How the Baby Boomers Ruined Everything for Gen X (But I'm Not Bitter)

As a young up-and-comer in the federal government in about '96, I was invited to a talk for generally more senior managers by Linda Duxbury.  Duxbury is an academic from Carleton who has made quite a name for herself in academic circles speaking about demographic changes in the workforce and such.  She's got the whole "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" thing happening and is quite an engaging speaker, if not particularly edifying.

In this particular talk, she would say that the pre-Baby Boomer generation--I forget what pet name she had for them--were set in their ways, and wanted everything to stay the same, because in their generation you were a company man.  The Baby Boomers--like Duxbury herself--were fun, inquisitive, interesting.

Then she moved on to Gen X--those she defined as born after 1964.  We  really fare too well in her analysis. I believe "bitter" was the adjective used.  She asked at one point "So what does Generation X want?"  It was supposed to be a rhetorical question, and she was just about to launch into her prepared answer when I piped up, "Not to be called bitter?"  I was one of only two or three Gen Xers in the room, the rest being Baby Boomers.  Duxbury jumped on the opportunity to portray my "outburst" as evidence that the Gen Xers are, indeed, bitter.  She had the perfect little argument really.  Any evidence against her argument was evidence for her argument.  It's like:

"You're in denial"

"No, I'm not"

"See!"

I still don't readily apply the word "bitter" to myself, but I would go so far as to say "rueful."  It's not that the Baby Boomers are bad, it's just that, as the demographic majority in a democracy, they’ve managed to fashion society to their liking through the decades. It's a tyranny of the majority, plain and simple.  You can't get mad at a mathematical reality.

Think of it. When the Boomers were kids, they had the 50s, which was all about family values.  In the early 60s you had bubblegum pop which ripened into the sex, drugs and rock'n'roll of the late 60s. The Boomers were young adults and in the exploratory stage they had an explosion of art the likes of which we have not seen since, they had a commitment to ideologies of peace and love.  And they had an insatiable curiosity that put a man on the moon (allegedly!).  The 80s turned into the "Me Decade" as Boomers, in their 30s now, put away childish things and focused on accumulation.  

With the advent of the third millennium, mortality hit the Boomers like a meringue pie in the face.  Change was now to be feared--thus this new wave of social conservatism.  Life was dangerous--thus the advent of mandatory safety and the nanny state.  And death was the new enemy--thus the explosion of life-extension and youth-preservation medicine.  The War on Cancer is, I think, a proxy War on Aging and Death.  (Especially if you research carcinogenesis and its similarities to the aging process and cell senescence.)

I was reminded of this when Newt Gingrich floated (no pun intended) the idea of a moon base, and was unanimously laughed off the stage.  No one laughed when Kennedy wanted to put a man on the moon.  Back then science was revered and the young, ideological Boomers were ready for any challenge.  But to present such an idea "in today's economy" was ludicrous, said the pundits. The cost of a moon base is estimated according to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in 2007 would be about $35 billion, and about 7.5 gigabucks a year to keep it going.

But medical research funding in the US, according to this study is estimated at about $90 billion in 2008 (4.5% of total health care costs) in the US.  A good chunk of this was in research diseases that are more common in the last trimester of life (cancer, heart disease, Alzheimers). Add to that (let's be perfectly bloodless about this) the fact that life extension applies primarily to retired people who are no longer working and often drawing upon as opposed to contributing to the social safety nets, and your economic cost increases.  And add to that the fact that Old Age Security / Social Security are now openly admitted as being essentially pyramid schemes that will see the Boomers through to their dotage and then collapse, and the economics of life extension spending takes another hit.

So it's nothing to do with "economic reality" and everything to with "biological reality."  The naïve promise of the stars has been replaced by the biological imperative to stay alive, and is the new priority because of course, of the Boomer's majority demographic.

So no, I'm not bitter.  I just think we need to take all the Boomers, mulch them up, and shoot them into the atmosphere to stop global warming.