Tag: Baby Boomers

The Baby Boomers are at it again. See, even at 70 they are young, sexy, cool, and fun!

This is a year of big birthdays, for, believe it or not, 2017 is when the baby boomer turns 70. Ever-youthful Joanna Lumley, Bill Clinton and Cher are 70 already and are now joined by a million new septuagenarians this year — more than ever before. To mark this, Channel 4 has a new four-part TV series called The Baby Boomers’ Guide To Growing Old. Its aim? To show just how young 70 really is.

The baby boomers have always been rule breakers. Born in peacetime, with the freedom to enjoy the Sixties’ summer of love, they’re now completely redefining ‘old age’. They may be doting grandparents, but they’re also going to music festivals, travelling the globe, wearing skinny jeans, remodelling their houses and feeling fitter and healthier than they’ve ever been.

(rolls eyes) To think they can’t figure out why everyone younger despises them. But why, when they are “redefining old age”? And, apparently, the concept of “doting”.

At this point, you’d think they’d be getting embarrassed by their generational narcissism. The funny thing is that they are so self-absorbed that they don’t even realize how ridiculous they are. I mean, did you see a single article about Generation X proclaiming “40 is the new 20”? For that matter, did you ever see a single article about Generation X turning any age at all?

Of course not. Because we’re not a generation of attention-craving buffoons.

The Zman has a few ideas concerning why their grandchildren hate the Boomers:

I’ve never cared for generational politics so maybe that’s why I have no trouble with the younger generation. In my youth, I was forced to sit through endless lectures by Baby Boomer teachers about how Generation X was a bunch of slackers. By the time I reached high school, I could, from memory, draw maps of the Ho Chi Min Trail and recite the playlist at Woodstock, despite having no interest in either. I’ve always thought that my generation’s disinterest was due to having to sit through so many Boomer sermons.

If you are a Boomer reading this, you are no doubt outraged, scandalized and offended at my comments. Just to be clear, I’m not talking about you. You are an exception. In fact, you are unique, like a snowflake, a special creation that stands in stark contrast to the conformity of your coevals. You’re special! That’s always been the amusing part about Boomer culture. They love talking about themselves, but hate it when others talk about them….

Anyway, hanging around the bad kids on-line, I’ve noted their extreme hostility to Baby Boomers and Boomer politics. It’s not the normal youthful rejection of their parent’s stuff as their parents are not Boomers. In the case of the 20-somethings, their parents are my generation. Their grandparents are the Boomers. This means the so-called Gen-Z and Millennials literally want to push granny off a cliff. I’ve read screeds by youngsters to that effect. They really hate the Boomers and not in an abstract way.

The coming Boomercide, if it happens, is going to be triggered by some portly old guys in comfort waist slacks, showing up at an alt-right rally wearing tricorne hats, preaching “heritage not hate.” It is the Boomer impulse to accept the morality of the Left while pretending to reject the consequence of it, that enrages the youth. Whatever you want to say about the alt-right kids, they have this one thing right. Boomer politics is all about the so-called conservatives swearing that the liberals are the real racists, as if it matters.

We know why Generation X hates the Boomers. We’ve had to listen to variations of their “70 is the new 50” narcissism all our lives and endure their babbling about how their inferior, mush-sounding, crudely recorded analog music played by inept musicians with rudimentary technique is the greatest music created in human history. (I’m not arguing for A Flock of Seagulls here, I’m merely pointing out that neither the Beatles nor Led Zeppelin have anything on Mozart and Vivaldi.)

But that’s not why the younger generations hate them. First, I’ve noticed that the Baby Boomers, on average, absolutely suck as grandparents. Most kids I knew growing up knew their grandparents well and spent loads of time with them. As for me, I was closer to my maternal grandparents than anyone else in my extended family; I still miss them greatly today. But I am amazed to observe how little time many grandparents now want to spend with their grandkids.

