after these two, and not only Obama (and Brooks). Quintessential? How about Bill Gates? (b. 1955, same as Jobs). And still active.
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The definition of what constitutes a baby boomer has the most consensus. The Census isn't the only one that extends it to 1964.
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David: As a Boomer myself I have to take issue with the criteria that you used to evaluate my generation. The real issue it seems to me is whether our generation left our successor generations in better shape than before, and I think that we have failed in that analysis. Our parents, the Greatest Generation, left us with unparalleled prosperity, a mighty economy, first place in the assembly of nations, a modest deficit, and a relatively unified electorate with two moderate parties vying for political control.
The Boomers have changed all that. The Boomer presidents, Clinton, Bush II, Obama and Trump have presided over massive deficits. failed wars and an increasing polarization of the electorate. The stature of the United States has diminished over their tenure and it is questionable that the US is still the foremost economic & military power. Our contest with China to continue as the world's foremost nation has just begun and the outcome is uncertain at best.
Under these circumstances, your overall grade of "B" is probably inflated. A grade of "C" or lower is probably warranted.
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Bill Clinton's policies established a budget surplus for most of his 2 terms, check the history books.
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@JAM
Whatever Bill Clinton’s various shortcomings may include, a massive deficit is not among them; he left office with a budget surplus.
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Susan & Mary Rose: Clinton's budget surplus was the result of a compromise on the budget with Newt Gingrich. If Clinton had his way, there would have been a lot more spending. His dalliance with Monica will be his defining role in history.
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The Boomers were not a monolithic group. I am a Boomer, although born one year too early, I am 'grandmothered' in. Not all Boomers went to college. Many got married right after high school and went to work in factories. Some worked their way up into management and became wealthy, or at least very well off. I came from a family with 8 children and we were split. About half of the Boomers are actually quite moderate and see themselves as Conservatives. The divide that began in the sixties simply grew old with us. Activist Boomers certainly did not elect Nixon. Our Presidential choices have reflected the ideological tug of war Boomers have engaged in ever since the sixties when we all came of age, but we did not all arrive in the same world.
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I don't like the idea of pitting generations against each other. The Boomers (and I am one) grew up in a time of great prosperity, never before seen in America. One parent worked, one stayed home. We attended neighborhood schools so we had the same friends all our lives. I am working class, and we saved money in banks, earning 8% interest. Reagan ended that era. And one more thing. Bob Dylan was born in May 1941 so he may be god, but he is not a boomer.
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He’s not God, nor a god, either.
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As a later baby boomer, I've seen and participated in some of the the idealistic efforts to correct inequalities, especially in the 1960s. But, we also had families to raise and jobs to work. The global economy has changed the distribution of resources in ways that are both positive and negative. I think our kids have a different employment landscape as a result. The environment was being more protected until T took office. In addition, we are in a period of political upheaval throughout the world. There are many factors not mentioned in the article that have made the life more difficult for following generations. The boomers are no better or worse than any other generation, we just had a different set of circumstances.
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To blame social trends on a generational zeitgeist is a specious undertaking. The roots of today's social, economic, and political problems were well established by the early 1970's - Vietnam, Watergate, the two oil shocks and the resulting stagflation, the rise of shareholder value as a business ideology, and the rise of the populist right as embodied in Reagan's run for President in 1976 and success in 1980. As a boomer who was in his twenties during the 1970's, I can remember housing prices tripling in Los Angeles from the time I was in school to the time I was ready to start a family and then being faced by mortgage rates of 13% or 14%. I remember Reagan's massive hike in the Social Security tax, supposedly fixing it for all time, and then finding benefits delayed and cut by the time I reached retirement age. The decline in pensions, unionization, and employee rights as well as the precipitous rise in inequality was a product of the Reagan years. In other words, these issues are and have been the product of a multigenerational social upheaval.
The generational blame game is simply a distraction.
