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Don’t blame the boomers — 37 Comments

1. The Boomers were the shock troops and the useful idiots.

2. I was born in 1963. I don’t think I belong with the Boomers. A guy named Jonathan Pontell came up with Generation Jones 1954 to 1965. I had a very different experience growing up compared to a person born in the late 1940s. They came of age during the Vietnam War. I came of age when Ronald Reagan was starting his first term.

3. I was born in 63, and never felt like a Boomer. To me, the Boomers were the hippies and Vietnam vets who were young adults when I was a child. I identified more with Gen X.

   Now I find that others feel the same (no surprise), and someone coined the term Generation Jones.

   To Neo’s point, yeah, the Boomers were young adults (or even younger) when much of that stuff was going down and they were not driving things. But you do see a lot of them doing the No King’s protests, but some of that no doubt is due to the fact they still watch cable and believe what their TV tells them.

4. Mattsky on May 12, 2026 at 4:45 pm said:
   I was born in 1963. I don’t think I belong with the Boomers. A guy named Jonathan Pontell came up with Generation Jones 1954 to 1965. I had a very different experience growing up compared to a person born in the late 1940s. They came of age during the Vietnam War. I came of age when Ronald Reagan was starting his first term.

   You don’t say . . .

5. Examine it more from the point of view of certain seeds being planted and yielding fruit in the next generation and reseeded in the next generation to the point that something like 1 out of 4 of the younger generation are LGBTQ and many ” non binary”.

6. I don’t know Neo. I was born in 1935, and I just think of us as depression babies.
   For ordinary people, it took courage to voluntarily have a child, and raise it, in the teeth of that upheaval; and I think we became aware of that as we matured. We also noted how those who were not so much older conducted themselves during two major wars. While, it is true that by most standards the people I grew up with were, shall we say muted, by current standards, so were those who were role models.
   I don’t think it serves a purpose to label an entire generation; but if I did I would have a place for the Cold War/Nuclear Cloud generation.
   I think that I am working toward the point that you may have ‘cherry picked’ your lineup. There is no one that I would recognize from daily life. I also wonder, but am too lethargic to research, just how privileged those people were as they advanced toward responsible adulthood, if they did. Fonda we know about, of course. She, and how many of the others, were arguably simply unbalanced; and hardly representative of anything other than deep angst and a sense of outraged privilege.

7. > Timothy Leary, drug promoter, born 1920 (he was of the Greatest Generation)

   Honestly, Timothy Leary — if you actually look into his writings and thoughts — was nothing like these other people you mention. He wasn’t trying to overthrow society he was mostly advocating for thinking and especially new thinking.

   Did you know that his initial research into LSD (before it was illegal) was in treating chronic recidivism among the prison population and encouraging them to “trip” with a therapist in order to essentially reset the wiring in their brains?

   Who knows what would’ve become of that sort of therapy if LSD had remained legal.

8. One additional note. It is not accurate to label Fonda an anti-war activist.
   She intentionally traveled to the land of America’s enemy and gave them highly visible support. She flaunted her support by appearing with the enemy in front of American POWs. She may have been directly responsible for immediate pain and suffering to Americans who were helpless to defend themselves. If that were not here intent, then she is even more stupid than I imagined.
   She, and the others, may have been born in the same time frame as were I and my contemporaries; but they did not represent us in any conceivable way.
   I just had to get that off my chest.

