[NYer]

Ehrenhalt is executive editor of Governing magazine, and author of two books on American politics: "The United States of Ambition" (1991) and "The Lost City" (1995).

[NYer]

The devil is in the details ....

"Faust was offered a simple form of relief for his confinement: He contracted with Mephistopheles for 24 years of unending novelty, physical gratification and encyclopedic knowledge. The baby boomers didn't sign any such contract, but as they became adults the most fortunate soon found themselves tasting similar treats: the erosion of sexual restraint, the ability to travel virtually anywhere, magic electronic devices that brought instant knowledge and entertainment even Faust never imagined, and most of all, ever-expanding choice—the freedom to make important life decisions and then unmake them at will: new locations, new spouses, new careers, all subject to endless re-evaluation out of a concern that something more exciting might lie around the corner."

Catholic Ping - Please freepmail me if you want on/off this list

[Red Badger]

...born in the early years after World War II grew up in a world of stability and order: lasting marriages, moms at home, fathers with permanent employment, local merchants who knew us and watched us, neighborhoods where the people next door were ever-present and predictable....

And then we screwed it up..........

[2banana]

It is not the boomer bankrupting us - it is the greedy senior citizens of the last 30 years that are.

They vote - and they vote for the politician that promises the most for them.

[Bigg Red]

Even though it is from MSNBC, he makes some valid points. My generation made its very messy bed, and now we have to lie in it.

[Phlap]

The headline implies they have a soul to sell. I, for one, doubt that.

[MNJohnnie]

Yep it sure looks that way. The boomber managed to screw up everything that they touched.

[telebob]

Please. This is some pretty idiotic navel gazing by a guy who obviously has never done anything in the world but has been content to be a passive observer.

I was born the same year as this dunce and I just ran it flat out on all the uphill parts, the good and the bad. Now that I'm on the downhill slide, I've still got the pedal to the metal.

What's this guy talking about? Some mythical world of yesteryear? It never was like that and if all you've ever done with your life is indulge in a lot of chin stroking rather than building shit (ala all the technological marvels that the author apparently assumes just sprang out of nowhere) then I guess one might naturally be attracted to some dream world out of Leave it to Beaver.

[Vaquero]

Where the heck was the so called "Greatest Generation"????

What happened in the 60's? The finger can be directly pointed at our WWII fighters and Depression Survivors, who, without thought of consequence, spoiled the living sh*t out of their kids, so they can "have it better" than they had it.

Please... ...its 10 O'clock, do you know where YOUR children are?

[Luke21]

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's all our fault. We've paid taxes all our lives while the federal government raided Social Security to give it to every type of parasite. I drive these people to the SS Admin for their appointments. Mental patients, 30 year olds with bad backs, alcoholics...Yeah, it's all our fault. We don't deserve anything...We are going to bankrupt our kids...Yeah, yeah..

[ansel12]

"we were the insolent teenagers of the 1950s;"



Just look at the dates people, boomers 1946 to 1964, the country is run by people in their fifties plus.

At the end of 1959 the oldest boomer was 14, at the end of 1969 the boomers ranged from 23 to 5.

Long after the Vietnam war and the sixties, in 1980 when Reagan was elected, boomers were 16 to 34 years of age.

We are only now in the "Boomer Era"

[JmyBryan]

Any generation "plagued" by the enormous affluence enjoyed by those living and thriving in the modern United States would have problems. No past generation even dreamed of affluence of the measure that our young children now enjoy. This sickening angst-ridden pap these days, typified by the expression that we are "addicted to oil", is pure self-loathing - original sin dressed up in media technicolor.

Newsflash: We are all going to die.

[RightWhale]

And then came Rock 'n Roll. Plato warned us.

[Steve_Seattle]

I was recently reading a book about Jim Morrison and The Doors, and there were some in my generation - most of them now rabid Democrats - who did make very conscious choices in favor of "the dark side." They were explicitly anti-Christian and explicitly pagan in the worst sense of the term: promiscuous, irreverent, cynical, self-centered, and arrogant. Some of us just enjoyed the music of that era because it sounded good, but others took the message quite seriously and literally.

