| It wouldn't be too hard to argue that the Baby Boomers are strange. Not Gen X, Y and Z. Until the 1950s, young people in the west were expected to live with their parents until they married and settled down. Just crack open a Victorian novel. (A few HNers have noted that this is true in India, China and Japan; but it was also true in the west.) This changed all at one and all of a sudden under the Baby Boomers. Young people left home earlier, travelled the world, experimented with drugs. Let's forget that the Baby Boomers were responsible for psychedelia, the protest movement and flower power. Here's what I'm saying: The Baby Boomers were a blip, premeditated by the astronomical rise of the USA in the global economy. Money and jobs were everywhere all of a sudden, endowing people (and especially young people) with the new freedom to experiment. Something that is not true now: We're facing increased global competition from the East and the west's manufacturing base has been hollowed out. In terms of global and Western culture they were a non-stereotypical blip, the result of very particular and unusual economic and social conditions, a few flicks of the second hand on the our cultural watch. So, are the Baby Boomers justified in criticising this generation for returning to former cultural values and habits? Personally, I don't think so. It's hard not to feel it smacks of myopia, of judging others through the wrong side of the binoculars. |
I'm puzzled how people can make generalizations about a group people born over a range of 18 years. While the notion of "generation <foo>" is dubious in itself, claiming that someone born in 1946 has a whole lot in common with someone born in 1964 seems especially silly.
What I've found is most people, when talking about "boomers", really mean the subset of those who might have plausibly attended the first Woodstock festival.