9. I think if you look at people born between 1938 and 1957, you see some aggregate features which differentiate the collective from those older (certainly) and to a more modest degree, those younger.
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   A. An explosion in the propensity to make use of divorce courts.
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   B. Escalating propensity to engage in crime.
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   C. Explosion in the use of street drugs.
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   D. An expansion in propensity to enroll in tertiary schooling (though this began with earlier cohorts and continued a pace with subsequent ones).
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   E. Lower prevalence of military service (though higher than that of subsequent cohorts).
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   F. Expanded propensity to out-of-wedlock child-bearing (though much worse in subsequent cohorts).
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   G. Abrupt changes in preferred styles of popular music.
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   H. Abrupt changes in styles of clothing and grooming.
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   I. Lower total fertility.
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   You hit a plateau in re some of these metrics (though at different times) and a slow and partial recission in regard to some of them.
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   There was an efflorescence in red haze politics on campuses (1964-71). What’s amusing is that the Students for a Democratic Society ca. 1966 received far more media attention than the Young Americans for Freedom, even though the YAF had 14x the SDS membership. Please note, 3/4 of the population of college age cohorts never got near a four year college at that time.

10. One feature of the era was the self-inflicted injuries that institutions visited upon themselves. The perpetrators here were modally people a generation older than the participants in the Summer of Love. The Catholic Church, the mainline protestant bodies, higher education, the courts, local government, and the public schools all provide examples of institutional autophagy (sometimes commanded by judges).

11. Then there were the professors – all of older generations – who gave in to the younger generation when it was the professors and college administrators who should have known better.

    Robert Bork has an extensive description of the lapses of those professors and administrators in his book Slouching Towards Gomorrah.

12. When I here criticism (or outright disdain) directed at the Boomer cohort, & I’m using the years 1946-1964, I hear AD’s list plus the decreased wealth transfer from parents to children.
    For many, the “I’m spending my kids’ inheritance ” on the back of the Winnebago really sticks in their craw.
    I reckon that started earlier, but who listens when they’re ranting?

13. It’s obviously true that the Boomers were too young to be driving the social upheavals of the 60s and 70s. What is also true is that most of the generation were anything but rebels. We were teachers’ pets, swallowing what we were told. (Which always included a heavy dose of flattery. “The smartest generation in history.”)

    What IS true, is that as a group, we were out for ourselves. We were big on “Five-finger discounts. Having noticed that when I was young, I am sympathetic tot the view that we are spending our kids’ inheritances on our selves. I do notice that, in the name of doing all we could for them, we avoided their company as much as possible when they were kids. Self-absorption was our most characteristic vice.

14. Late boomers got to experience bussing in schools and affirmative action in employment.

15. I especially like the supposition that all the Boomers got together sometime in the ’70s and uniformly decided, as a group, to screw over the following generations.

16. @neo: … the gist of it is that the Boomers were too young to be the movers and shakers of this particular revolution.

    Exactly. By simple arithmetic it stands to reason that Boomers were led by members of the Greatest and Silent Generations.

    In the 60s Boomers were in their teens and twenties. The Greatest and Silents were peaking in their 30s-50s.

    The Greatest and Silents survived the Depression and World War II. They also rode the incredible wave of post-war expansion and prosperity. They were well poised to find positions of power in academia, the arts, corporations, media and politics.

    Boomers mostly got to enjoy stable childhoods free from want. They were often spoiled, not surprisingly, by the Greatest and Silents who wanted their children to have happier lives than they had had.

    Which explains IMO much of how Boomers turned out.

17. I tend to lean into the Strauss-Howe definitions in their now rather exhaustive series of books (continued by Neil Howe after Strauss’s death) which places generations in relation to historical events rather than by charting the number of births in a given year. Their Boom generation begins in the year a child likely has no memory of V-E or V-J day (they use age 3 as a rule of thumb) so roughly 1943 and ends when a child similarly has no memory of the JFK assassination or 1960. Thus Obama just makes it into Gen X, and will likely be the only Gen X President much like Biden just barely made it as the only Silent Generation President.

    Secondly, while I understand your complaint the Boom generation didn’t necessarily deliberately engineer the social changes that happened during their tenure, the mass of the Boom population made impact and even distortion inevitable. As an example, the increase in full retirement age for Social Security enacted in 1983 appears to have been carefully constructed to impact as little as possible the Boom generation with a specific cap at age 66 for birth years from 1943 to 1954 before advancing to 67 for anyone born after 1960. It was raised 2 months per year starting with birth year 1938 which would have resulted in an FRA of 67 for anyone born in *1950* or later without the pause that avoided most of the impact to the Boom generation, even though in 1983 the oldest Boomers still had almost three decades before they would start making claims.