[stylin19a]

My cohort of early baby boomers has been called a lot of names in its nearly six decades of existence—we were the insolent teenagers of the 1950s

sincer the boomers start is considered 1946, i suppose, technically, a 13 year old in 1959, could be considered "insolent".

[pabianice]

Too many of my generation are simply selfish bums. That's all the analysis needed.

[Catholic Canadian]

The Boomers have brought us all kinds of wonderful things.....the homosexual revolution, feminism, rampant leftism. Pretty funny when I'm the child of a boomer and have reverted back to family values and conservatism. I suppose it's all cyclical.

[redgolum]

The boomers were spoiled and coddled to the point where personal accountability vanished. Not all of them but a lot.

The following generations have been marching along side, sadly.

[Rocky]

The author makes a good point. The most vocal ones of our generation reshaped our society, and not for the better. But many of them are proud to this day of their contributions.

These vocal ones rallied much of their generation to protest against the Vietnam war. They took advantage of a flaw in human nature to leverage the anti-war sentiment for the benefit of their social reengineering program. The flaw in human nature of which I speak is the tendency of people to get overcommitted to one cause (the protest against Vietnam) and to not notice that other members of the movement are manipulating the cause for the sake of other unrelated goals.

The leaders of the movement were socialists (communists) who wanted more than anything to destroy the political/economic system of the United States. To do this, they had to gain control of the educational system and destroy the moral/religious backbone of our society.

Much of the activity started on college campuses. There were protests, endless speeches in plazas, sit-ins, love-ins, riots. It was our generation against the older generation. "When we get in control, things are going to change."

There was a rejection of any moral authority. Relativism reigned supreme, as it still does today. Women burned their bras. Couples did outrageous things in public. Proclaiming "free love", every sexual moral standard was violated.

Hollywood catered to the changing morals and made trashier movies, with more explicit language and sexual scenes. Radio stations played music that badmouthed every part of our society, and broke every taboo. This has been going on for so long now, that most people think it was always like that. But it wasn't.

And then there was the rampant use of drugs. Marijuana, LSD, mescaline, uppers, downers, and heroin for the real hard-liners. References to drugs appeared in much of the music and in a lot of movies. The more that young people thought, "Hey, everybody's doing it," the more they were encouraged to try it themselves.

And behind the scenes, the socialists were cheering. Now they make up most of the faculty on college campuses and have graduated a generation of brainwashed, unthinking parrots as public school teachers. They have also taken over journalism.

Socialism has failed everywhere it's been tried. But that doesn't stop the religious fervor that these people have for Marx. In a fit of self-loathing, they want to bring down the structure of our society even though it would mean their own demise.

Maybe some of the hangers-on have had second thoughts, as the author of this article expresses. But the true believers are still pushing their agenda. They have truly sold their souls to the devil.

[DustyMoment]

But maybe it would be more appropriate to think of us as the Faustian generation. We didn't exactly sell our souls to the devil—not collectively, anyway—but as we jog toward senior status, it's hard to escape the sense that we were complicit in our own unique kind of unholy bargain.

Thanks, Alan, but include me out of your little fairytale. Not every boomer turned on and tuned out, nor do we all live in the nostalgia of the 60s. The 1960s that I recall were a period of turbulence; when America was fighting two wars - one in Vietnaam, the other here at home. As the Timothy O'Leary crowd toked up and got naked, some of us voluntarily abandoned our selfishness and fought for our country! We didn't stand around waiting for the government to do something for us, or give us something, we went out and made do for ourselves. Instead of perverting and corrupting the higher education institutions, we took responsibility and helped America move forward, in spite of the effort by the leftist "gimme" crowd to just take whatever they could get.

I don't know what boomers the leftists nostalgically wax and wane about, but they don't represent me or any of the boomers I have known along the way.

[DustyMoment]

By the by - For those of you here who blame the ills of the world on the boomers; please, do yourselves a favor! Save this entire thread - put it away for 30 years or so and, when your kids and your grandkids start blaming you and your generation for everything that is wrong in THEIR world, pull this tattered, yellowed thread out and re-read the things you wrote.