The Evil That Men Do

The Evil That Men Do
Portia Lamas
I didn’t want to post this as a comment on neo without asking because it’s so incredibly long – so I’m sending it to her and asking her if she is all right with my posting it. If you’re seeing it, she is. Or perhaps she just gave me permission to post a link. Who knows? It really is VERY long.
I didn’t meant to start a thread on the evil of the boomer generation. While it is true that many people – particularly my generation which follows right on their tail – has come to loathe everything boomer and paint them with a broad and dark brush, and while I’ve been known to make comments about living long enough to dance on their graves, this is to an extent and injustice. And not just because there are good boomers among the best – as there are in every generation. I’m not saying this to mollify them or even to throw in some of that worship which they have come to believe is their due from everyone, PARTICULARLY our age cohort.
I assure everyone I come to bury boomerdom not to praise it. Yet, some things need to be said, on how they GOT that way and on the good things they managed along the way which got buried in all the bad. And also, perhaps, about such generic things as how to destroy a country without firing a bullet. And what the real enemies are. And perhaps how we can survive this – I don’t know if we can and I don’t have any real ideas, but perhaps someone out there does.
To begin with let’s talk of the "boomer generation." Were other generations mentioned before? Well, I’ve heard of the lost generation, but by and large the whole concept of "generation" – though existent – seems to have been ignored by American History and Literature until the boomers. I might be wrong on this, because frankly I don’t have the time to do the careful research necessary to back it.
The fact that time and careful research is needed, though, tells you something. NO ONE needs careful research to identify a boomer generation. No one will, even a hundred years from now. They are right there, in every print media, in every radio station, in every record of the time, singing about "My [their] generation." Their effect is undeniable.
Why is that? Well... they’re a REALLY large generation. As such they provided a very attractive marketing target group for a newly prosperous society. All the things they believe about themselves "the best, the brightest" etc started before their turn to the left; before their infatuation with communism, before they began to hate their country.
Am I saying this was a bad thing? Not of itself. Not necessarily. I’m ALL for capitalism. Capitalists have to keep people alive so they can sell to them. It’s much better than the alternative.
So I’m not saying that the marketing was bad or wrong. It was human. I’m saying that it started before these kids ever came to age, that it was a novel experience for them. Regardless of how their parents taught them, or how they were viewed by their parents, they had someone fawning on them as something special. I came onto the scene almost twenty years later, but I grew up reading my brothers’ books. There, on the back of everyone of them, was a page of advertisements. Decoder rings, bikes, "be the first on your block." By the time I came along that marketing had moved on to stuff favored by twenty year olds and teens. My first definition of our generation before I had anything to hold against the boomers was "we came after." As in, we came after all the excitement. After all the neat stuff. At that age I fit what some marketer tried to imprint my people – wedged between boomer and genexer – with "generation Jones." At that age I was envious of everything the boomers had. Don’t discount this marketing campaign as the source of boomer ego. I still have friends who cry at a listing of the products targeted at them as children. There is at least one short story that is nothing more than a listing of these brands. They can’t understand why it leaves my people cold.
From the boomers as a marketing scheme we come to the definition of boomers – of the generation. I know anthropologically and on the books, a generation is 25 years. But the boomers as a "generation" can’t be that long. It can’t even be 20 years. At a maximum stretch I’d give it 15, but I know that the younger of my two older brothers, born in fifty five, when I was growing up considered himself at the very tail end of the generation. He still did some protesting in college, but not as much, and he missed out on all the "exciting stuff," such as the taking of the Dean’s offices and student strikes and all that. And though he still had some classes in which you graded yourself, and a lot where you spent time raising consciousness, it just wasn’t the same. (Echoing his stories, I’m tempted to add ‘man’ to the end of that sentence.)
The generation primarily catered to was exactly that, perhaps birth dates of 46 to 56 or thereabouts. Of course, remember that generations – like decades – as cultural currents do not end at a precise year. There will always be people who identify with the prior generation – Obama is as much a boomer as anyone can be – and those who identify with the next. I have friends who heaved a big sigh of relief in the eighties as schools and students became more "normal." If you look – and I suspect someone could get a grant to do this in sociology or history. Not me. I work for a living – I bet you can trace that truly massive first BOOM moving through the system by the kind of advertisements targeted at them. Decoder rings, milk flavorings, pre-teen primping stuff, teen stuff, love beads, first home, wedding paraphernalia, baby carriers, how to raise your rebellious child books (and did we get a lot of these), do not spank laws and regulations, flash cards and increase your child’s IQ, how to cope with teen children, empty nesting stuff (waning now), and how our retirement is the greatest thing since our birth commercials. All of those are aimed at a rough ten years and about ten years ahead of me. (I’m forty five. The retirement commercials are full force now.) I don’t know for sure nationwide, but I know when I hit the schools they were already starting to contract. There were closed buildings, rooms that weren’t repaired because we didn’t need to use them. Not as bad as the school closings six or seven years later, but there was already a feel that the mass of people that constituted "boomers" was on the wane.
