KhrióMagazine / Inspire
27/05/2011
A little controversy from Ted Polhemus #3
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Did the Baby Boomers destroy the world?
Having become something of a hermit in the last couple of years, I tend to avoid dinner parties. All that small talk about house prices (I rent), schools (I don’t have kids) and work (I’ve never had a real job) drive me crazy and desperate to get home to watch TV with wine and a few cigarettes.
But I did go to a dinner party last week and it turned out to be nice – and nicely stimulating. I’ve spent much of the last year working on a new book – Our Generation (still no publisher!) – about the Baby Boom generation and it was interesting that the one thing the guests at this dinner party had in common was that we were all Baby Boomers – products of that bulging birth rate which followed on from WW2.
‘Shouldn’t we’, one woman asked, ‘feel guilty given that our generation took all the money and left the next generation with so little?’
Yes and no. Yes because, historically, that is exactly what happened. When I was growing up there was optimism everywhere and it was clear that we Boomers would have a more prosperous life than our parents. Now it looks like the reverse.
But no because a generation isn’t a cohesive social group with collective responsibility. One Boomer, George W. Bush invaded Iraq but other Boomers like me spoke out against it. Some Boomers became phenomenally wealthy, others struggle to make ends meet.
Furthermore, in the 60s, quite a lot of us Boomers were drawn to a Hippy lifestyle which questioned the value of materialism and sought a more spiritual, ecological, less consumerist way.
OK it didn’t work out that way for many of us naïve Hippies but, interestingly, the return to the Greed Is Good materialism which came in the 80s (and the foundations of the economic crises of the 21st century) was trumpeted by politicians like Regan and Thatcher who were from a pre-Boomer generation.
In economics as in so much else – Elvis, Jack Kerouac, Miles Davis, Warhol, The Beatles and The Stones were all pre-Boomers – the Baby Boomers just followed where others led.
What do you think?
