The kids are not alright

I keep waiting for the great Baby Boomer revolt.

It's not just that my generation is taking the brunt of the massive layoffs, replaced, if at all, by "lower cost" employees in their twenties. Or just that, even without a recession, we would face a hostile, age-biased job market at a time when many of us should be in our peak earning years. It's not just that we're the ones who lost the pension protection enjoyed by our parents, to be replaced by now decimated 401(k)s just as retirement nears. Or that we've spent a lifetime paying for the Social Security and Medicare of others to find that the nation sees our turn for this social compact a "looming danger" to be curtailed or stopped altogether. It's not just that the experience and skills many of us spent decades amassing are arbitrarily deemed worthless in "the marketplace."

It's all this, but more.

Throughout time people have awakened in a foreign country, whether they traveled anywhere: it's called old age. For many Boomers, this discontinuity has arrived much sooner compared with previous generations. And all the electronic distractions can't compensate for a simple fact: What happened to our country?

It's taken nearly thirty years of creep, but the economy, society and social compact that built the greatest middle class in history have been shredded. It doesn't take a Hurricane Katrina to realize this. For several years, in all sorts of settings, I would hear people old enough to remember another America talk about how their job quality had been eroded; how they were valued less and less, especially if they brought the wisdom and skills that only come from seasoning; how employers couldn't wait for an excuse to show them the door.

Most disturbing of all were the stories about the loss of meritocracy: The ability to rise based on work and merit that seemed a birthright for Americans from the 1940s onward. I heard it from cops, nurses, doctors, teachers, professors, auto workers, steel workers, people in all levels of technology and, yes, journalists. When we complained that the leaders of our fields were destroying them, we were told to read Who Moved My Cheese and dismissed as malcontents who couldn't accept "change." It's telling that the old America, which valued experience, built the great economy that the new America, which values cheap labor and plutocratic concentration of wealth, has proceeded to destroy.

Our parents could take a grim satisfaction that our supposedly revolutionary generation was the victim of so many revolutions. Yet the problem for most struggling Boomers that I know is not that they can't adapt or won't work hard. It's that the "rules" keep changing against them, the goalposts keep being moved further downfield. Meanwhile, the minority of winners have won beyond the imaginings of previous plutocrats. This happened by conscious public policy, pushed by the wealthiest and most powerful interests -- ranging from bad trade deals to anti-worker laws to deregulation. They also created another Great Depression. All this has left the future for people who "work hard and play by the rules" looking dimmer.

The revolt has been postponed if not canceled. Generations are, after all, made up of individuals. The Boomers were never monolithic. The cohort born between 1946 and, say, 1950, had most of the fun: sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. They sold out to Wall Street in the 1980s and came to real power in the 1990s. At the average Joe and Jill level, many enjoyed the best of the old America and now are set to retire. Later Boomers may not be so lucky (we even had to suffer through disco, long skirts and bad hair). Of course in the new highly stratified America, there are some who are doing quite well. But I suspect the hurt has only begun for the majority. Also, the dangers to come have been concealed by the transfer of wealth to many Boomers from their middle-class parents, who amassed it in an America of stable, secure jobs, abundant opportunities, real pensions and meritocracy.

By happenstance, my generation is the first that will experience a poorer, meaner America -- but it won't be the last. Whether Barack Obama -- contrary to myth, another Boomer -- can change this grim calculus remains to be seen.

Comments

[soleri]

As an early Boomer, I'm used to the kind of false argument that deems one generation at fault in order to excuse bad policy and harebrained ideology. Boomers didn't invent the sexual revolution nor the Reagan Revolution. We went along for the ride because, as individuals, that's what you do. We were lucky, to be sure, that the old ecoonomy still afforded middle-class lifestyles. Of course, some of us are very unlucky to be at retirement's doorstep with hollowed-out 401Ks and houses that are no longer piggy banks.

It might be that much of this was inevitable, that American Exceptionalism carried with it enough hubris to deny both stern virtues and ordinary economic laws. Does it matter that Generation X was raised on a diet of Milton Friedman and Joel Osteen? Will it matter to the Millenials that their future looks foreclosed before it really began?

We don't feel like a community anymore because we accepted the idea that we're all free agents in a global marketplace. The problem here is that individuals in an Ownership Society necessarily loosen the ties that bind. Disjointed families are a symptom of a country that counts its blessings monetarily. If this is really a new Great Depression, we may rediscover with bitterness and tears that we really are in this together.

[eclecticdog]

Being a late boomer (1958) makes me too young to really feel a part of the Boomer Generation. I was too young for the 60s, too young and uncool for the 70s, too poor for the 80s. Got ahead in the 90s but now have watched it all erode (IRAs down 40%, each new job brings lower pay and benefits). I'd like to revolt believe me. But as you have said, we have gotten old. Revolutionaries are youngsters (low 40s tops).

Speaking of being beaten down, I heard that the PHX PD entered the parking lot of my former employer (5000+ employess) and began handing out tickets for license plate covers that obscured the ARIZONA on the license plate. Guess we know how the city will try to cover its budget shortfall -- legalized muggings ($130 a pop). Maybe there will be a revolt! Revolutions usually require the support of a squeezed and unhappy middle class.

[Emil Pulsifer]

Amusing and true, Mr. Talton. Allusions to the "new paradigm" (Who Moved My Cheese) remind me that it isn't only on the pages of Dilbert that pointy-haired bosses flourish.