I call those that came of age in the late 60s the "Endless Summer" generation. They never thought they would get old, they can't come to terms with their own mortality, they can't see the younger generations as adults because that would mean that they are now what they thought of as their own parents. They are clinging to every bit of "youth" and power that they can touch and it is smothering Gen X, Millenials, Gen Z, and soon it will smother Alphas. This is why we have politicians in power who are older than dirt and STILL running for re-election. It is why our nation went to such extremes to during the pandemic, to save those who have already lived their best years but won't let the next generations live theirs. It is why our next presidential nominees will probably all be over 70 years old.
So much truth to this. Endless summer generation, afraid to get old, terrorized by the idea that are closer to death, clinging to SOMETHING to bring an illusion of control over that inevitability. The contrast between the bravery of their parents and the terror of the Boomers is just astounding to me.
Thank you for this. It explains a lot. I wish I had understood this a long time ago, it might have made understanding my parents a lot easier and maybe could have saved me a lot of heartache over the years.
Wonderful post and spot on for many things. Your characterizations of the successive generations is wonderfully accurate. Given a Washington career that began before you were out of diapers somewhat alters my perception.
You make a solid case for social failings, but those are symptoms and omits the engineers who orchestrate by policy just as the COVID crisis accomplished the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history.
"While I couldn’t necessarily see what the future held for me, I was generally optimistic that I could do whatever and go wherever I wanted without a hint that I would ever feel the boot of oppression on me. I didn’t trust the government and was always interested in the “unofficial” story, but I believed that overall, we had enough good people in high places to lead us according to traditional American principles. We were still the “good guys”.
All of that changed on 9/11. The world completely changed that day, and that’s the day that the America I knew ceased to exist. Oh, the following days and weeks were filled with patriotism. I remember weeping as I watched all of Congress sing “God Bless America” on the steps of the Capitol, with nary a hint of division or political posturing.
I believe that was the last genuine, authentic, united moment that the United States has witnessed."
If Washington had a single caring bone in their collective bodies everyone would know about 9-11 heroes who pulled off the greatest sea evacuation in history. Our bloated, corrupt system didn't even protect the airspace around the Pentagon. Does failure get any bigger or does the official story always stink like old fish?
The unity emotion shared by folks around the world is genuine but the political side is pure theater and it has been this way longer than my lifetime. The Iran Contra Gang were Bush Cheney White House. Ground Zero workers and injured public fought for ten years and public humiliation by Jon Stewart finally got related illness, cancers etc qualified for coverage.
Thanks, Pamela, for your comment. Thanks for your perspective. I think about the Eisenhower comment about the military industrial complex, or the JFK comment about massive powers and shadow government and knows that the systems have been infected for a long time. But I guess my rage and disappointment are personified in the image of a Boomer. That's what's most real to me. I can't wait to dig into the links you sent, and I'll check out your newsletter as well.
Always my pleasure, knowledge is power that multiplies when we pass it along. If there's ever a toxic history niche you fancy delving into and need better reference source please ask. Sharing links is second only favorite to sharing my photo collections!:~)
My parents are boomers. Our relationship has been strained by my choices for myself (injection refusal) and my family the past two years. My father shared some FB post about masks being just masks and implying those who don't want or choose to wear masks as selfish. I have an amazing daughter with lots of developmental challenges. Masks are truely damaging for her as they are for my other two kids. But it hits a lot of deeper for kids like her. Let's just say I haven't looked at my parents the same and never will. I love them and they gave me a great childhood but you don't put a burden like than on kids, especially our most vulnerable. Thanks for the post.
My parents were of "the Greatest Generation." My eldest sister remembers as a toddler, being picked up by her hair & bounced off walls by our mother. My earliest childhood memory is of my mother looking in a mirror smearing on lipstick & humming. Suddenly she turns, starts screaming, & belts me across the face. I was 3.
She took me off the bottle at 3 months. I spent the next decade or so being screamed at, hit & threatened for sucking my thumb.
