A good opinion piece about baby boomers and their detrimental effects on the U.S. Taken from this blog and reproduced below.
As an Xer raised by a Boomer I was constantly fed rhetoric about how great the summer of love was, man, and how the people stood together against the man, man, and it was groovy, man. Of course, our parents were never home, man, because they were off looking for truth or Zen or some platform shoes or some such seventies pap that preceded the Yucky Yuppie era when they apparently found themselves (oh, there I am!) and discovered that ideology was a shit sandwich without a BMW and a nice big house in a gated community on the white side of town to wash it down with.
Groovy. Summer of love, peace, man, tune in, turn on and drop out; you were always a bunch of followers and will always be nothing but followers. My only curiosity now is what were you idiots smoking that made you all think that you were so originally profound and where can I get some? Or explain to me, if you will, why a group of people who said they didn’t trust anyone over 30 is suddenly espousing how great it is to be 50, and why suddenly, they can’t seem to hear anyone under 30 (or 40), or even let us voice our concerns in a legitimate venue.
God forbid that we aspire to career-track jobs while laboring under an opportunistic boomer who’ll gladly use (read: steal) our creative outputs to bolster their flagging intellectual facilities, then toss us away faster than a BIC lighter at a crackhead’s house. This is a generation that is so busy protecting their own self interests that they’ve never hesitated to annihilate anyone from the ranks who represented a threat to their continued existence on the top of their respective dunghills.
Generation “Me” brought us divorce; plastic surgery; air pollution; water shortages; Michael Jackson; rampant narcissism; pop music; drugs and wars on drugs; latchkey children; AIDS; herpes; Pac-man, prison culture; corporate logos on our clothes; savings and loan scandals; bad movies; worse TV; political correctness; Prozac; sobered-up soccer moms; SUV’s; declining SAT scores; media blowjobs; Bill Clinton; a “C” student president who — quite frankly — has the IQ of a bush; cornball nostalgia; youth worship; and a flip-flop hypocrisy so blatant we are left with no doubt that Senator Kerry is, indeed, a Boomer. This is a generation that bridged the gap between Beat Intellectuals and Beavis and Butthead. Good going, man. Oh yeah, boomers were cool, still are. Like Joe Cool or James Dean. Imagine a whole generation that was so intent on looking cool they forgot how to be cool. Far out, man. Why don’t you all go to a reunion rally and spit on some veterans for old times’ sake, eh?
And then there’s the youth who, having narrowly escaped Amerikkka’s draconian prison culture and, while in between shifts at McDonald’s, get our widdle heads patted by patronizing boomers like we were still their kids, like THEY aren’t the most immature, egocentric, greedy, self-indulgent generation on the planet, like this bunch of Peter Pan I-won’t-grow-up Fairies have the right to pat anyone on the head, and say, “Oh, isn’t the angry little X generation funny? They wanna be like us.”
No, we don’t want to be like you. You’re a bunch of GOP voting, tax cut grubbing, narcissistic, self-interested, whining, immature, hypocritical, deficit-driving SUV whores. We want your fat, old, thieving asses to retire already; or better yet, die, and stop perpetuating the lies of a pathetic culture that facilitates your arthritic last clutch at our purses. And don’t even think about sending our little brothers off to a war that your fucking president started, we already have to pay for it for the rest of our lives.
I guess we should thank our elders, since at the ripe old age of 35 many of us are still allowed to live at home, because our predecessors priced the home market out of our reach with their hoarde of interest-only loans and 30-year second mortgages that their grandchildren will be left to pay off; we have no health insurance; no job prospects because we still have to compete with their tired, incompetent, stoned asses; and we’re making a dollar or two over minimum wage (which has been so generously raised all the way up to still below poverty level).
To add insult to injury, school was virtually free for their generation, and now that they’re in charge we can’t fucking afford college (because our Pell grants paid for our elders’ tax cuts), yet they want to tout how much more educated their generation is than everyone else. Big fucking deal, most of the Boom boomed off to college to avoid the draft. We’re a significantly smaller generation than our predecessors’ generation; why can’t we have free community college? Oh, that’s right, it’s because the Rubber Baby Boomer Bogarts were done with college, so, obviously, nobody else needed any education. And, while I’m on the subject of education, my bogus little Boomers, you’ve made really lousy mentors to us, too. Saved by Zero, indeed.
And now they want our social security? Just because this generation of spoiled little wrinkled-up kids are in hoc up to their nipped and injected jowls to pay off the lease on their Escalades, Barbie-Doll boobies, Viagra copays, coke parties, trophy wives, American Express fees, and the second mortgages on their bubble-economy condominiums doesn’t mean that X’s retirement pittance should be made available to finance their endless supply of narcissism.
Even our fresh, young art has been forced into subservience to the Boom’s antiquated crap. Carlos Santana whores out shoes at Nordstrom’s, from somewhere beyond the stratosphere Jerry Garcia’s corpse pimps his primitive prints on upscale neckwear (as if Deadheads actually shop at Macy’s) and, if I see one more overhyped reunion tour of ancient rockstars dressed in tight leather pants gyrating their stuffed scrotums around on my TV screen — when I’m done puking — I’m going to embalm Keith Richards because, and I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this but, Keith’s corpse is getting a little flyblown.
Our day will come, my Boomer friends, and your bar tabs are going to be marked “pay in full.” I envision poorly funded state hospices and ubiquitous rows of paupers’ graves. And then finally we’ll be free of the yoke of Boomer’s pseudo idealism, classic-rock radio, sugar-frosted nostalgia, instant gratification, feminist backlash, bellbottoms, lip service, hip-hip-hippie-hypocrisy, fashionably tragic flower-children, hearing about The Haight, Robert Plant solo efforts, self-help books, male-pattern balding mixed with ponytails, and the rest of the soul-sucking corpulence that is the Boom generation’s ultimate legacy. But have no fear, our Boomer Babies’ll leave their droolmarks on the world yet: a mass of silicone titties and hair plugs rotting in every grave.
Oh, yeah, you changed the world and now it’s great to be old. Lie to us, baby, but shitcan the cognitive dissonance act, and pass the Vioxx.
tick . . . tick . . . tick
Oh, and PS, for a more in-depth and considerably less hostile viewpoint on the subject of generational interactions, read Strauss and Howe’s most excellent books, The Fourth Turning, and Generations.