People try to put us d-down
(talkin’ ’bout my generation)
Just because we g-get around
(talkin’ ’bout my generation)
Things they do look awful c-c-cold
(talkin’ ’bout my generation)
I hope I die before I get old
(talkin’ ’bout my generation)
If you’re of a certain age, you’ll quickly recognize the lyrics from the Who’s famous 1965 anthem for the baby boomers, written before we g-g-got old … or d-d-died. Or before it became trendy to d-d-dump on us, the latest example being an opinion piece in The New York Times last week, in which several members of succeeding generations asked geezers one question: “How about an apology?” The story was called “Thanks a Lot, Boomers.” That was irony, in case you’re too old to get it.
Here’s the gist: Young people are “struggling with the high cost of education, a scarcity of affordable housing, and a diminished American dream. [They] live in communities that are still divided by race, in a nation burdened by debt, on a planet that keeps getting hotter.”
I’m not sure how all the problems in that second sentence are the fault of America’s senior citizens, but I do get the resentment that might arise from the conditions laid out in that first sentence. Financially speaking, boomers drew the lucky straw in myriad ways.
My story is pretty typical: I grew up privileged. Not because my parents were rich — far from it — but because I faced so many fewer obstacles than younger generations now face. Everybody in my small Midwestern town — Black, white, or brown, poor, middle-class, or rich — attended the same public schools, read the same newspapers, and watched the same four television stations. We all seemed to get along okay, though I’m sure my Black and (then-anonymous) LGBTQ classmates faced hardships that my clueless teenage self could never comprehend.
Full tuition at the University of Missouri in 1972 was $800 a semester. Like many of my fellow boomers, I was able to work my way through college doing part-time jobs during the school year and full-time work during the summers. When I graduated — after leisurely cramming four years of college into six — I had no debt and no interest in a career, so I cruised around the West in an old pickup with a camper cover, settling for a short time in New Mexico, and later in San Francisco. My girlfriend and I worked menial jobs and easily paid the $175-a-month rent on a decent Haight Street apartment.
My generation had the ultimate luxury: time. We had the freedom to spend years figuring out what direction we wanted our lives to take, unsaddled by student loan debt or high rent. When we did settle down, we still had it good. In 1980, after two years of marriage, my wife and I had saved enough from our modest salaries to put a down payment on a house. That level of financial freedom is now mostly reserved for the wealthy or those well-established in their careers.
Boomers’ good fortune was the result of being born at the beginning of a decades-long economic surge, fueled by low-interest GI-Bill loans that enabled millions of young Americans returning from World War II to buy homes priced at half the comparable level of today’s housing. Labor union jobs provided good wages and strong pensions for millions of blue-collar workers. Consumer spending rose dramatically. Money was being poured into the booming economy from the bottom up.
Contrast those conditions with today’s “trickle-down,” billionaire-friendly economy: The minimum wage has been the same for 15 years. Healthcare costs are rising sharply. Social services for veterans and the poor have been shredded. Social Security and Medicare are in jeopardy. University tuitions are rising in the face of federal funding cuts. Jobs are being slashed by the thousands. Grocery prices are rising while crops lie fallow in farmers’ fields, a result of impulsive and senseless tariffs, and the gutting of the immigrant workforce. The housing market has been in the doldrums for months.
The last thing we Americans need to be doing in this moment is sniping at each other with meaningless, age-based insults. Didn’t we learn anything from the pointless trashing of millennials a few years back? I saw lots of people from every generation holding signs at No Kings rallies last weekend. It was beautiful and powerful. We need a lot more of that and a lot less click-bait snark. Talkin’ ’bout our generations. All of them.