When I was 5 my mother beat me until I peed all over myself, even as I begged her to let me go to the bathroom & then she could hit me. Then when dinner guests -- aunt, uncle, cousins arrived -- apologized for absent father cleaning up mess. Mary is such a baby she wet her pants. Made into a laughing stock with roomful of adults & children mocking & laughing at me.
At 5, they got us an easter chick. It somehow got into the laundry & she told the "funny" story for years after, giggling about listening to our pet frantically peeping as it was tossed about until drowning. When I was 8 my father got us a gsd puppy, Mike. He really was my sisters. He got mad at her & hit her so hard he knocked her off his feet. Mike rushed to her defense. So Mike had to go. At 10 they killed our hamster.
I was made to take piano lessons that year. After 3 months I had progressed so well that I played in a student recital. I played perfectly & everybody was whispering what a great job I did. Except my mother was in a rage. It was, "too easy a piece." And so I went into purgatory of perpetual punishment. No matter what I did was never good enough. Only 99 on a test? Only 100? What about the bonus point? Only #2 in your class? (#1 was genius daughter of NASA scientist & his genius wife )
I was 11 when my father started barging into the bathroom when I was on toilet or in the tub. They were the nee upper middle class -- my mother drove a benz & wore furs & diamonds. And while I sat on the toilet half naked, daddio stood over me berating me for "wasting toilet paper" & ordering me to use only a single square folded into quarters.
I was 14, last kid left, when they started taking off for weekends & leaving me literally locked out in the street.
And so on. Twice weekly violent rages, while my father looked the other way on went on his on rage.
At 16 they got me a horse, which I had never asked for but loved dearly. I spent a year being berated by my father as a liar & spoiled brat. As a result of his refusal to even consider that I had never once lied, Teago suffered unnecessarily for weeks from an untreated broken leg before being taken to the vet hospital & killed. The other boarders at the barn went to my father as a group & offered to testify if my father wanted to sue the perps who broke his leg. Instead he went off on them for not coming to him sooner. That he had assumed I was lying.
That filthy pedophile killed my boy as surely as if he took a sledge hammer & smashed his hock himself. He died alone, afraid, at the hands of strangers.
We were good kids. I was called down to the principal's office exactly once, when I was 17. For my *mother's* horrific behavior, which he asked me to speak to her about!
Spoiled Mary was given a car for graduation.
*Paid for with wages that he stole from me!*
My real graduation "gift" was a letter from the IRS demanding immediate payment of back taxes, along with interest & penalties, or face prosecution & prison.
The coup de grace was when he had the fucking gall to show up on my doorstep 10 years later, unannounced unexpected, as I was about to head out to my first party since I was a kid.
He wanted a favor & drove 7 hours to get it
He wanted me to testify on his behalf in a lawsuit.
He was planning to sue my middle sister -- his "favorite" daughter -- and her ex for custody of their son. To take with him to the opposite side of the country. That dirty sob actually thought I'd help him steal my sister*s son!!!
Mary, I appreciate your comment, and I'm so sorry for the trauma that you've experienced from the people who were closest and should have cared the most for you. Not everyone in that generation was great, and that's especially true for you personally.
The point of the article was that one generation beat back the darkest forces the world has ever seen, and then the subsequent generations have completely given themselves back over to that same darkness, just manifested in a different light.
Your point is taken, though, and I'm considering taking down this post. I think it might be doing more harm than good.
HI BHerr, Please don't take it down. It's not doing harm, just forcing the demons out and that's a good thing. As a fellow Gen X'er, I totally resonate with this post, albeit, everyone is different and all generations have intricacies and their own unique dilemmas. I think since so called generations have been "named" and therefore "marketed to" and used as collateral, there was most likely a smooth transition from childhood to adulthood, as the teen years became a marketing wonder, a berneysian tool and something to be exploited and used in division..The evil that inhabits families of any and all generations, has been there well before they were given names and exploited by divisive and destructive forces. Thanks.
The last thing we need is intergenerational warfare.