Second, I think that the younger generations, growing up in harder times and facing a much more challenging future, are angry at the Baby Boomers for squandering what should have been their inheritance of Western civilization and white America. Even though it’s not necessarily their fault – Baby Boomers were not responsible for the Immigration Act of 1965 or the Civil Rights movement or the Great Society – the Baby Boomers supported, and in most cases, still support those terrible, dyscivilizational catastrophes. As one commenter there noted, Boomers are the r-Selected offspring of WWII rabbits, “You’ll never want for anything like I did!”

Third, the Baby Boomers grew up in an idyllic white Norman Rockwell picture. That alone is sufficient for the growing and statistically significant non-white minority among the younger generations to hate them.

But a GenXer should not speak for the succeeding generations. Those are merely my suspicions. If you are younger than Generation X, then speak for yourself. Do you admire or loathe the Baby Boomers? Do you wish to emulate them and embrace their ideals or reject them and all their works? Do you share GenX’s cynicism or do you consider us to be overly pessimistic? Speak for yourself.

And if you are a Baby Boomer, do your best to restrain your urge to inform everyone how they really feel about your generation. I’m not asking you how you feel about it, and remember, the Zman has already acknowledged that you are a special snowflake, rare if not unique among your g-g-generation. I’m not asking the Gen Xers either, as we already know their opinions on the matter. And let me say as well that I am perfectly aware that macro is not micro and I personally admire those Baby Boomers who somehow managed to cast off the disastrous spirit of their g-g-generation. For example, I think this Boomer has a perceptive take on the situation.

Our poor decisions as Boomers and those of our parents (Silents voted for the folks who put the 1965 immigration act into effect) obliterated them. So it’s no longer worth kvetching about “the youth,” in the same way that these young whites can complain about “the boomers.” The boomers are 90%+ white Americans with several generations of history and tradition, just like their parents. “The youth,” in the America of today are nearing a Mestizo plurality and the shrinking white youth cohort is now politically eclipsed by every other stripe in the liberal rainbow.

Isolating the white youth, I’d say they’re about as good of stock as we ever had. Trouble is, we left them to institutions that were obviously out to destroy them, fill their heads with madness, and let their non-white peers batter them into submission. And somehow by no fault of our own a whole bunch of them have founded the alt-right and got a serious reactionary movement going.

It’s no small feat what the young white men of today have accomplished. Personally, I think it’s time to lend a hand rather than punch down. We earned the licks we’re getting. So far as I’m concerned, the right-wing youth can pillory us all day.

That, I think, is the important point. Even now, it’s still not too late for Baby Boomers to throw what is left of the weight of their generational cohort to help their grandchildren and great-grandchildren rather than hinder them.

UPDATE: Boomer narcissism in action.

Real phone call with my Boomer Mom:

ME: Had a friend commit suicide & another die of cancer

BM: Oh that’s too bad… we just bought an RV!

Back in the Seventies, when I was juggling a thriving business with early motherhood, there was nothing I cherished more than a cuddle with my sleepy babies in the middle of the night. No matter how long my day, if either of them woke crying I would bring them, freshly changed and fed, into our bed. There, I would drink in their delicious baby scent and we would all drift off together. Bliss!

Yes, running the country’s leading fashion PR agency meant not being home in time to cook my children’s supper, but that didn’t mean I loved them any less fiercely. Nor did I think for one moment that my daily absences necessarily made me a ‘bad parent’.

But it appears I was horribly wrong. For when I opened the Mail last week, I had quite a shock: there was an article by my son, Joshua Howie, now 40, declaring me an ‘absolutely awful’ mother who was ‘too selfish to raise children’.

Perhaps what hurt the most was not knowing it was coming. If my son did it to promote his career as a stand-up comedian, you’d think he’d have asked me — a PR guru — for advice. You might think, considering I’m the supposed inspiration for the character of Edina in the very funny and successful Absolutely Fabulous, I would be used to comedians using aspects of my larger-than-life existence to comedic effect. But this time I felt the joke was on me.

Far be it from me to criticise my son, whom I love dearly, but many baby boomers who read his article didn’t hold back. Understandably, they took offence at the suggestion that our generation made terrible parents, who neglected their children while scaling the dizzy heights of glamorous careers and filling their ‘gold-plated’ pension pots.