18. I tend to split the so-called boomer generation into at least two: post-WWII (1945) to 1954, then 1955-1964. Refine it by those eligible for combat service in Vietnam. Most “rock stars” were not boomers as you point out. The “60s” lasted from Kennedy’s assassination (1963) to Nixon’s resignation (1974) though 1968 could be a defining year; ie Johnson’s administration. Re the boomer generation: someone born in say 1947 was 20 in 1967 while someone born 15 years later (1962) wasn’t 20 until 1982. Vastly different growing up experiences.

19. I guess it’s trendy to bad-mouth “Boomers”, but the entire idea of trying to categorize people by their birth in some given interval is a crock. Personal example: I was born in 1954; my youngest brother was born in 1962. Three other brothers were born in-between, so all of us are classified as Boomers. During the classic Boomer event “the Summer of Love” in 1967, I was in junior high school and my littlest brother was in kindergarten. None of us had any notion what was happening to those people much older than us (per Neo) who actually were in San Francisco “turning on, tuning in, and dropping out”. One of the middle brothers did get mom to buy him a Nehru shirt, though.

    Same for 1968. I was a freshman in high school, my little brother was a first grader, and neither of us “Boomers” was doing the stereotypical Boomer things like getting drafted to Vietnam (maybe little brother got a draft notice, but he was still learning to read), demonstrating on campus, joining communes, etc. We missed Woodstock, too. That stuff all involved people who were at least five years older than me and far older than my brother. I was 14 and dreaming of someday buying a car and getting into Betty Lou’s pants, my little brother was playing with Tonka toys. I graduated high school in 1972 and enlisted in the Air Force just in time for the draft to be ended, served with older guys who had signed up to avoid the draft. Little brother went to high school in the late 70s, graduated in 1980 and joined the Navy (no draftees). A very different experience.

    Yet we and the brothers in-between are all “Boomers”, despite none of us having been old enough to take part in any of the Boomer games, and the younger ones are not even old enough to have much memory of the times. Neo is entirely right. Very many with the “Boomer” label were simply too young to have had any part in any of it. Trying to class people born during an 18-yr period as some kind of cohesive class is absurd.

20. Re: J.D. Salinger, Greatest Generation, WW II vet

    Don’t forget that “Catcher in the Rye,” which became a seminal novel in the Boomer canon, was written by J.D. Salinger (1919-2010).

    Salinger fought from D-Day to the Battle of the Bulge to the Battle of Heurtgen Forest all the way to Germany. Where he stayed in Intelligence working to find ex-Nazis.

    Much of his journey as a writer was based on his shattering WW II experiences, though he rarely referenced them explicitly. He was looking for answers outside the mainstream.

    Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), another shattered WW II vet turned Boomer hero, fits that profile too.

21. Most boomers weren’t hippies or political activists.

    They were still boomers and to some extent influenced by that zeitgeist because that’s what zeitgeists do.

22. Looking beyond culture at government, specifically the rise of the welfare and regulatory state, all of that was done when the sainted Greatest Generation had reached the point where they were assuming political office and power.

    All of the Presidents starting with JFK through to Bush41 served in some sort of uniformed capacity during WWII, although only aforementioned bookend POTUSes were born in the years normally considered for the Greatest Generation, the rest being older.

    But the time period from the early to mid-1960s on into the early 90s was the period when the upper levels of government was dominated by the WWII generation.

    Their governmental influence, especially the welfare state, definitely bled over into culture, especially the erosion of the nuclear family among those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.