Every generation has both started wars & been stuck fighting them. Every one.
The same generation that fought WW2 sent kids to kill or be killed in Viet Nam. For what?
Every war is the darkest the world has ever seen. They get sequentially bigger because there are more of us, communications are faster, distances shorter. It seems darker because we're on the middle of it.
FWIW, my experience of boomer parents was my late 20s as a p/t riding teacher with 8 year old groups on shetland ponies on Saturday mornings. One or both parents were there. We handed the kids brushes & taught them how to groom & put on the saddle & bridle. The parents sat as a group & chatted with each other & encouraged from the sidelines. Everybody laughed & had a good time, except when the fat stubborn mare would make a beeline to a patch of grass, drop her head & refuse to budge, while the kid who drew the short straw tugged & cried til someone ran to the rescue. Afterward, they invariably had brought treats for their ponies. The parents were there & they cared.
Fast forward to the late 90s & I went back to teaching p/t. Kids were carted around from activity to activity. They were exhausted, bored, uninterested. We brought them groomed & tacked up horses. They sit on them for an hour & then hung around waiting for the ride home. They didn't care about the horses at all. Didn't pick up a brush or bring a carrot or even scritch a neck. Younger kids showed up without appropriate clothes for winter -- bare heads, no gloves or scarves. We actually kept a supply of those to hand out. I remember a young boy just dropped off from a trip to Europe in a thin level jacket coughing & sneezing with terrible head cold. I gave his father hell when he picked him up. They appreciated nothing. It was miserable, I pitied the unloved horses & walked away.
I've been taught, if you don't have anything to say remain silence. I will remain silence for my comments to your blanket statement about the Boomers, is so off the mark.
Interesting piece from Wayne Dyer about Letting Go... What is over, is over. Might help with the blaming.
No, I'd love to hear your comments and how I'm off the mark. If I need to correct my thinking, then help me. Show me how I'm wrong.
There's blaming, and then there's accountability. There's discussion on why and how we got to where we are, and this is my assessment, from my vantage point.
If I would have left it at just blaming, then that would be unhelpful. Everything I do, I do with the intent of bringing healing and finding a way forward, and that's what I'm doing with this article. But I don't think it's wrong to assign blame where blame is due. It's a hard truth to hear, but it's the truth.
I will look at your link. I'm not hanging on to resentment. I've made my peace with how bad my parent's generation has failed the world and how much damage they've done since the 60s. But I'm not going to let them off the hook. If you're part of that generation and take offense to what I've said, so be it. Please enlighten me.
Try looking at more than the last 70 years. Look at your Bible. Same shit, different millennium. Look at hundreds of years. Don't stop conveniently at 3.5 generations.
No one generation is to blame unless you want to blame the first. If Adam & Eve had *just said no* to thay damn apple.
We got our failings from our "greatest generation" parents. Their dna & their response to their parent's failings. Who survived WW1, but never got Cronkite's "Greatest Generation" nickname, just the roaring 20s.
The bottom line is every war is a resource war. All. Of. Them.
Iirc, there is some reason to believe FDR *knew* about Pearl Harbor in advance, that it was LIHOP in order to sucker us into the War. Because the same evil families wanted us dying for their benefit back then as those behind WW1, 911/war on terra, & c19. WW2 was as big a marketing campaign as the rest of them. Do some digging beyond the coffee table books & pbs documentaries.
Every generation has their robber barons and their sheeple. But also their cultural transformers... the baby boomers brought us rock and roll, civil rights, sexual liberation, and the human potential movement.
Your attack on Boomers, of which I am one, is uncalled for and inaccurate. Every generation rebels in some way against the establishment. I did not participate in the chaos but many who did were rebelling against the secular, quasi-religious-for-show aspect of the Post WWII industrialization of this country. Your generation is a milk-toast generation in response to the Boomer generation. Don't make waves, believe the institutions, avoid conflict whenever possible.
You should read Neil Howe's boopk "The 4th Turning" Much to be learned about the personalities of the generations there. A must read to fully understand social cycles.
