DETROIT – One evening in the early 1990s, I was on the phone with Jack Kevorkian, the pathologist waging a crusade to allow physician-assisted suicide, and who was then in jail.
I asked him if he thought that what he did would ever be fully legal? “Well, of course,” he said, “but not for the right reason.”
When I asked what he meant, he shot back, “You’re a baby boomer, aren’t you? (I pleaded guilty) There are 75 million of you, and a lot fewer in the next generation. Do you think they will want to spend all their money to keep you alive on machines?”
Well, OK, boomer! He didn’t utter those words, which years later would appear as a handy way of dismissing what younger generations think are boomers’ out-of-touch ideas.
Dr. Kevorkian, who has now been dead for more than a decade, may not have been the first to scoff at boomers as a generation, but he certainly wasn’t the last. I haven’t heard many Generation Xers or millennials complain about the coming costs of keeping us aging boomers alive and on our meds, though that may come.
But we are being increasingly portrayed as a selfish, spoiled and clueless lot, who probably still secretly play old cassette tapes, don’t know the difference between Tik-Tok and Instagram and may even read print newspapers. So I was surprised a couple months ago when an authentic millennial said she wanted to know more about my generation, and what shaped our thinking.
That pleasantly surprised me, and got me thinking. For years, I had thought that if I were a millennial, I would probably hate and resent the boomers for having it so much easier in so many ways than they did. For example, it was far easier for most of us to afford college, thanks in part to Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviet Union.
I was in kindergarten when Sputnik orbited the earth in October 1957, beating the United States into space. The powers that be were freaked out, to use a later boomer term, and tons of scholarship and loan money became available.
The only students of my generation I knew who came out of college with significant debt were some medical students, back when an MD was almost a sure ticket to riches.
Yes, in that way, we boomers were lucky — but not in every respect. I may not have lived to write this column had I not gone to college. More than likely, I would have been drafted and sent to the meat grinder of the Vietnam War.
Baby boomers were called that, of course, because of the tremendous explosion of childbearing that happened from 1946 to 1964. This was due in large part to those Americans who had been forced to postpone childbearing during the Great Depression of the 1930s and then World War II.
The number of babies born increased by almost a million a year as soon as the men were back home, and soon hit four million a year till 1964, the official end of the boom, according to the U.S. Census.
Personally, as far as world-view and attitudes are concerned, I think the true boomers are those born in the 1940s and 50s. President Barack Obama, born in 1961, seems culturally much more like a Gen Xer than the boomer he technically is.
The popular boomer stereotype is that of children who were spoiled rotten by self-indulgent parents who wanted to give them everything they’d lacked, and there is some truth in that for many boomers, but by certainly no means all. Many spent our childhoods fearing a nuclear war lots of adults thought inevitable.
True, many boomers were also raised to believe they could be or do anything they wanted, and that the United States was the greatest, most honorable and most powerful nation in the world.
Those beliefs were then ripped apart in little more than a decade, by a series of events that disillusioned, if not traumatized everyone, but perhaps the boomers most of all. President Kennedy, who inspired so many to ask what they could do for their country, was the victim of a seemingly senseless assassination.
Lyndon Johnson, who followed him, promised us a Great Society — and instead lied us into a war that failed, killed 58,000 Americans and made no sense. He was followed by a president who bugged himself, lied about what he did and was forced to resign.
That same decade saw the assassinations of two of the era’s most inspiring leaders, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.
All that was followed by the high inflation and the gasoline shortages of the 1970s, and the end of an economy where virtually any high school graduate in a place like Toledo or Detroit could get a good paying, if repetitive and boring, manufacturing job.
That was the world that boomers emerged into as young adults. It is significant, I think, that the three boomers who became President were all born in 1946, the first year of the boom, and none are likely to be ranked among our greatest leaders. It also seems very likely that America will never have a President who was born in the 1950s, when more babies were born than ever before.
All that doesn’t excuse whatever mistakes the boomers have made. Nor does it glorify their achievements, which include Apple, Microsoft and the World Wide Web. But it may help explain them.
Ok, millennials?
(Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
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