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Bob Dylan was born in 1941, so I don't think he'd be a boomer, but if he is, so are The Beatles and no one, except possibly Dylan, that you've listed, had the cultural impact of the Fab Four.
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I find the self-flagellation embodied in many of the comments pathetic. I think my generation did rather well amid all the confusion, and I think a quick time-travel back to 1969 would prove that.
There is a limit to the extent people will give up their self-interest in the name of idealism and I think the boomer generation regularly has pushed that envelope rather well overall.
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The "nominees" -- Remember that Dylan was born in 1942, , like the Beatles and Hendrix etc. the music that defined the 50s and 60s was mostly created by pre-boomers.
Who are the Boomer-age selfless leaders: the Gandhis and MLKs, willing to give all for others?
Really? You start by putting Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the same category as Nelson Mandela and then expect us to believe that your analysis is going to be fair and equitable. Sorry, David, most of us don’t see Ronny and Maggie as especially “talented.”
The politics of the so-called ‘greatest generation’ gave us Vietnam, Watergate, the Southern Strategy and so much more! In fact, one could argue that all of the boomer politics of the last half century was in response to these brutally divisive political disasters that eventually led to the election of Donald Trump and the complete deconstruction of our very democracy.
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We Boomers also seduced our teachers into a system of grade inflation, which, apparently, persists to this day.
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I would disagree with this. I was among the first of the baby boomers born — 9 months after Hiroshima. There was no grade inflation at UC Berkeley. Nor were there professors who provided help when approached at office hours. It was basically sink or swim. My brother was the first to admit that Stanford was easier academically than Berkeley (he went to both). I work with high school students and the feedback I get from them is often that college is easier than high school.
Swap out Madonna for Bruce Springsteen. He scraped his way to the top, wrote songs that reflected different eras, and didn't need to reinvent himself along the way. Plus, he's still relevant.
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@NA
they each spent this summer battling for the #1 spot on UK charts
still relevant.
How about this: instead of dividing people into monolithic groups (this generation versus that generation) we start looking at our common interests and working together to resist the corporate control that is degrading our planet and destroying our democratic process. I applaud the young people today who speak out. And ideologically, I have far more in common with them than with Trump voters my age. And guess what? Financially I have more in common with them than with the wealthy of my generation. I fear that this article manipulatively incites generational warfare while our corporate overlords are laughing all the way to the bank.
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Brooks and all you commenters seem to forget 2 big big thing about the Boomer generation:
1.We Boomers made divorce socially acceptable, and made divorced single mothers a natural part of society without giving them jobs by which to support their kids.
2. We lived through Viet Nam with brothers, husbands,lovers, friends drafted and sent to die in Southeast Asia.
Not all of us lived in the rose tinted world you describe.
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I pick Spielberg. Also just because one didn’t go to Woodstock does not mean you didn’t experience the 60’s. That was 3 days out of a decade. Also The Beatles count even though they’re English.
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David, you have graded us way too generously. We Boomers overall are the best educated group of people in the entire history of the world, yet we have permitted global warming to grow into global heating, done nothing about guns, allowed Tea Party and Trumpism to grow into such a force that our democracy, our economy, and world peace are now under dire threat, allowed poverty and racism to not only continue but thrive, and sexism to continue. I, born in 1949, still thrill to rock and roll, but otherwise, am ashamed of my generation.
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@Mary Carmela, PA, I am not ashamed, and never will be. This comment won't be published however.
So they should get a good grade because they completely gutted the American Dream in order to make restaurants better?
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Mr. Brooks, on oversimplification of a complex era in all areas that you mention. I give you an A for effort, but a C for results. Signed, a baby boomer.
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Boomers have exceeded all expectations in furthering the destruction of the planet and since that is an existential threat to the species, it ranks as the most important grade.