I think it's incredibly accurate, Lane, or I wouldn't have written it.
Our society is incredibly sick. Your parents beat back the darkest evil and stood for something eternal. If that generation did that, where did the sickness in our society fully manifest? It wasn't them. It was your generation, and then your example lead to my "milk-toast" generation and down through the abominations we're seeing now.
The reason that you believe we're "milk toast" is because we learned how to be nerfed. Once you boomers got comfortable after raising all of your hell in your youth, you experienced a profound alienation from the very principles that tethered your parents to the things that matter. You lost your religion, your direction, your soul. You became humanists, clinging to the next life line, searching for relevance. My generation took that example of fear and purposelessness and became shells. I don't absolve us, as I said in the article. But it was learned behavior, it always is. Where did we learn it?
How is that inaccurate? It's certainly not a hot take.
Do you not see that your generation opened Pandora's box? I'm not saying at all that there weren't very substantial and amazing advancements and progress that your generation carved out. You transformed the face of humanity for good in many ways, and maybe I should have acknowledged that a little more.
But that fact is, while evil has always existed, if we look at the generational fossil record over the last 70 years, where did the tree get bent? 1960-1985, prime boomer years. And when the trunk grows bent, the rest of the tree follows.
This isn't a personal attack on you, either. I don't know you. You seem angry and defensive, like I've touched on a nerve here and in another post. And granted, in this this post, I also show my raw emotion towards your generation. I won't deny that. Maybe it is uncalled for, but in this, am I not doing the very opposite of what you accuse my generation of being? I'm making waves and not running from conflict. You should be proud.
I call those that came of age in the late 60s the "Endless Summer" generation. They never thought they would get old, they can't come to terms with their own mortality, they can't see the younger generations as adults because that would mean that they are now what they thought of as their own parents. They are clinging to every bit of "youth" and power that they can touch and it is smothering Gen X, Millenials, Gen Z, and soon it will smother Alphas. This is why we have politicians in power who are older than dirt and STILL running for re-election. It is why our nation went to such extremes to during the pandemic, to save those who have already lived their best years but won't let the next generations live theirs. It is why our next presidential nominees will probably all be over 70 years old.
So much truth to this. Endless summer generation, afraid to get old, terrorized by the idea that are closer to death, clinging to SOMETHING to bring an illusion of control over that inevitability. The contrast between the bravery of their parents and the terror of the Boomers is just astounding to me.
Thank you for this. It explains a lot. I wish I had understood this a long time ago, it might have made understanding my parents a lot easier and maybe could have saved me a lot of heartache over the years.
Wonderful post and spot on for many things. Your characterizations of the successive generations is wonderfully accurate. Given a Washington career that began before you were out of diapers somewhat alters my perception.
You make a solid case for social failings, but those are symptoms and omits the engineers who orchestrate by policy just as the COVID crisis accomplished the largest upward transfer of wealth in human history.
"While I couldn’t necessarily see what the future held for me, I was generally optimistic that I could do whatever and go wherever I wanted without a hint that I would ever feel the boot of oppression on me. I didn’t trust the government and was always interested in the “unofficial” story, but I believed that overall, we had enough good people in high places to lead us according to traditional American principles. We were still the “good guys”.
All of that changed on 9/11. The world completely changed that day, and that’s the day that the America I knew ceased to exist. Oh, the following days and weeks were filled with patriotism. I remember weeping as I watched all of Congress sing “God Bless America” on the steps of the Capitol, with nary a hint of division or political posturing.
I believe that was the last genuine, authentic, united moment that the United States has witnessed."
If Washington had a single caring bone in their collective bodies everyone would know about 9-11 heroes who pulled off the greatest sea evacuation in history. Our bloated, corrupt system didn't even protect the airspace around the Pentagon. Does failure get any bigger or does the official story always stink like old fish?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDOrzF7B2Kg
The unity emotion shared by folks around the world is genuine but the political side is pure theater and it has been this way longer than my lifetime. The Iran Contra Gang were Bush Cheney White House. Ground Zero workers and injured public fought for ten years and public humiliation by Jon Stewart finally got related illness, cancers etc qualified for coverage.
