“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” – George Orwell

I’m a Boomer and I don’t say that with much pride these days. I have joined a few Facebook sites touting Sixties and Seventies music, fashion, lifestyle, culture, etc. The “free love” Sixties are not immune from inflamed politics or the lamentation for “the good old days.” What happened to the “first” “Me Generation?”

Why have we, the Boomers, become so judgmental, so jaded? What did we do to become the end all adjudicators for societal judgement? I mean, we invented the term “generation gap.” What happened?

We once put a premium on thinking outside of the box. We were the epitome of non-conformity. We were going to go out and change the world and we did. Boomers did some amazing things…and then sat back on their laurels and bitched and moaned, “What happened to our youth, no manners, no work ethic, yada, yada, yada?”

We allowed the world to beat us down, turning us into our parents, and now we want to make sure our future generations get beaten down too by pointing out all their failures when we are the ones who raised them. I hope these new generations will save us from ourselves or will at least save themselves from us. We need a little Sixties-style nonconformity.

Am I looking through rose-colored glasses at the past? Newberry College in 1968-1973 was not a liberal baston of “wokeness” despite being a “liberal arts” college. I mean it was in South Carolina, a conservative baston and a champion of the “Lost Cause”.

I remember plenty of folk who did not toe the expected line. We weren’t all about panty raids, Purple Jesus, and singing “Dixie” or “Hail to the Redskins” at football games. (The Newberry College mascot was once “The Indians” and not “The Wolves.”)

I remember people who not only colored outside of the box but tore the box up and used it for kindling to start a fire in one of the outside entrances to Brokaw Hall. It wasn’t willful destruction. They picked the safest place to start a fire so they could broadcast the “Fish Cheer” from their dorm windows to the powers that were gathered outside. I’m not sure the Dean of Men ever recovered. I know, there were bigger war protests at certain “left” coast institutions of higher learning, but we did have them and only had a student body of eight hundred or so.

What happened to us? We came of age during a decade of protests, primarily centering on an unjust civil right of segregation and an unjust war fought in Viet Nam. Church, state, and parents were all called into question and found wanting by us…and now we have become them…or at least the most vocal have.

My research has given me some insight. The Boomers are not monolithic, nor are the Generation Xers or Millennials we raised. Those Boomers who were born closer to the end of WW II tend to be more liberal than those born in the later period. Interesting but I digress.

We utter the same battle cry our parents did. “That’s socialism” or “that’s Marxism” anytime anything is done to try and help people other than those at the top of the food chain. Helping those on the lower end of the food chain is not socialism. Socialism is, “a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.”

The last time I looked, “the means of production, distribution, and exchange” is still in the hands of the owners of said means of production, distribution, and exchange; ergo, not socialism.

The fact is we “sold out” during the 1980s and became part of the materialist, consumer culture. We became members of Reagan’s “moral majority” which was anything but moral as far as treatment of people. Remember the beginning of the AIDS epidemic? It was “hurrah for me and the hell with everyone else.” “Trickle down” only happens with rain…or “the man” pissing on our heads.

For those of us who might have championed capitalism we should have learned how corrosive capitalism can be when unaccompanied by a counterbalancing belief of moral restraint. When did our 1968 idealism turn into materialism? When did we become so pontificated against the generations that we raised?

We judge the new generations as being lazy, without morals, or taste. We had the best fashion, the best cars, the best music, we say. We forget about the class struggles, the war, and civil rights assassinations and riots. This fictional world is no longer our oyster…nor is it Generation Xers. We taught you too well to be just like us.

One of the tasks for those who succeed the Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials is to restore some good old fashioned, 1968 idealism. The great challenge of this moment is the crisis of isolation and fragmentation, the need to rebind the fabric of a society that has been torn by selfishness, cynicism, distrust, and autocracy created by my generation. Good luck. You have a huge job ahead of you.

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