What They Left Us...

I will be 39 years old this month. I'm right on the cusp of Generation X (b. between 1964 - 1981) and squarely a product of the Baby Boomer generation before me. In the late 1980's TIME magazine described us this way:

By and large, the 18-to-29 group scornfully rejects the habits and values of the baby boomers, viewing that group as self-centered, fickle and impractical.

I wouldn't quite go that far, but I would say that what the Boomers have left is a pretty stunning example to us (a few left-over drug addicts aside) of what not to become. As the Boomers now near or enter into retirement, I wonder how exactly they see their legacy?

First, the positives. Boomers demonstrated to us the value of questioning authority. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Government isn't always on the side of the people and while generations before the Boomers probably knew this to be true, they never had the stones to massively organize protests on college campuses, in town halls, or in mass groups walking hand-in-hand along the main streets of the United States. Boomers taught us that the "old time religion" our grandparents kept preaching was laced in hypocrisy, racism, and the fear of healthy change. All of us Gen X'ers owe our inquisitive spirit and pursuit of truth despite consequences to the Boomers.

Even so, in the process the Boomers managed to toss out the baby with the bathwater. In the scud of their empty tub where the stains of broken marriages, unwanted pregnancies, drug addition, and eventually corporate corruption and greed. In tossing out authority altogether, they tossed out every reason to be moral. They devalued the most fundamental stabilizing forces of any society with a "Don't Tread on Me" individualism.

Of course not all of them did this. Some of them went to the polar opposite and began insisting on inapplicable moral absolutism's and overtly harmful (and hypocritical) theological doctrines. They substituted Vietnam for a culture war of their own making, while we the children in Generation X were forced to watch the ensuing blood bath. Politics divided. Churches split. Heroes fell. It's been a war, not to end all wars, but rather to endure for generations. They inscribed lines not in the shifting sand, but in the irremovable fabric of our social, political, and religious landscape.

Busy fighting each other, government and merchants banded together to rob them blind. The great celebration of giving us the first two back-to-back elected Boomer Presidents, Bill Clinton and George Bush, epitomized the frail nature of this conflict. With these appointments they successfully offered America four terms of "new leadership" by way of a pervert and a moron respectively. Sadly, I voted for both of them at least once. Their offerings to the House and Senate haven't done much better, nor have their offerings to the American pulpit.

The political and religious authorities they spent their lives questioning and rebeling against were replaced by the most corrupt authorities in American history-- maybe in all American history combined.

I know there are exceptions, and thankfully I happen to serve under one. But by and large, what the Boomers left us was a legacy of what not to become. I suppose in that, we at least owe them our thanks.

Now that the economy is lurching backward from the compounded lack of wisdom and greed, it seems like they might at least get a little taste of the mess they've left Generation X to clean up before they "shake their white locks at the runaway sun." That little taste of what we will be required to clean up is what Gen X'ers call "just desserts." I just hope there are enough of us out from under the hypnotic power of Microsoft's "X-Box" to act.