We
are often in a hurry to point the finger of blame. Hey, it's what
people do, it's very typical human behavior. Animal behavior, even!
I've seen those funny dog videos where there's a mess of torn up
couch cushions and the dog owner/ film maker asks two or three dogs
who did it, and the innocent dogs put their paws on the dog that's
covered in stuffing. I'm certainly guilty myself. I complain about
the comically mislabeled “Greatest Generation” mercilessly.
All
that is required to put all of this into its proper perspective is
greater empathy in general and a much deeper understanding of the
historical background of the age-group to be examined. That,
unfortunately, is too much to ask for. It calls for a person who is a
saint to begin with, and a tireless researcher besides. Those people
are rare.
I
complain about my parents' generation. That is a simple statement
that could easily be made by anyone who has ever walked the earth. I
try to keep it fact based. Not just personal observations and
anecdotal notes, but historical perspective derived from reading
books coupled with a broader base of observation. I will admit that
the “Greatest Generation” had it pretty tough. They were born
into a rough life, and they were little boys and girls when the
depression hit. It hit a lot of them very hard. Then they graduated
from high school and somebody started a World War. Sixteen million of
them did military service during that mess; twelve million were still
in uniform at the end of it. If they came home with little patience
for their own children and an over-fondness for alcohol and
cigarettes, or perhaps a quick temper and the firm belief that
nothing really mattered, there was a reason. God bless the ones who
hid those feelings well, and thanks for that.
Trials
of the Baby Boomers
It's
easy to look back and believe that true Baby Boomers* were born into
a perfect world, some sort of Disney movie paradise of princesses and
talking hedge hogs. Those photos and post cards of the 1950s make it
all look like so much fun! The big, brightly colored cars with the
tall fins. Pretty girls everywhere. MGM musicals, movies about giant
monsters or adventures in space, and sanitized Hollywood war movies
where there was very little shooting and the few soldiers that died
did so bloodlessly and quickly, almost peacefully. One of the tricks
to understanding anything is learning how to look at the reality
behind the photographs.
I
was raised in Queens, New York. The house that I lived in up to the
age of ten, the upstairs unit of a worn-out, two family house,
brother, you wouldn't let your dog sleep in that house. Between the
coal furnace and the ancient, unpainted wooden surfaces, the place
was a monument to dust. The food that my mother put on the table,
man, if you fed your child like that in modern Los Angeles, Social
Services would come and remove the child from the house. My mother
did not believe in fruit, and for vegetables we saw only the
occasional potato.
People
forget the illness and disease that we had to endure. In these
anti-vax times, people almost act like measles, the chicken pox, and
the mumps, were good for children. They were not, but even our
parents were blasé about the phenomenon. It was simply the way
things were. It was common for them to bring a healthy child over to
play with a friend who had the measles. Might as well get it over
with! Whooping cough was no joke, babies died from that. Every heard
of scarlet fever? That one kept you out of school for a year and left
you with a permanently weakened immune system.
Polio!
Try and laugh that one off, I dare you. I was seven years old before
I got the polio shots, and that was the first year they were
available. Dodged a bullet there.
The
filth caused all kinds of smaller indignities. Skin infections; styes
in the eyes; boils. On top of it all, most of us had poor hygiene. It
was the age of the “Saturday Night Bath.” That's when we washed
our hair as well. Two baths per week was plenty. The other days we
just wore the same underwear and added some more Brylcreem to our
hair.
The
1960s remind me of the opening paragraph of Dicken's “A Tale of Two
Cities.” “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.”
