(Authors note: Most of this story appeared in a response to another story. Apologies for the repetition, for those of you who read that.)
Born at the tail of the Baby Boom, I admit that I find the Blame the Boomers sentiment infuriating. Yes, there are big challenges faced by the generations following the Boomers such as the cost of housing, healthcare, and higher education. Climate change looms.
But in so many ways life is much, much better today than when Boomers were growing up or even for the majority of their lives. Envy and nostalgia for that world are misplaced. Anger at Boomers is unjustified and counterproductive. All generations endure their trials and tribulations, and all generations (as groups) do some things right and some things wrong.
First of all, *I* know that I personally won PowerBall with respect to privilege. I am a
(1) white, heterosexual male
(2) born in the United States in the 1960s
(3) to psychologically healthy parents who loved me and
(4) who had the financial means to provide me with the education and medical care to reach my potential.
(5) I grew up in a safe environment with good adult role models, and
(PowerBall) I am smart.
But here is what the Boomer generation has endured.
Millions of Boomer kids had parents who were screwed up by PTSD from combat in World War Two or Korea or by losing a family member in one of those conflicts. For example, the father of one of my friends was a medic who spent the first two weeks of his deployment in Europe picking up bodies off the Normandy beaches. Near the end of this man’s life, as his wife lay dying, he revealed that was tormented by the fact that he could have saved so many more lives if his medical kit had more supplies. The father-in-law of one of my cousins was a Jewish man whose B-17 was shot down in 1943, and he was one of the lucky ones to survive. He spent the next 18 months in a German prisoner-of-war camp until Germany surrendered. The father another friend was an immigrant who was forced to work in Germany after the Nazis seized Poland. You get the idea . . .
With respect to health and medicine:
1. Polio was an epidemic yearly until the Salk and Sabin vaccines were developed in the mid -50s.
2. Smallpox was still a danger until the 1960s.
3. Vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella did not become available until the 1960s
4. Cancer was virtually a death sentence, especially for our parents and grandparents, until the development of effective chemotherapies in the late 70s. Even after that Boomers died of cancer who would survive today.
5. Parents of friends died of heart attacks that people now routinely survive. Open heart surgery was largely unavailable until the 1970s. Stents and angioplasty are outpatient procedures now.
6. There was essentially no organ transplantation until the 1970s and even then it wasn’t until the 1980s that anti-rejection drugs made organ transplants possible on a large scale.
7. There was no reattachment of amputated limbs or fingers.
8. There were no CT scans, MRIs, PET scans, or sonograms. Often exploratory surgery was needed just to try to determine what was wrong with someone.
9. Smoking was everywhere including restaurants, elevators, airplanes, and public transportation. People routinely smoked and drank while pregnant, and kids endured adults’ smoking in closed automobiles.
10. In the late 60s, over 50,000 people per year died on the highways when far fewer people drove and drove fewer miles. There were no seatbelts or child safety seats. People bragged about driving drunk into the 1980s — they thought it was funny! I had friends either killed by drunk drivers in high school or were left never the same after an accident.
11. Unwanted pregnancy before 1973? Depending on where you lived, you had the baby or risked an illegal abortion. Birth control itself was illegal in many states. Being an unwed mother had a terrible stigma. (So did divorce.)
12. In the 60s teenage boys had to worry about being drafted. I recall an older cousin getting his draft number in 1971.
13. As many Boomers were becoming sexually active, AIDS emerged in 1980. Friends of mine died of AIDS in the mid-80s. It, too, was a death sentence until about 1990. Training as an EMT in 1986, I took vital signs without wearing gloves on a man in an ER who had track marks on his arms. (Gloves were not required and firefighters and EMT even bragged about how they got bloody responding to accidents.) Only when speaking with the attending physician came into the exam room did the man reveal that he had the HIV virus. I knew he was as good as dead.
Boomers bore the brunt of the scourge of AIDS. Now COVID is a much bigger danger to Boomers than to the generations who have come after us.
What else?
One of my earliest memories was the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Only five years old, I could not understand — my father told me only that a bad man had killed a good man. Two months later, I recall asking my mother what the person on the radio meant when he said “hemorrhaging.” That was the assassination of Robert Kennedy. I recall watching evening news footage of the 1972 busing riots in Boston.
The nightly television news contained lots of images of the Vietnam War until American servicemen and women left in 1973. Over 55,000 Americans died and many more were maimed physically and/or psychologically in that stupid, immoral conflict. Most of those were Boomers. Thousands fled to Canada to avoid being drafted.
Wanted to marry someone who was not of your own race? It was ILLEGAL in many states until the late 1960s. Even after that one would be a pariah in most places for marrying someone of a different race.
Being gay was considered to be a mental illness for a long time, and then still to be an abomination by almost everyone. Marrying someone of your own gender was simply considered preposterous.
Wanted to change your gender? Not even medically possible when Boomers were growing up, never mind something people seriously considered.
Had a disability? Good luck getting a job, or even being physically able to negotiate sidewalks, get into buildings (like restaurants), or go to a restroom. The Americans with Disability Act was passed in 1992 when most Boomers were in their 30s or 40s, and its implementation took several years.
There was no OSHA, EPA, or Clean Water Act until the 1970s. The air in LA burned people’s eyes, Pittsburgh had terrible smog so bad you could not see across the street sometimes, and air quality was terrible in many cities until years after the Clean Air Act of 1970. DDT was not banned until 1972, and the bald eagle and other raptors were extinct here where I grew up in New England. Now they are back! So are deer, turkeys, and coyotes.
While in some ways financially the Boomer generation was more fortunate than later generations, inflation was above 6% from about 1975–1985 and above 4% for most of 1970 to 1995. During the same time period, unemployment was above 6% from 1970 to 1995. Inflation was above 10% in 1975 and 1979–1982, and it reach 14%(!) in 1980. From 1980 to 1985 unemployment was as high as it was during the Great Recession years of 2008–2013, and inflation was much higher.
Many friends grew up in large families (7, 8, and even 10 or more children), and they were expected to contribute to family finances as soon as they could hold a job in their teens. For the most part, they could not afford college, and many didn’t even see higher education as something they could do.
Women were discouraged from all kinds of careers in science and technology and other “jobs for men” like airline pilots or combat soldiers.
I don’t mean to suggest that life was terrible. Quite the opposite — I had a good life growing up, and so did most of my friends and relatives. We look back with fondness at the good times and warm relationships.
But the fact is, I wouldn’t want to go back to that era. And I expect that most people complaining about Boomers would not want to go back to those times either!
Gang, there is too much to fix in this world to waste time and emotional energy blaming or being envious of another generation. (Would the people of later generations really have made different choices than Boomers under the same circumstances?)
Instead, let’s be grateful for what we have now — especially that which was unavailable in years past — while working to address the many, many problems facing *all* of us (including Boomers) to make the world a better place.