Don’t blame the boomers
It’s common to do so; I see it constantly online. I recently wrote this post about the phenomenon. An excerpt:
I’ve seen it for years and years and years online: the idea that the Boomer generation has screwed the younger ones. It’s often advanced by 40-somethings or younger, who feel insufficiently flush with cash and that the world hasn’t rewarded them in the manner they think they deserve. The idea that previous generations struggled and that many still struggle (I have friends my age with little savings, for example) is brushed aside. And the opinions of older people are shrugged off with the dismissive, “Okay, Boomer.”
It’s not unusual to wish that the Boomers would die already. Just shuffle off this mortal coil so that the young can get the spoils. And this is usually said with no sense of shame whatsoever.
I’ve seen most of this in the comments sections of blogs and MSM articles, as well as on social media of many kinds. It’s said not with humorous tolerance but powerful hatred and envy. But envy has now become perfectly okay, a kind of badge of virtue with “microlooters” and the like.
But based on the comments thread to that post, I realized I wanted to expand on something, and I’m highlighting it here. My point is not so much about the economic envy I already discussed in that post; it’s about blame for the cultural changes that began during the 1960s that jettisoned many traditions.
First of all, we need a definition of “Boomer”: it is the generation born between 1946 and 1964. By that definition, Bill Clinton (1946) and Donald Trump (also 1946) just make it into the beginning of the Boomer generation, and Obama is close to the end (1961) but still a Boomer. Biden, on the other hand, is not even a Boomer; born in 1942, he’s a member of the Silent Generation.
But the cultural changes of the 1960s which tore down many of the older standards, plus the Vietnam War opposition, featured people born in the early portion of the Boomers generation as followers rather than leaders. The Boomers are often blamed, but the movement actually was driven and led by people from the previous generation, the so-called Silent Generation.
Just to take a few examples:
Tom Hayden, antiwar activist, born 1939
Jane Fonda, antiwar activist, born 1937
Jerry Rubin, “Yippie” activist, born 1938
Abbie Hoffman, “Yippie” activist, born 1936
Timothy Leary, drug promoter, born 1920 (he was of the Greatest Generation)
Huey Newton, black activist, born 1942
Malcolm X, black activist, born 1925 (Greatest Generation)
Bernardine Dohrn, Weather Underground, born 1942
Bill Ayers, Weather Underground, born 1944
I could go on and on. The Beatles, all born prior to the Boomer Generation (early 1940s). Rolling Stones, same, except for Ronnie Wood (1947). Eldridge Cleaver (1935), Bob Dylan (1941), Janis Joplin (1943), Ken Kesey (1935), Frank Zappa (1940), Ram Dass (1931).
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.
I could continue with this, but the gist of it is that the Boomers were too young to be the movers and shakers of this particular revolution. You do see quite a few carrying it on, though, in terms of anti-Trump demonstrations and the like.
The Boomers were the shock troops and the useful idiots.
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.
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.
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 . . .
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”.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).