It's so easy now to recall only the pretty, suddenly sexually
available girls, and the wonderful factory hot-rods, and the
brilliant music that characterized the late 1960s. But can we take a
moment and recall that the entire decade was alive with social
upheaval at home, and half of the decade was overshadowed by a
terrible, deadly war overseas? The racism, The Bay of Pigs fiasco,
the Cuban Missile Crisis, the police riots, the burning of entire
neighborhoods, the assassinations. We true Baby Boomers began high
school at the dawn of the 1960s, followed by either university, the
draft, alternative military arrangements, or some kind of plan to
avoid that whole thing. Many terrible things are happening today,
but it's all more abstract now. We had been lulled into a false sense
of security in the 1950s, and then, after Kennedy got shot, we were
bombarded for an entire decade by non-stop bad news on high-boil,
life-threatening developments, and existential threats. There was no
censorship of the news back then. The riots and the war were all over
the TV news, such as it was. Real battlefield footage, with hundreds
of guys a week getting killed. Plus the off-screen suffering of the
Vietnamese, which many of us intuited and were disturbed by. There
were a few horrific years in a row.
Imagine
just 1968! Opening with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam; the
assassination of Martin Luther King; punctuated by urban riots, often
instigated by the police or the FBI; the assassination of Bobby
Kennedy; the wholesale chaos of the Democratic National Convention;
leading up to the election of Richard Nixon. Even lacking the deeper
understanding of the even more terrible things that were happening
behind the scenes, 1968 was a rough ride.
All
of that was against the background of the Cold War! MAD, “Mutually
Assured Destruction.” I was strangely at peace with the prospect of
nuclear war, but that might have been to mask my terror of it. I read
novels about it, and books about war in general, and novels where
humanity was wiped out. Those helped to settle me down.
You
may grudge us some of the advantages that we did, in fact, enjoy. I
probably would, in a younger man's shoes. Getting an education and a
start at a decent working life was definitely much easier for us. All
of that is nearly impossible today. I do not like that fact any more
than young people do, because what hurts American citizens, any of
us, hurts me. Whatever makes life harder for young people and young
families in America weakens the nation and all of us. I would love to
see much of that wonderful old deal reinstated for the benefit of
young Americans today. But only Bernie Sanders, alone among
politicians, is interested in doing such a thing, and I don't think
that he has much of a chance. I think that he could have an outside
chance of becoming president, but getting all of that legislation
passed? Nope. Not a snowball's chance in hell.
Speaking
of Elections
For
there to be any energy in “Baby Boomers ruined the world,” either
one of two things must have happened. Either Baby Boomers must be
personally responsible for the ruinous policies and legislation that
have led us to this sorry state, or they must at least have elected
the public officials who are personally responsible for it.
The
first proposition doesn't really work, because most Baby Boomers,
most by a wide margin, are simple, ordinary working people. Look, I'm
a lawyer and an itinerant university lecturer, big deal, I include
myself in the simple working stiff category. If there is a core group
of evil geniuses at the heart of this chaos, I doubt if there could
be more than half a dozen Baby Boomers among them.
That
leaves the election angle. It's amazingly easy to look that stuff up
now. All of the following statistics come from the web site:
ropercenter.cornell.edu
1980
This
is when the real trouble started. Reagan was the candidate of the
Conservative backlash against the 1960s, which to Conservatives was a
matter of uppity blacks and filthy hippies overturning everything
that was sacred about American culture and traditions at the
instigation of a bunch of communist university professors. You may be
laughing now, but that is actually a simple statement of what
self-identified Conservatives believed, and most people over thirty
were very conservative.
Older,
white voters elected Reagan. The 18-29 age group, not a large segment
of the voters, was evenly split. Of all voters over the age of
thirty, Reagan was fifteen points ahead of Carter.
N.B.
Voters over thirty years of age in 1980 had been born before 1950, so
almost none of them were Baby Boomers.
In
a pattern that will repeat itself, Reagan took the white vote by a
factor of 56-36. Carter took the black vote (83-14) and the Hispanic
vote (56-37).
1984
Reagan
took all voters by a factor of 59-41. Mondale only showed well among
voters from union households, black voters, and Hispanic voters. This
was a walk-over.
1988
Dukakis
for the Democrats. Another walk-over.
George
H.W. Bush saw his biggest scores in the 45-59 age group. Those voters
would have been born between 1929 and 1943, so no Baby Boomers to
blame here.
As
time marches through these elections, financial demographics become
more important. From here on out, Republicans have overwhelming
energy in the upper income brackets, and Democrats take almost all of
the votes in the lowest brackets.
