One Baby Boomer’s Personal Response to Generational Blame

There are enough problems in the world without getting into an intergenerational American dust-up. But if journalists like Emily Holzknecht and Binyamin Appelbaum and their recorded speakers want to go after their elders, this Baby Boomer from the Bronx is ready to tussle. If the New York Times columnists and interviewees want to pin the world’s problems on Baby Boomers like me in “Thanks a lot, Boomers,” they’d better be ready for some pushback. As Aretha Franklin sang: “R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me.” I’ll tell you exactly what it means to me.  

Dean Baker gave an economic explanation of why the article/video was wrong in CounterPunch, (Blame the Rich, Not the Boomers for Economic Inequality – CounterPunch.org); this response is personal.

In their Times’ three-minute, thirty-six-second Opinion video, “younger Americans from the New York region spell out the frustrations of the generations that followed the baby boomers.” (Already there’s a lack of respect in not capitalizing Baby Boomers.)

What do they want? “We’ve noticed that many of you are pretty upset about the state of the nation. And we get it. We really do. But do you ever stop and ask yourselves how we got here?” they challenge. “We have one simple request: How about an apology?” Apologize! And then they tell us to “Protest yourself.” 

“You were handed the world on a silver platter,” one speaker declares. “For the last several decades,” another says, “Boomer presidents” – from Bill Clinton to DJT – are to blame for the dire state of the world. “What is your legacy?” another demands.

An apology! Protest yourself? Legacy? Listen Gen X,Y,Z, and Millennials. (Notice the respect with the capitals.) First, lumping a whole generation together is a risky business. Tom Brokaw praised The Greatest Generation, those who survived the Depression and fought in World War II. Was he right to put so many people together? Brokaw lauded George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole. What about Norman Thomas? The pacifist, democratic socialist ran six consecutive times for president between 1928 and 1948. Although he never won, many of his ideas were incorporated in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Baby Boomers are the generation born between 1946 and 1964. Being “born with a silver spoon in their mouths,” as one speaker said, is an exaggeration. Those who grew up during that period will never forget Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), the Cuban Missile Crisis, Sputnik, or the other horrors of the Cold War. (For Gen X.Y,Z, and Millennials: The Cold War was not a weather pattern before global warming.) Watch Dr. Strangelove, read Herman Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War or Henry Kissinger’s 1957 strategic best-seller Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. We Boomers lived in fear that our silver spoons could become radioactive at any moment, and those childhood memories remain. 

As long as we’re doing generational history: What about the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, all within a four-year period when we were at the height of our political/civic development and the country seemed close to chaos? Only sixty-two days elapsed between the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Our silver spoons risked more than just radioactivity.  

And what about war? You never experienced the intense anxiety of the Vietnam draft lottery. If your birth date was selected, you could find yourself in full combat after only six weeks of basic training. According to Defense Department records and birth-year distributions, roughly 70-75% of the Americans who died in Vietnam were Baby Boomers, about 40-44,000 people.

More generally, Holzknecht and Appelbaum raise the difficult question of collective responsibility. As indicated, the speakers in the editorial blame an entire generation – a collective responsibility that assumes all members of the Boomer generation had more in common than just their birth dates. Imputing blame to such a large group denies individual action; it is too broad, too general.

Personal examples of such generalization: In 1968, simply because of my American accent, I was spat on in Paris for “causing the war in Vietnam” even though I had never served in the military and had completed a four-year form of alternate service. At the other extreme, some years later, I was treated to champagne by an elderly gentleman at a restaurant on the beaches in Normandy because, as an American, I had “saved France and the world from the Nazis.” In fact, D-Day happened before I was born. Neither the insult nor the compliment reflected anything I had done.

Generational blame requires a moral community. Tribal responsibilities, perhaps, may apply if there is genuine collectivist thinking and feeling. But collective responsibility follows only from the existence of a true collective. Mere birth dates are not sufficient grounds for imputed blame. Baby Boomers are very diverse; they have little in common except shared birth dates and shared history. 

Blaming an entire generation separates actions from individuals. If the interviewees blame Baby Boomers, they should be prepared to be blamed as well – something I hinted at in CounterPunch. (“Mary Robinson and Elders: Where Are the Young Leaders in Today’s Progressive Movement?” – CounterPunch.org).

To return to my experiences as someone with an American accent: Although I have lived outside the United States for over fifty years, can I be held responsible for what the current government is doing? By blaming Baby Boomers for many of the world’s problems, the interviewees have reduced individual responsibility to a simplistic generational level. As Eugenia Cheng shows in Unequal: The Math of When Things Do and Don’t Add Up, generalizations in Math and life blur individual specifics.

I am fully aware of Mitch McConnell’s latest fall and Joe Biden’s debate performance. I am also aware of 83-year-old Bernie Sanders lighting it up with his Fighting Oligarchy tour, and of Mick Jagger still going strong looking for “Satisfaction.” This Baby Boomer accepts his age but challenges attacks on his moral responsibility. 

In the end, every generation inherits both the achievements and the failures of those who came before. We Baby Boomers have lived through wars, assassinations, and nuclear fears, but we have also fought for civil rights and created new forms of culture and technology. History will judge us not by our birth dates, but by our individual actions. Respect, as Aretha sang, runs both ways.

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