28 January 2009

The Lost Generation

My parents are members of the baby boomer generation, and wonderful people. They are not alone in that regard. Despite many individuals who dignify this generation, as a whole I find Baby Boomers to be quite disappointing.

I'm not alone. Victor Davis Hanson has a condemning post on The Corner:

The reaction to the economic panic was sort of analogous to the call to 'charge it!' after 9/11 (cf. Ike's fights about the surtax to pay for Korea), or to the Iraq 2006 upsurge in violence, when suddenly our leaders declared the war lost, blamed the nebulous "they" for tricking them into voting for the war, and calling for immediate withdrawals and retreats. Ditto the Stalag-Gulag Guantanamo that, by January 19, had ruined the Constitution, shredded the Bill of Rights, and forever tarnished our reputation. Yet, on the 20th, it was suddenly complex and problematic, and required a "task force" to do a year-long inquiry into the bad and worse choices confronting us. At some point in all this serial hysteria, we are beginning to see the problem is not in the stars of the economy or of the war, but in ourselves—a weird generation that, when it finally came of age, proved to be just about what we could expect of it from what we saw in its youth.
Its not too late for this to change, but the continual love affair of Baby Boomers with the misbegotten social experiement that is 60's sure isn't helping.

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