Declassified Archive Iran Contra https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB210/index.htm
Catherine Austin Fitts ~ Best short lesson on how the game is rigged.
https://dillonreadandco.com/
Thanks, Pamela, for your comment. Thanks for your perspective. I think about the Eisenhower comment about the military industrial complex, or the JFK comment about massive powers and shadow government and knows that the systems have been infected for a long time. But I guess my rage and disappointment are personified in the image of a Boomer. That's what's most real to me. I can't wait to dig into the links you sent, and I'll check out your newsletter as well.
Always my pleasure, knowledge is power that multiplies when we pass it along. If there's ever a toxic history niche you fancy delving into and need better reference source please ask. Sharing links is second only favorite to sharing my photo collections!:~)
My parents are boomers. Our relationship has been strained by my choices for myself (injection refusal) and my family the past two years. My father shared some FB post about masks being just masks and implying those who don't want or choose to wear masks as selfish. I have an amazing daughter with lots of developmental challenges. Masks are truely damaging for her as they are for my other two kids. But it hits a lot of deeper for kids like her. Let's just say I haven't looked at my parents the same and never will. I love them and they gave me a great childhood but you don't put a burden like than on kids, especially our most vulnerable. Thanks for the post.
Fuck the intergenerational warfare.
My parents were of "the Greatest Generation." My eldest sister remembers as a toddler, being picked up by her hair & bounced off walls by our mother. My earliest childhood memory is of my mother looking in a mirror smearing on lipstick & humming. Suddenly she turns, starts screaming, & belts me across the face. I was 3.
She took me off the bottle at 3 months. I spent the next decade or so being screamed at, hit & threatened for sucking my thumb.
When I was 5 my mother beat me until I peed all over myself, even as I begged her to let me go to the bathroom & then she could hit me. Then when dinner guests -- aunt, uncle, cousins arrived -- apologized for absent father cleaning up mess. Mary is such a baby she wet her pants. Made into a laughing stock with roomful of adults & children mocking & laughing at me.
At 5, they got us an easter chick. It somehow got into the laundry & she told the "funny" story for years after, giggling about listening to our pet frantically peeping as it was tossed about until drowning. When I was 8 my father got us a gsd puppy, Mike. He really was my sisters. He got mad at her & hit her so hard he knocked her off his feet. Mike rushed to her defense. So Mike had to go. At 10 they killed our hamster.
I was made to take piano lessons that year. After 3 months I had progressed so well that I played in a student recital. I played perfectly & everybody was whispering what a great job I did. Except my mother was in a rage. It was, "too easy a piece." And so I went into purgatory of perpetual punishment. No matter what I did was never good enough. Only 99 on a test? Only 100? What about the bonus point? Only #2 in your class? (#1 was genius daughter of NASA scientist & his genius wife )
I was 11 when my father started barging into the bathroom when I was on toilet or in the tub. They were the nee upper middle class -- my mother drove a benz & wore furs & diamonds. And while I sat on the toilet half naked, daddio stood over me berating me for "wasting toilet paper" & ordering me to use only a single square folded into quarters.
I was 14, last kid left, when they started taking off for weekends & leaving me literally locked out in the street.
And so on. Twice weekly violent rages, while my father looked the other way on went on his on rage.
At 16 they got me a horse, which I had never asked for but loved dearly. I spent a year being berated by my father as a liar & spoiled brat. As a result of his refusal to even consider that I had never once lied, Teago suffered unnecessarily for weeks from an untreated broken leg before being taken to the vet hospital & killed. The other boarders at the barn went to my father as a group & offered to testify if my father wanted to sue the perps who broke his leg. Instead he went off on them for not coming to him sooner. That he had assumed I was lying.