1992
This
election was fascinating, mostly due to the presence of H. Ross
Perot. Perot took a whopping 19% of the vote; Bush 37%; and Clinton
43%.
Bill
Clinton was, of course, our first Baby Boomer president. Did he ruin
the world? He was a mixed blessing. He kept the economy humming, and
he managed to balance the budget. He also passed some odious
legislation that made mass incarceration worse and made it almost
impossible to discharge student loans in bankruptcy. If the Boomers
are my generation, Clinton did not represent our best. Neither was he
the worst. That will come later.
Perot
seems to have taken votes almost equally from Clinton and Bush, and
the age demographics are all over the place. It's easier to point out
that Clinton walked away with most of the black and Hispanic vote,
and the low income vote too. This is the election where the votes of
“self-declared Conservatives” begins to really show. 64% of them
voted for Bush. There is no breakdown for the ages of the
“Conservatives,” but there's a clue coming up.
(Let's
skip 1996 as uninteresting, and 2000 as a bold and successful
criminal enterprise including the Supreme Court, Governor John Bush
of Florida, and Ralph Nader. 1996 was a nothing-burger; 2000 would
require a shelf full of books. W. Bush was also a Baby Boomer
president. He was an unambiguous stain on our brand.)
2008
Very
interesting because Obama won even in the high-end income groups.
Obama was our first “Post Baby Boom” president. McCain's slim
successes came among white voters and voters over 65 years of age.
His only high percentage win was the over 65s. Let the record show
that anyone over sixty-five in 2008 had been born before 1943, so
very few Baby Boomers voted for McCain. Baby Boomers voted for Obama.
2016
Trump
is our third Baby Boomer president, and, like W. Bush, the result of a Boomer
v. Boomer election. Trump is a stain not only on the Boomer brand,
but also on his family, and the country in general.
Here
we may be able to ascribe some mischief to Baby Boomers, but I
suggest that it would be hard to focus on this one group at this late
date as far as ruining the world goes. It was pretty much ruined
already. By older Americans, I'll admit it, but not all older
Americans are Baby Boomers. White voters over the age of 45 elected
Trump. That group would be born before 1971, so it would include many
Baby Boomers. It also includes part of Gen-X, and a lot of births
that I consider too late for real Baby Boomer status.
Hillary
made a very good showing with the under 44 group, and it's worth
remembering that she did win the popular vote by almost three million
votes.
The
fascinating thing here is that Trump did not do well in the high
income groups. All financial demographics were very close.
Those
“Self Identified Conservatives” were hard at work in 2016, for
Trump. He took that group by a factor of 81-16.
The
Roper Center included some issues for this election. Voters declaring
themselves to be motivated by immigration went for Trump 64-33. By
terrorism, for Trump 57-40.
Conclusion
Trump's
big rally crowds do appear to include a lot of potential Baby
Boomers, but honestly, if you are looking for things to hang on Baby
Boomers, wouldn't you agree that the world didn't just fall into ruin
within the last ten or even twenty years? It's been a long process, a
long, often hard road. Older Americans are leading the Trump charge
off of the cliff, but Americans “over fifty” is a big, diverse
group. Have the trouble makers all along been older Americans? If so,
much of that time it would have been the Greatest Generation. Nixon
and Reagan sure raised a lot of hell that we are still paying for,
and their age-mates elected them.
America
has gone from the relative prosperity and narrower income gap of the
mid-century to the current chaos of debt slavery, the gig economy,
increasing racism, domestic terrorism, rampant anti-intellectualism,
xenophobia, and intolerance. It has taken us seventy years to come to
this ruin. And the chaos is not limited to the United States. I think
it would be quite a stretch to say that any particular group is
responsible for the chaos that is rampant in North and South America,
half of Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and parts of Europe and
East Asia. That's leaving climate change completely aside for the
moment, except for mentioning that we'll have to wait for the fires
to burn themselves out before we know what has happened to Australia.
We
need solutions, not finger pointing.
*Born
at least one year after the end of the war, and before 1956.
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