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Why does Mr. Brooks seek to polarize us further with these arbitrary distinctions between the generations? Americans, it seems, need to put every aspect of their lives into neat little boxes to sort, categorize, label and measure. Boomers, Millennials, Gen X -- call them what you will; they're marketing inventions that let corporations sell you things. They're also a way for people to deal with the messiness of life. Our culture is a stew rather than discrete segments, each generation bleeding into the other, sharing the good, bad and the ugly.
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@AlNewman
I was waiting for someone to mention marketing. It was in a commercial context that I first encountered the term "Baby Boom." Before that people probably ate peanut butter and jelly, but they didn't put the sandwich on a pedestal. If anything about us is different, which I doubt, it is that our parents, with loving intentions, cultivated in us an obsession with the minute details of our lives. I'd say we invented the selfie long before the cell phone, but a quick stroll through the Met's magnificent Egyptian collection lays that claim (or concern) to rest.
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A simplistic comparison of "The Greatest Generation" and "The Baby Boomers." Being a daughter of the first and a member of the second I can't help comment that my parents, members of GG had many issues with their compatriots. They were anti-fascists who were trying to raise awareness of Hitler's rise when they were teenagers in the early 1930s. (The United States took its time acting on the atrocities that were occurring overseas.) Their lives were forever effected by the Great Depression, something that was caused by multiple factors, including ignorance and inaction on percolating issues.
I think the two generations have many things in common, primarily because we are all human. The issues that they confronted, fought and sometimes solved, are our issues, again and again. Hatred, ignorance, greed. The energy of boomers fueled the culture and the movements towards more equality. We are still actively solving problems related to race, gender, sexuality. Our rock music is listened to today, just as Frank Sinatra's, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald -- classics all. They dropped the bomb, we killed the Kennedys.
My parents were proud of my young energy and creativity, and proud when I settled down to a helping profession. They were not fans of Reagan, and they certainly would be aghast at our present buffoonish political situation. But they wouldn't be surprised, because they saw worse.
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My oldest siblings were born in the Great Depression, it was over before they were old enough to do anything about it. My middle siblings were born during WWII, it was over before they were old enough to do anything about it.
I was born during the nuclear arms build up. We were taught in grade school how to survive after nuclear attack and had bomb shelter signs on our schools and churches. Survival supplies were stored in the basements. We watched the daily Viet Nam body bag count on the evening news through our entire childhood. We all held our breath during the Israeli 7 Day war, afraid that this time those buttons really might be pushed. We grew up with the doomsday clock. We marched to stop the race to armageddon.
We grew up with government sanctioned segregation in the United States, South Africa, etc and worked to change that.
We grew up in environmental meltdown, and created the environmental movement.
Did we solve the world's problems, no? But we gave our children a world cleaner, safer and more tolerant that the one our parents gave us. They are in charge of making it better for their children.
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Report card for boomers, measuring outcomes over aspirations. That says it all, doesn't it?
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Brooks ignores so much. Boomers foolishly revoked the financial controls if FDR which lead to S&L collapse and eventually to another depression which is politely called Great Recession. They have presided over endless wars which have been devastating to the recipients of our wrath. And finally they have empowered our major enemy Red China. They have been some of the worst democratically elected leaders. Most have used their positions to enrich themselves.
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Two of the people you name as icons - Madonna and Bob Dylan - claim to be musicians but can't tie their own shoes musically speaking. They are both empty posers that made their mark on naked "non-conformity" and provocation. They're also pretty good tokens of what the boomers did to the painting, writing, and musical arts.
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@Dan
as Willie Nelson sings " if you don't like it Mr. record executive , go on and write your own songs "
We have not been good stewards of our planet. And for that we must receive an overall grade of fail.
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Let's see: we boomers grew up watching previous generations kill JFK, MLK, Bobby K, etc. We came of age on a planet with billions suffering extreme poverty, communism advancing across Eastern Europe and SE Asia, 10% unemployment, rivers in the US that literally would burn, terrible race relations, and acid rain.