23. I think that 1943 would be a better date for the start of the Boom, as Strauss and Howe would have it.

    I can attest as an Xer that when I was a teenager and in my early 20s, I didn’t clearly distinguish between the Boom and Silent Generations. I knew I was exasperated with the generation immediately older than myself, but that I kind of liked the World War II elders.

    (This is not a personal thing, so much as my attitude about their attitudes. I liked Project Apollo, I didn’t like hippies and drug culture and I even at that age I could see that the leaders of the ‘peace’ movement were on the USSR’s side.)

    Later I came to understand that the Silent Generation and the Boomers were not the same group, and that the people responsible for the worst of what I didn’t like seeing was a very small group of highly educated and atypical Silent and Boomers.

    The resentment over the 60s (which mostly happened in the 1970s) lingers now, over half a century later. It’s shaped politics and public affairs in all that time.

    (Back in the 1990s, someone once replied to a quesiton of why Clinton generated such hostility with the truthful statement that he ‘represented the 60s’. He was right. It wasn’t the only reason, but it was a significant one.)

    Most boomers weren’t hippies or political activists.

    They were still boomers and to some extent influenced by that zeitgeist because that’s what zeitgeists do.

    — huxley

    In fact, many Boomers are conservatives, and there was a huge divide between the hippies, who were mostly upper class, and the working class Boomers, who quite often detested them. The fact that working class young men were much more likely to end up in southeast Asia than the hippie class made it worse.

24. Discussion of this subject in popular media tends to put its attention on curios prevalent among children of the professional-managerial bourgeoisie. You can write interesting stories about such things, but that’s a poor description of the population at large in those birth cohorts. (BTW, Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew had six children between them, all born between 1943 and 1957; none of them were antagonists of the previous generation).
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    People born after 1938 produced fewer children and the marriages they contracted were more fragile. That’s half of what you need to know.

25. Boomers mostly got to enjoy stable childhoods free from want. They were often spoiled, not surprisingly, by the Greatest and Silents who wanted their children to have happier lives than they had had.
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    People who saw the midpoint of their upbringing in 1960 were as a rule less affluent than those who came later, manifest in various ways. Social relations were as a rule of a more salutary character.
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    Suggest that disagreeable phenomena in family life in that era caused more acute distress but (perhaps) fewer long-term deficiencies in personal function.

26. HC68. Yeah, there was a cultural divided between the self-proclaimed superior young folks and the “hard hats” (spit).

    I was born in March of 45, so I don’t quite fit, but I was there watching things, from what might be called the inside–college and all that implies–until 69 when I enlisted and saw the situation from the outside where, after marrying, I have remained. But, for various reasons, I have been able to see the hippy/left/ thing up close all along.

    However. Talked to some staff at an elementary school where I was doing some mentoring. Described sixth-grade boys about 1956 and what we were up to in school and out, The staff agreed that, should such a bunch show up in their school today, they’d all be arrested by middle of lunch hour. We carried jack knives. Cub Scout uniforms had clips for carrying one on the belt. We won WW II every third recess, playing cowboys and Indians in between. We doodled various kinds of weapons our fathers talked about on our notebooks and spelling tests. Our sports in recess involved heavy contact. What the ed folks suspected was true; the armory of faux firearms in our homes was astonishing. You could get a Mattel item looking like iirc an MP39, German submachine gun. Wind it up and it fired caps as if it were an automatic weapon. There was one with a perforated barrel sheath and a bipod. Turn the crank and you have a machine gun. Any number of cap pistols like in the westerns.
    We turned out okay.

27. So many people tout the 1946-64 Boomer range as if it were a law of physics. Strauss and Howe are closer to the mark with 1943-60 but I figure since it’s all generalizations anyway let’s just make it simple. Rather than these weird mid-decade boundaries and varied lengths let’s just do twenty year ranges by decades. It’s as good a generalization as any.

