The Newsweek cover story, “Ready or Not, Boomers Turn 60” (Nov. 14), highlighted the media’s preoccupation with the nation’s largest generation as they hit another milestone. But it also exposed a not-so-latent antipathy among many who are not boomers, and even some who are.
Newsweek readers were scathing in their letters to the editor, published this week. “Another article about boomers?” asked one. “They’ve left a wake of greed and overindulgence in American culture.” Matthew Schulz, a 34-year-old from Kirtland, Ohio, said he was tired of hearing about what boomers plan to do as they start to hit traditional retirement age.
"Let’s take a moment and look at what they have not done,” he wrote, citing the unsolved challenges of Social Security, health-care costs and the debt load that will be left to younger generations.
The reaction also revealed the fault line between front-edge boomers, who were raised in the 1950s and early ‘60s -- an era now bathed in gauzy nostalgia -- and those who came of age in the more divisive and pessimistic 1970s and early ‘80s. Molly Grimsley, in Fairfax, Va., born in 1959, wrote that she has “nothing in common” with those born from 1946 through the mid ‘50s – no memory of JFK or Howdy Doody or Woodstock. Her reference points are Nixon, Gilligan’s Island and Live Aid.
Susanna Harter of Huntington Beach, Calif., complained, “Most people do not think of a boomer as a baby drinking a bottle in the ‘60s, but as someone smoking pot in the ‘60s.” Front-edge boomers “grew up in a different era and with a different mind-set,” she wrote.
The backlash and schisms present a challenge as employers and policymakers craft strategies to keep aging boomers in the workforce – both to solve impending labor shortages in many fields and to reduce the burden on Social Security, pensions and health care plans. Many front-edge boomers, particularly the healthy and well-educated, are eager to keep working as well.
But many younger people, including back-end boomers as well as Gen-X’ers and the so-called Millennials, are just as eager for front-end Boomers to finally exit the stage, or at least center-stage. (Full disclosure: I was born in 1960, putting me squarely in the late-boomer demographic.)
In that view, boomers are the problem, not the solution. Yes, young boomers in the ‘60s and ‘70s broke down barriers of race and gender and opened new frontiers of culture and consciousness. But since then, the self-absorbed and self-important generation (blame Dr. Spock) has been unable to let the nation move on from its own preoccupations. The first two boomer presidents, Clinton and Bush – who both turn 60 next year – exemplified their generation’s liabilities as much as its virtues.
Boomers "quest for satisfaction has at times led to nadirs of narcissism and greed,” wrote American Heritage magazine in an excellent tour through boomer history. “As a generation the boomers have always seemed to want it all: cheap energy, consumer plenty, low taxes, loads of government entitlements, ageless beauty, and an ever-rising standard of living. They inherited a nation flush with resources and will bequeath their children a country mired in debt.”
All of that presents an opportunity as well as a problem. As the front-edge boomers wind down their primary careers, they can indeed make way for younger leaders to emerge. At the same time, they can apply their considerable (and heavily subsidized) talents in a new phase of work – as engaged citizens, part-time employees, volunteers, mentors and social innovators – to improve education, health care, the environment and community life in general. That would contribute both to solving some of the problems their generation helped create and burnishing their not-yet shining legacy.
At Civic Ventures, we’re helping define this new stage of work by nurturing the already strong impulse toward community service among many boomers and spurring the creation of opportunities for such effective and fulfilling service. The alternative, we warn, is generational warfare.
But maybe a little generational warfare is not a bad thing. Perhaps there’s a need for a push as well as a pull. Imagine an ad campaign sponsored by an organization of Millennials, Gen-Xers and perhaps younger boomers, aimed at front-edge boomers and ending with the tag line, “Clean Up Your Own Damn Mess.”
Put more positively, as Mr. Schultz, the Gen X Newsweek reader, wrote: “This is a battle cry for people of my age group and younger to unite to work alongside boomers to solve the challenges this nation has in store. Otherwise, my fear is continued lopsided social agendas (Medicare, Social Security) will certainly also erode my children’s future.”
--David Bank
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