Baby boomers, the 60s and now

1. Baby boom... and bust
Baby boomers like to trumpet their generation's achievements. But their fondness for conspicuous consumption and foreign travel has led to many a modern-day ill, from rising debt to environmental woes.
By Brendan O'Neill

This week, former US President Bill Clinton - perhaps the archetypal baby boomer - turns 60.

With his penchant for playing sax, feeling everyone's pain, and his admission that he flirted with marijuana (without inhaling), Clinton has come to symbolise the generation born between 1946 and 1964 who shook up Western society.

Now, as the boomers become "ageing hipsters", we're constantly being reminded of their achievements.

They gave us rock 'n' roll (which might explain the recent book, Baby Boomers and Hearing Loss), mod cons, the space race, computer science, and a rebellious disregard for the stiff-upper-lipped attitudes of earlier generations.

But did the baby boomers also leave behind a negative, even destructive legacy?

With their thirst for "stuff" - bigger houses, better cars, tastier grub - did they give rise to a culture of selfish consumption?

And by challenging old-fashioned moralism, did they inadvertently nurture a climate of promiscuity - even fuelling the spread of STDs?

Children of the revolution

The term "baby boomer" refers to those born during the period of increased birth rates when economic prosperity rose in many Western countries following World War II - during the relative peace and prosperity that followed the ravages of conflict and preceded the economic downturn of the 1970s.

They're probably best known for opposing the Vietnam War, having a relaxed attitude to sex 'n' drugs, and trying out less authoritarian methods of parenting.

A house in the (almost) country
But they're also, says US newspaper columnist Lewis W Diuguid, the "greediest generation".

"I am a baby boomer, born in 1955. My generation typifies today's excessive consumption," he says.

"We live in oversized homes in the suburbs, drive an excessive number of miles to our jobs in the cities, and we go on extravagant vacations. My generation wants it all, whatever the cost."

Diuguid says his generation has a worrying "sense of entitlement".

"My parents' generation lived in the Depression; they ate sparsely and recreated spartanly. But the Boomers think they should be given everything on a platter."

This uber-consumerism has contributed to today's environmental degradation, he says, where over-use of fossil fuels and over-production of carbon seems to be heating the planet.

"In the United States, we consume a grossly disproportionate amount of the world's energy, and the planet can't sustain it. We've become dependent on fossil fuel-generated amenities. We're too busy digging our own graves to reassess our lifestyles."

R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

Others argue that the boomers caused social breakdown, by challenging traditional roles and relationships and championing personal experimentation and sexual liberation. This, they argue, has undermined the "culture of respect" necessary to run society.

A report published earlier this year, Difficult Times Ahead for Baby Boomers?, said they bear some responsibility for "social and moral decline". On their watch, "divorce rates have more than doubled, AIDS has overshadowed the joys of sexual liberation... and many boomers have had to battle drug and drink addiction."

Californian academic Mike Males says it's a generation facing "boomergeddon". His book of that name says Californian Boomers suffer high levels of drug abuse, imprisonment and family instability.

The British newspaper columnist Melanie Phillips says there has been a similar decline in the UK thanks to our own boomer generation (which includes Tony Blair, born 1953, and Phillips herself, born 1951).

She blames "the onslaught on the family, the dismantling of national identity and the promotion of 'victim culture'" on the fact that "the baby boomers are now in control".

Environmental degradation, social breakdown, rampant consumerism, even disease ... is it any wonder that US commentator Joe Queenan (born 1950) once wrote: "If you want the God's honest truth, baby boomers are the most obnoxious people in the history of the human race."

Material world

But is this fair? Not at all, says Leonard Steinhorn, US author of The Greater Generation: In Defense of the Baby Boom Legacy. Those who criticise boomers - "usually snarky journalists", he says - forget that they helped to make equality a reality.

Frank Furedi on the 1960s

"Before boomers, women were told to stay at home and wear aprons; blacks were told to stay separate and not get uppity; Jews and other minorities were told to stay inconspicuous; gays were told to stay in denial and in the closet.

"That has all changed, and these changes didn't happen on their own. They didn't happen because Samantha on Bewitched wiggled her nose. They happened because people made them happen - in their homes, communities, schools, workplaces, institutions, media."

Steinhorn doesn't buy the idea that boomers are uniquely consumerist. He points out that the "Greatest Generation" - those born between 1911 and 1924, who went on to fight in WWII and later gave birth to the boomers - were also criticised for trying to keep up with the Joneses.

"Success in the West has long been defined by material prosperity. It was that way under the Greatest Generation, and even under the great leaders of the Enlightenment."