    Born in:

    1900’s-10’s Greatest
    1920’s-30’s Silent
    1940’s-50’s Boomer
    1960’s-70’s GenX
    1980’s-90’s Millennial
    2000’s-10’s Gen Z

    Look at the birth dates of most of the musicians who played Woodstock. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me to consider them to be Silent and not Boomer.

    The two-decade ranges can be easily split into earlier and later halves, and if one wants to consider the last quarter of Boomer and the first quarter of X to be a “Generation Jones” sub-generation, go for it.

28. The 1946-1964 range is not from generational historical theory but rather Census Bureau data, merely raw birth cohorts. Strauss & Howe’s framework takes in other factors and produces different ranges. For example, they say that the ’43 & ’44 birth cohorts are ‘war babies’ and early Boomers, with the Silent cohorts ending with ’42. GenX birth cohorts are ’61 to ’81, and so on. Being reproductive units, generations are 17 to 23 years in length (determined retroactively). The books “Generations” and “The Fourth Turning” are well worth reading, even if generational theory isn’t your cup of tea. It is a useful framing device, at the very least. Have a great hump day, y’all!

29. My mom was born in 1930, silent generation, and it doesn’t make sense to me she’s in the same generation as Mick Jagger. My mom remembers the Great Depression and WW2. Jagger would have been about 2 when Germany surrendered. It’s a different life experience.

30. @ Richard > “Who knows what would’ve become of that sort of therapy if LSD had remained legal.”

    Part of my internet browsing (“knowing how way leads on to way…”) recently turned up a few articles on what the pharmas are doing with “recreational drugs” in turns of actually studying their effects and some possible benefits.
    FWIW

    Of course, a lot of states legalized marijuana for “medical purposes,” and look where we are now.
    One quote (2021) covers the gist of all similar posts.

    https://www.zmescience.com/science/psychology-science/psychedelics-psychotherapy-05012021/

    Despite their ill reputation, psychedelics such as Psilocybin, LSD, and MDMA (commonly known as Ecstasy) may be the missing puzzle piece to treating several mental disorders. Results from contemporary clinical trials testify for the drugs’ capacity in inducing positive, long-term alterations in mental health and well-being in both patients and healthy individuals, when taken under regulation and as a complement to psychotherapy.
    …
    The belief in the therapeutic potential of psychedelics has been around for decades. But now more than ever, scientists are carrying out intensive investigations to allow for their use alongside psychotherapy, and results are promising. Their use in psychiatry can be attributed to a group of pioneering psychiatrists in the 1950s that demonstrated the powerful effects of LSD as an adjunct to therapy, in treating a gamut of conditions such as alcoholism, depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, personality disorders, and even sexual dysfunctions.

    Towards the 1970s, research on the use of hallucinogens in psychiatry has yielded over 1,000 scientific papers that contained findings from 40,000 subjects and 6 international conferences. Many of these studies weren’t reliable as the methodology conducted was flawed relative to contemporary guidelines.

    Nonetheless, the preliminary findings were intriguing enough to warrant further research into the matter. Unfortunately, that would become impossible as the use of psychedelics became a point of contention when LSD hit the streets in 1963, and psychedelics became notorious as drugs of abuse that are linked to the counterculture. Eventually, research using psychedelics was halted in the late 1960s due to political and societal pressures leaving many questions unexplored.

    The current situation …
    …
    Like the primary class of antidepressants, Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), psychedelics act on serotonin receptors and enhance the brain’s neuroplasticity. Nonetheless, psychedelics have an additional effect best described by Franz Vollenweider, a psychiatrist and neurochemist at the University Hospital of Psychiatry in Zurich, Switzerland, he states that psychedelics “activate a therapeutic, dreamlike state, intensifying sensory perception, and memories pop up like little films.”. Therefore, the drug creates a receptive mental state and allows patients to be open to fresh ideas about how to view the past and the future, and this is where psychotherapy has a big role in breaking down false thought patterns that drive mental illnesses like depression and enforces positive ones.

