Every now and then, a “generational” event will jog a few memories in my age-addled brain, and I’ll get to thinking about the legacy that my parents generation left to me, and the one that I’ll leave to my children. Right up front, I’ll state that I don’t really care about lumping demographics into the baby boomers, gen x, gen y, whatever - in my view, we’re kind of all in this boat together, regardless of our calendar age.

I recently watched a History Channel documentary on the “hippies” of the mid and late 1960’s. It was really eye opening, because I’m just shy of having been of-age during the 1968 summer of love in San Francisco. After watching the documentary, I was a bit sad that I didn’t really get to experience the social experiments of the mid-60’s, but absolutely relieved that I just missed the late-60’s, because I would have been there with all of the waifs and wastrels of my generation who were searching for something that didn’t exist.

But that’s not what I wanted to discuss, really. There’s apparently a pervasive attitude among the younger generations that the Boomers have sucked the life out of this country. That’s not necessarily a new viewpoint:

…Goodness Gracious my generation’s lost
They burned down all our bridges
before we had a chance to cross
Is it the winter of our discontent or just an early frost?

Goodness Gracious of apathy I sing
The baby boomers had it all and wasted everything
Now recess is almost over
and they won’t get off the swing

Goodness Gracious we came in at the end
No sex that isn’t dangerous, no money left to spend
We’re the cleanup crew for parties
we were too young to attend
Goodness Gracious me…

From “Goodness Gracious”, © 1994, Kevin Gilbert

Even progressives from such luminary liberal outposts as AmericaBlog occasionally take the Boomers to task for fucking things up so badly.

Folks, it ain’t the Boomers. Or more correctly, it wasn’t the Boomers who set our country on the course that we’re currently marching. Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast wrote a response to the AmericaBlog posting that is almost laser-beam-spot-on. Here’s one of the money paragraphs, but treat yourself to the entire read:

The 80-hour workweek, this drive towards “productivity” that has us all spinning our wheels harder for less reward, found its footing during the Reagan years, when the doctrine of “trickle-down” economics had American workers behaving like the Little Engine that Could, working ever-longer hours with ever-less security, repeating “I think I can I think I can I think I can” while deluding themselves that if they just WORKED HARD ENOUGH, they’d get their piece of the Republican pie. And nothing that’s happened in the meantime, no matter how much they’ve been screwed, has dissuaded many from this belief…

Even before I got to this paragraph in Jill’s fantastic article, I was saying to myself (as I’ve done many times in the past):

Lay your complaints at the feet of the GOP and St. Ronald Reagan.

Indeed, I’ve written before that when Reagan took office, there was almost an immediate and palpable shift in the attitude of Big Business™. Michael Hammer became the HBS guru of the day, and Hammer begat the “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap’s of the corporate world. An even more discernable shift in loss of workers rights and putting the nose to the grindstone occured almost immediately after Reagan’s second election victory. I swear to you - the corporate bosses didn’t even wait until Reagan’s 2nd inauguration - in December 1984, they knew they had another four years (at least) to totally rewrite the rules of corporate citizenship and to complete the total destruction of the employer / employee contract. So they got busy.

I could go on an on, but I’ll close for now, because I have to get back to work. I have to get back to work because the closer I get to my own retirement, the more that I have a “scared bunny” work ethic. Not enough money. Barely adequate health care. A pension that may or may not be available when my time comes.

It’s not the fault of the Boomers. It’s the fault of us all, for not having the spine to stand up when standing up was necessary.

I sometimes wonder if we’ll ever grow a collective spine.