I’m not trying to claim that the baby boomers were always models of parental perfection. I certainly wasn’t, and I still harbour huge amounts of guilt about the things I missed out on when my children were young.

The funny thing is the way that her first response to the charge that she was an absolutely awful mother and too selfish to raise children is to talk about how wonderful she felt on days that she didn’t even put them to bed.

Just to be clear, my parents were great, so I know very well that not all Baby Boomer parents were like that. (And it is really not necessary to explain to the author of two books on economics that there is a difference between macro generalities and micro examples.) But it’s still an amusing defense that misses the point, even though the chances are not insignificant that the whole thing was concocted by the mother as a PR stunt.

Nevertheless, the idea that Baby Boomers were, on average, terrible parents is not out of line, especially considering the way that many of them are intentionally not leaving inheritances for their children, in either the USA or Britain.

The children of baby boomers are heading towards a financial shock after it was revealed their parents aim to spend all their cash rather than pass it on. Baby boomers – generally referred to as those born between 1947 and 1964 – are often seen as the ‘selfish generation’ because they have benefited from good wages and rising property values before retiring on gold-plated pensions. But now a study has shown that their children are facing poverty in old age.

They’re not leaving much of a country behind them either. And while the demographic demolition of the United States cannot be blamed on the Baby Boomers, as it happened in 1965, the fact is that they collectively celebrated it rather than corrected it. They were too excited about having ethnic restaurants and whole new ways to virtue-signal their superiority to their parents to consider the long-term implications for their children and grand-children.

UPDATE: The son’s article to which the Baby Boomer mother was responding:

Mum was the epitome of the Eighties career woman; on the phone to the office within 20 minutes of my birth, she didn’t get off again until I was 16. And during that time, when more than 20 nannies raised me, I have not one recollection of Mum ever playing with me or reading me a bedtime story.

Far too many Baby Boomers didn’t give a damn about their own children, let alone their nieces, nephews, and grandchildren. We can hardly expect them to care about the fate of Western civilization after they’re dead, gone, and presumably, burning in Hell:

It’s ironic that we spend our youth wanting to be older, and our middle age wanting to stop the clock. But I’m not going to wallow. On the contrary. For my birthday, I’m treating myself to a Vivienne Westwood frock, a haircut by Nicky Clarke and dinner at one of London’s finest restaurants, Le Gavroche.

I’m not wealthy. I’m just representative of the so-called ‘Gold Timer’ generation – people in their 60s who are spending money now, rather than leaving it in their wills….

Surely I needed to leave my house to the next generation of my family? I surprised myself by my adamant response, but then I began asking myself why.

My parents, who were married in the Forties, believed in leaving as large a legacy to their four children as possible and, once they’d reared us, they continued in their thrifty ways, refusing to spend their savings on luxuries they deserved.

Growing up in Somerset, it was a necessity to have holiday jobs as a teenager. After my father’s death, my mother took up the mantle of austerity, despite constant urging by us children to spend. By then, we were earning far more between us than our parents could have dreamt of.

My mother, Jean, did dip into her savings, but only in a modest way; she took a coach trip to Paris and bought a Chanel lipstick – I still wear Chanel lipstick in her memory. I admired both my parents tremendously, but so much has changed from their generation to mine. My siblings all have comfortable lives, and their children are unlikely to need a helping hand from Auntie. Unlike them, I never married and I don’t have children.

I’d always thought I would leave everything to my half-a-dozen wonderful nephews and nieces. But now, suddenly, all the guilt I felt about spending my own inheritance has gone.

That’s amazing. Suddenly all the guilt I felt about euthanasia for the elderly has gone too!

At the very least, it’s a convincing case for eliminating Social Security, shutting down all the bankrupt pension plans, and letting millions of literally useless old Boomers rely upon the children they didn’t have.

Fortunately, their sense of narcissism and entitlement is such that they can be relied upon to self-euthanize once they can’t afford to eat in fine restaurants anymore.