Today we enjoy nearly universal internet access, a US unemployment rate of 3.7%, few starving peoples, relative peace, cleaner air and water and once unimaginable prosperity.
A-
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This is the best, most sensible column by David Brooks in a very long time. Perhaps there should have been a few additional criteria that would have produced a more believable GPA, but it was a good start.
I admire the column most, however, because it has produced the best, most trenchant self-analyses of and by a generation that I’ve seen in the Times.
As a Baby Boomer myself, I can't understand how your fellow op/ed columnist Bret Stephens comes across as a wannabe Boomer while trashing Millennials. He tells Gail Collins, for example, how he'd give ANYTHING to have been able to attend Woodstock yet somehow has NO PROBLEM advocating annihilating the Iranian Navy which, regardless of geopolitics, can only drastically mitigate clean air & water.
Hence, while the Flintstones unto the Jetsons were created by pre-boomers, they both inspired an imagination whence Bart Simpson is unequivocally our go-to TOP Baby Boomer. Similarly for our Keith Haring's advancement of pre-booming Warhol unto Lichtenstein. With Jean-Michel Basquiat, like Obama, as our requisite 1960-born beacon making good what the latter third of our Dread/Wrath&Beyond had only hoped for.
Mr. Brooks has been hitting it out of the park lately with thoughtful columns that are enjoyable to read. Steven Spielberg is my vote for boomer master. That Trump is mentioned is an embarrassment for the Boomers. Sad but true. Hopefully, to be rectified in November 2020. Go Joe, who tweeted some Brietbart reporter yesterday. Stay tough Joe.
Wait a minute, Baby Boomers, maybe we're being too tough on ourselves. I'm 63 and right in the middle of the Boomers. When I was a kid in school, I was put under my desk and told to be ready for a nuclear bomb. Well, we had something to do with that still not happening 55 years later.
My father paid for my brother and I to go to state colleges. May have cost him $30k? I paid entirely for my 2 daughters to go to state schools and it was around $300k all in.
Pension? What pension? We got no lifetime jobs with pensions. We had to leave our employers when they sold out , went bankrupt, etc. We had to save for our own retirements.
Some of us died or were maimed in one way or another in Vietnam, a war not started by a Boomer. Nixon was not a Boomer but he cheated with the Viet Cong to get elected, and created Watergate. Sound familiar? The current President is almost 74 and he's not a Boomer. The greed of the '80s was caused, at least in part, by the Reagan massive tax cuts and deficits. Reagan was not a Boomer. Clinton is a Boomer and he created surpluses.
To Gen X, Y, and Z: It is so much easier now to start your own company of any kind, get a loan, be your own boss, work hard, and sell it or do otherwise. That rarely happened 50 years ago. Stop complaining you can't afford to buy the house that your parents sold when they retired. Start somewhere. Be smart and buy smart; that's what we did.
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@David Bowers
Both Clinton and Trump, as well as W. Bush, were all born in ‘46. They’re all boomers.
P.S. They all avoided Vietnam. I guess no one likes to die a soldier.
It’s too soon to grade us. The issue of the last boomer president is before us. Biden or Trump?
For my money, the re-election of Trump would negate all the sacrifices of the “Greatest Generation “ from the Great Depression through World War II to the Moon Landing. It would render meaningless the efforts and accomplishments of our parents by our failure as a generation to carry the torch of civilization to greater elevations.
Do we tell our parents and grandparents that they might as well have spent half of the Twentieth Century sleeping in, letting fascism run the world? My answer is no.
It ain’t over ‘til its over and Trump must not be the last gasp of my generation!
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Didn't Bill Clinton have a budget surplus when he left office?
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Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, one awful part of the Boomer Generation.
Substitute the alternative for them at the time and you have a MUCH better world.
Ronald Reagan was not a Baby Boomer.
Bob Dylan isn't a boomer. Barack Obama is.
The baby boom was 1946-1965.
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