That filthy pedophile killed my boy as surely as if he took a sledge hammer & smashed his hock himself. He died alone, afraid, at the hands of strangers.
We were good kids. I was called down to the principal's office exactly once, when I was 17. For my *mother's* horrific behavior, which he asked me to speak to her about!
Spoiled Mary was given a car for graduation.
*Paid for with wages that he stole from me!*
My real graduation "gift" was a letter from the IRS demanding immediate payment of back taxes, along with interest & penalties, or face prosecution & prison.
The coup de grace was when he had the fucking gall to show up on my doorstep 10 years later, unannounced unexpected, as I was about to head out to my first party since I was a kid.
He wanted a favor & drove 7 hours to get it
He wanted me to testify on his behalf in a lawsuit.
He was planning to sue my middle sister -- his "favorite" daughter -- and her ex for custody of their son. To take with him to the opposite side of the country. That dirty sob actually thought I'd help him steal my sister*s son!!!
Greatest Generation my ass!
Mary, I appreciate your comment, and I'm so sorry for the trauma that you've experienced from the people who were closest and should have cared the most for you. Not everyone in that generation was great, and that's especially true for you personally.
The point of the article was that one generation beat back the darkest forces the world has ever seen, and then the subsequent generations have completely given themselves back over to that same darkness, just manifested in a different light.
Your point is taken, though, and I'm considering taking down this post. I think it might be doing more harm than good.
HI BHerr, Please don't take it down. It's not doing harm, just forcing the demons out and that's a good thing. As a fellow Gen X'er, I totally resonate with this post, albeit, everyone is different and all generations have intricacies and their own unique dilemmas. I think since so called generations have been "named" and therefore "marketed to" and used as collateral, there was most likely a smooth transition from childhood to adulthood, as the teen years became a marketing wonder, a berneysian tool and something to be exploited and used in division..The evil that inhabits families of any and all generations, has been there well before they were given names and exploited by divisive and destructive forces. Thanks.
The last thing we need is intergenerational warfare.
Every generation has both started wars & been stuck fighting them. Every one.
The same generation that fought WW2 sent kids to kill or be killed in Viet Nam. For what?
Every war is the darkest the world has ever seen. They get sequentially bigger because there are more of us, communications are faster, distances shorter. It seems darker because we're on the middle of it.
FWIW, my experience of boomer parents was my late 20s as a p/t riding teacher with 8 year old groups on shetland ponies on Saturday mornings. One or both parents were there. We handed the kids brushes & taught them how to groom & put on the saddle & bridle. The parents sat as a group & chatted with each other & encouraged from the sidelines. Everybody laughed & had a good time, except when the fat stubborn mare would make a beeline to a patch of grass, drop her head & refuse to budge, while the kid who drew the short straw tugged & cried til someone ran to the rescue. Afterward, they invariably had brought treats for their ponies. The parents were there & they cared.
Fast forward to the late 90s & I went back to teaching p/t. Kids were carted around from activity to activity. They were exhausted, bored, uninterested. We brought them groomed & tacked up horses. They sit on them for an hour & then hung around waiting for the ride home. They didn't care about the horses at all. Didn't pick up a brush or bring a carrot or even scritch a neck. Younger kids showed up without appropriate clothes for winter -- bare heads, no gloves or scarves. We actually kept a supply of those to hand out. I remember a young boy just dropped off from a trip to Europe in a thin level jacket coughing & sneezing with terrible head cold. I gave his father hell when he picked him up. They appreciated nothing. It was miserable, I pitied the unloved horses & walked away.
I've been taught, if you don't have anything to say remain silence. I will remain silence for my comments to your blanket statement about the Boomers, is so off the mark.
Interesting piece from Wayne Dyer about Letting Go... What is over, is over. Might help with the blaming.
https://youtu.be/piDbuUdEuMU
No, I'd love to hear your comments and how I'm off the mark. If I need to correct my thinking, then help me. Show me how I'm wrong.
There's blaming, and then there's accountability. There's discussion on why and how we got to where we are, and this is my assessment, from my vantage point.