For Frank Furedi - the British-based sociologist born in Hungary who studied in the US in the 60s - the backlash is a product of our cautious political culture.

"At times, especially in the 60s, it seemed that anything was possible. This was no doubt an illusion, but it was the kind of illusion that stimulated many of us to try to find new ways of living.

"Yes, many boomers were self-indulgent and self-obsessed, and some still refuse to accept middle-age. But this generation left very little untouched. We could learn from that climate of daring and experimentation."


2. Debunking the ’60s with Ayers and Dohrn -- by Laura S. Washington

They are storied and iconic, America’s Numero Uno radical couple. In the ’60s, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers were activists and leaders in Students for a Democratic Society and the Weathermen. Dohrn, now 64, and Ayers, 61, played starring roles as Vietnam War dissenters. When their protests turned violent, they became fugitives from the law.

Forty years later, they are still in the game. I recently invited them to dinner at Yoshi’s Café in Chicago’s Boys Town. The national convention of Students for a Democratic Society was coming to Chi-Town. So what do these longtime Hyde Parkers think about those good old days, when radicals were radicals and the movement was muscular?

“The ‘good old days’ is a funny way to think about the left,” said Dohrn.

Ayers picked it up. “One of the things that sits very heavy on the progressive impulses today, and young people in particular, is the myth that there was a golden age in resistance, that the ’60s was where it was really at.”

Today Dohrn is a scholar and director of the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University. Ayers serves as a distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. They visit college campuses around the nation, where, Ayers says, “We spend a fair amount of time debunking the received wisdom of the ’60s.”

That “wisdom,” he explains, is that resisting the war “was easy to do and everybody did it.” It was a hard-fought slog.

Iraq brings its own lessons of protest. He points to a failure of leadership in the run-up to that war. “In March 2003, we participated in the largest antiwar movement in our lives, possibly in history. Now there was a leadership problem in a sense that the leadership said this is the demonstration that will prevent a war.

“It was a wrong thing to say,” Ayers argues, “because it didn’t help people who participated in that, particularly young people, to analyze the situation, to make sense of it, to make a contribution, and then to continue organizing. It said we’ll prevent a war. That war was not preventable.”

Forget the Democrats, they say. “The Democratic Party supported the war in Vietnam …” Dohrn began. Ayers cut in: “Led the war in Vietnam.”

“And they’ve been supporting, and leading this war,” Dohrn continued. “I don’t look to the Democratic Party. I don’t have hope for the Democratic Party. I think the Democratic Party is bankrupt. And I think the only answer is for us to build an independent, radical movement, and, I mean, the big ‘us.’ “

To mount a movement, “let’s look at history,” said Dohrn between bites of her tuna nicoise salad. “Lyndon Johnson was not a civil rights leader; Lyndon Johnson was responding to a civil rights movement. FDR was not a labor leader; FDR was responding to a labor movement. We confuse these things when we think about them today.”

Indeed, that’s “a great mistake. Lyndon Johnson was the most effective politician of his generation, but it took a movement independent of Lyndon Johnson to get Lyndon Johnson to use that effectiveness for the good.”

Still, I asked, aren’t progressives putting high hopes in November? Even leading Republicans admit that the Dems are likely to recapture at least one house of Congress.

So what? That’s not the point, Ayers says. Electoral politics is a tool to connect causes, like gay rights, disability rights, voting rights, human rights. “That’s how you use electoral politics. Not as an end in itself, but as an organizing mechanism. Our deepest belief, I think, is that we need to connect all these good projects and build the movement. …we should always be positioning ourselves, thinking, okay, if I’m involved in this next election, how am I positioned to help contribute to building a movement, raising consciousness, making the connections, and that’s a real tricky business.”

It wasn’t so tricky for Ned Lamont. On Aug. 8 Lamont blew out of nowhere to knock off the pro-war U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut Democratic senate primary. For my money, that vote is a strong predictor of the power war-weary voters will bring to the polls this fall.

Despite their critiques, Ayers and Dohrn are eternal optimists. Over coffee, Dohrn reflected that their activist days can serve as a metaphor for a “candle” that illuminates the past—and the future.

“The issue holding us back today, to me, is the idea that what you do won’t make a difference. The elite powers tell us the world is too complicated. They spend a lot of energy fostering despair,” she argues.

The candle shows us that “it’s not true,” Dohrn says. “I don’t think it’s all the complicated issues of what kind of an economic society we really want and how are we going to deal with globalization and all of that. Those are tremendously complex challenges but they’re solvable by human creativity and ingenuity and collective effort.”

Stay vigilant. The light will come.

(Laura S. Washington , an In These Times senior editor, teaches journalism at DePaul University and is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times)