    This one does have a theory about what is going on (reported 2026).

    https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/massive-new-study-reveals-how-psychedelics-actually-reorganize-the-human-brain/

    You’ve likely seen some of the headlines: psychedelics aren’t just for getting high, they’re showing real medical promise. In some fields (like PTSD and addiction), they’re even being heralded as the next frontier of mental health. But if we’re being honest, it’s often hard to know where the hype ends and where the real scientific potential begins,

    That’s because studying these drugs is a nightmare. For decades, red tape kept labs locked. When the gates finally opened, we were left with small, scattered studies that rarely agreed on the details.

    Now, an international team of researchers has finally stepped in to add up all the info we have. They formed the BOLD Psychedelic Consortium and conducted a mega-analysis that integrates 11 independent datasets across five different drugs — psilocybin, LSD, mescaline, DMT, and the potent brew ayahuasca. This massive effort spanned three continents and five countries, involving 267 unique participants and over 500 individual brain scans.

    The biggest takeaway? Psychedelics effectively “flatten” the brain’s organizational hierarchy.
    …
    This research could prove instrumental in figuring out exactly how psychedelics help the brain escape some of its problems. For instance, for someone trapped in the rigid, repetitive loops of deep depression or OCD, the brain’s hierarchy can feel less like an organizational tool and more like a prison. By proving that psychedelics flatten this structure, we’re seeing the physical mechanism of a mental reset.

    That isn’t a full explanation. But for a field long divided by scattered findings, it is a meaningful step toward a common map.

    Not that any of this is new.

    https://www.zmescience.com/science/psychedelic-drugs-are-transforming-how-we-treat-mental-health/
    (2022) “We’ve come full circle with science now supporting what shamans have been doing for centuries.”

    https://www.zmescience.com/medicine/bronze-age-people-in-mediterranean-islands-were-taking-hallucinogenic-drugs-3000-years-ago/

31. I can’t tell exactly where AesopFan is coming down. No matter.

    My own take, based on more than occasional experience, is that marijuana, LSD and shrooms are interesting, potentially useful and even therapeutic, but they have been oversold, have random effects and important drawbacks.

    I’m not expecting reliable mental health breakthroughs via psychedelics. But they will have fun trying.

    Nonetheless, put into the context of alcohol or tobacco, psychedelics are relatively harmless.

32. All our times have come
    Here, but now they’re gone
    Seasons don’t blame the Boomers
    Nor do the wind, the sun, or the rain

    (We can be like they are) Come on, baby
    (Don’t blame the Boomers) Baby, take my hand
    (Don’t blame the Boomers) We’ll be able to fly
    (Don’t blame the Boomers) Baby, I’m your man
    La, la, la, la, la
    La, la, la, la, la
    ______________________

    –The Blue Oyster Cult, “Don’t Fear the Reaper” (1978)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbJJ0q2YSc8\

33. Don’t Fear The Reaper was released on 7/31/76

34. @ huxley > I wasn’t really coming down on any side, just pointing out the coincidence of reading some relevant posts shortly after after Richard posed his question.

    I do think that making some (maybe all) “bad drugs” illegal without also making provision for academic and pharmaceutical studies was a mistake. We lost a lot of valuable time that way.

35. Richard Aubrey – I’m GenX, born 1974, and most of the things you describe were still normal in schools in the 1980s and early 90s. I carried a Swiss Army knife to school all through high school. An awful lot of my art projects involved tanks (I got really good at drawing Shermans.) And “circle of death” style dodgeball was a regular feature of elementary school PE – with teachers occasionally participating. (Mr. Hilburn, my 4th grade teacher, was particularly deadly.) And at some point I owned a full size replica Uzi cap gun, which I ran around the neighborhood all summer shooting at my friends playing ‘War.’

36. Dave. My kids were born in 77 and I never saw anything like that in our neighborhood. Wanted sports stuff from the earliest ages, same as all their friends.

37. We did it! We totally did it! And we would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for those meddling kids.

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