Boomer or bust: reflections of a generational refugee.

AuthorTaylor, Jeff A.
PositionRant - Column

IT HAS TAKEN 40 years for me to come to the conclusion that if you are born a baby boomer you are pretty much destined to die one too. You can't escape them. I know; I've tried.

Acting half your age doesn't work--the boomers patented the whole forever young thing. Besides, it is tiring as hell and annoys your wife. Coming into the world at the absolute ass-end of the boom in December 1964 closes off the acting-older escape route too, as there is no shortage of 55-year-old boomers waiting to suck the life out of you with golf, stock tips, and the time they saw the Stones.

It is not enough that by sheer force of numbers this generation has kept America's politics and popular culture boomer-centric for decades. There's that recurring boomer exceptionalism--most, best, only--that often muscles its way to the front.

In their book Generations, William Strauss and Neil Howe took this constant refrain of "we're special" to actually mean something besides bad parenting. Strauss and Howe declared the boomers' strident tendency to declare from on high the goals and wants of society to be the defining characteristic of the generation. Prompt howls of indignation from boomers demonstrated a moralizing busybodiness that has given rise to one movement for "change" after another.

Yet millions of boomers, each declaring he or she had discovered the best way to live and work and pray and play, did have profound consequences--just not the intended ones. As the Team America soundtrack puts it: "America! FuckYeah! Freedom is the only way, yeah. "The net effect of all the boomer striving was to increase personal freedom and possibilities, not in any one direction, but in many, sometimes contradictory ones. Turns out freedoms were the only way, yeah.

What started as an effort to build a counterculture soon fragmented into many niche subcultures that had nothing to do with (or even hated) flower power. That continued with succeeding generations to the point that today, with a big boost from technology, the average American can burrow deep into one comforting culture and/or surf across dozens with equal ease.

Yet history will show that...

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