If I would have left it at just blaming, then that would be unhelpful. Everything I do, I do with the intent of bringing healing and finding a way forward, and that's what I'm doing with this article. But I don't think it's wrong to assign blame where blame is due. It's a hard truth to hear, but it's the truth.
I will look at your link. I'm not hanging on to resentment. I've made my peace with how bad my parent's generation has failed the world and how much damage they've done since the 60s. But I'm not going to let them off the hook. If you're part of that generation and take offense to what I've said, so be it. Please enlighten me.
Try looking at more than the last 70 years. Look at your Bible. Same shit, different millennium. Look at hundreds of years. Don't stop conveniently at 3.5 generations.
No one generation is to blame unless you want to blame the first. If Adam & Eve had *just said no* to thay damn apple.
We got our failings from our "greatest generation" parents. Their dna & their response to their parent's failings. Who survived WW1, but never got Cronkite's "Greatest Generation" nickname, just the roaring 20s.
The bottom line is every war is a resource war. All. Of. Them.
Iirc, there is some reason to believe FDR *knew* about Pearl Harbor in advance, that it was LIHOP in order to sucker us into the War. Because the same evil families wanted us dying for their benefit back then as those behind WW1, 911/war on terra, & c19. WW2 was as big a marketing campaign as the rest of them. Do some digging beyond the coffee table books & pbs documentaries.
They didn’t get the roaring 20s, they were born in the roaring 20s.
You are in charge of correcting your thinking. stay well & take care.
no more to be said but watch the video
Every generation has their robber barons and their sheeple. But also their cultural transformers... the baby boomers brought us rock and roll, civil rights, sexual liberation, and the human potential movement.
Your attack on Boomers, of which I am one, is uncalled for and inaccurate. Every generation rebels in some way against the establishment. I did not participate in the chaos but many who did were rebelling against the secular, quasi-religious-for-show aspect of the Post WWII industrialization of this country. Your generation is a milk-toast generation in response to the Boomer generation. Don't make waves, believe the institutions, avoid conflict whenever possible.
You should read Neil Howe's boopk "The 4th Turning" Much to be learned about the personalities of the generations there. A must read to fully understand social cycles.
I think it's incredibly accurate, Lane, or I wouldn't have written it.
Our society is incredibly sick. Your parents beat back the darkest evil and stood for something eternal. If that generation did that, where did the sickness in our society fully manifest? It wasn't them. It was your generation, and then your example lead to my "milk-toast" generation and down through the abominations we're seeing now.
The reason that you believe we're "milk toast" is because we learned how to be nerfed. Once you boomers got comfortable after raising all of your hell in your youth, you experienced a profound alienation from the very principles that tethered your parents to the things that matter. You lost your religion, your direction, your soul. You became humanists, clinging to the next life line, searching for relevance. My generation took that example of fear and purposelessness and became shells. I don't absolve us, as I said in the article. But it was learned behavior, it always is. Where did we learn it?
How is that inaccurate? It's certainly not a hot take.
Do you not see that your generation opened Pandora's box? I'm not saying at all that there weren't very substantial and amazing advancements and progress that your generation carved out. You transformed the face of humanity for good in many ways, and maybe I should have acknowledged that a little more.
But that fact is, while evil has always existed, if we look at the generational fossil record over the last 70 years, where did the tree get bent? 1960-1985, prime boomer years. And when the trunk grows bent, the rest of the tree follows.
This isn't a personal attack on you, either. I don't know you. You seem angry and defensive, like I've touched on a nerve here and in another post. And granted, in this this post, I also show my raw emotion towards your generation. I won't deny that. Maybe it is uncalled for, but in this, am I not doing the very opposite of what you accuse my generation of being? I'm making waves and not running from conflict. You should be proud.
Your article is excellent- it would appear some are a) not giving it the reflection and thought it deserves and b) taking it very personally.
You are not the first to ascribe thoughtful blame to the boomer generation, you are not wrong so please keep up the great work.