In those early years, we were not considered boomers. The boomers were the others, the generation everyone was talking about. However, this was created by marketing, remember? They need to extend that sense that their products which they just designed/refined for the boomers are still cool and hip. So they started claiming my generation, year by year. When last I looked they were up to sixty four, which is ridiculous. They might have gone further than that now. This in part is to cater to the boomers idea that they’re still young. Ignore it. It’s a distraction.
When I say boomers, I assume 46 to 56 birth dates with some bleed through on either end.
Some of the boomers’ hype about themselves is true. They were probably the best fed American generation ever. And because, as America goes, so does the world, worldwide the boomers were the most prosperous generation ever. Which is not the same as saying that foreign boomers were on the same level as American boomers, but they still enjoyed "wealth never before experienced." (Exceptions to countries behind the iron curtain and of course the usual misery spots.)
We know that early childhood feeding is essential. As such they were probably brighter and more active and healthier than their parents. Here comes the second prong of the generation’s issues. They were brighter, more active and healthier than their parents. Most parents recognized that. All parents always hope for the best for their kids. However most of us know our kids will do "about like we did" accounting for different conditions. Oh, sure there are exceptions. There are rags to riches. They’re few and far between. (Though more common in the US than anyone else.) It is far from the common story. Variations of it, sure. Somewhat ragged to relatively rich is common. But the total change, what the arab horoscopes which -- in one of their few sane ideas compute place of birth, date of birth, status of parents, status of the area born in, and not planets – call "deep slingshot" which comes from the depths of misery to the uppermost riches are rare (No, don’t quote tax records at me. That’s not the same. That records the relative rags to relative riches. Not a meteoric rise, with sudden and permanent results. I.e the very fact people move between the brackets means it wasn’t instant and lasting.)
The boomers’ parents looked at their kids – and perhaps helped by the media hype and by their own traumas from WWII which they wished to overcome – saw something new. A great shining hope. Consciously or not, they raised them like that. "You will change the world" started before student protests.
Call this a story of how those whom the gods mean to destroy they first drive mad.
My guess – and remember I came ten years later, so my vision of it might be colored – is that the rebellion started before it became political. It would have started because these kids would hit late adolescence with sky high expectations and the world would meet them head on and defeat half of them. No one attains their goal every time. And when you’ve been raised to think you’re something special and all doors will open to you, rejection will hurt hardest. Whether what you want is a job or a college education after high school, about half of you are going to fall short of exactly what you want. Maybe more. And if you been raised on hype of how great you are, you’re going to rebel. It can’t be your fault. It’s that ossified older generation. They just don’t "get" you.
And then there was the Vietnam war. The catalyst. You were raised as something special and now they want you to go and die somewhere, for someone you’ve never known? Screw that. You’re special. You’re supposed to have everyone bow before you. You’re not a bullet stopper.
And across the world the third prong of what would drive the boomers to madness kicked in. The marching behemoth of the USSR saw their chance to defeat the US from within, using their own children to do it. This is documented. They sent over agitators. They bombarded Europe with propaganda experts, talking about the boomer revolt here, encouraging the same in the rest of the west.
Suddenly the boomers, raised to believe they were the swiftest, smartest, brightest – the generation everyone must cater to – discovered they were also altruistic, good, kind, the hope of the future. They discovered Aquarius was on the way. They were going to change the world. At first this had a hard edged communist feel, but judging by my brother it waned to hippy-dippy. Most American kids knew they didn’t really want to bring about the revolution. More than anything else, they didn’t want to go to war and they wanted to not grow up. A not uncommon aspiration between late teens and mid twenties. The zeitgeist and the massive doses of narcissism they’d been fed gave them an excuse not to.
They didn’t cut their hair, they didn’t get a job, they went into communes, they experimented with drugs and they joined a thousand different cults. The seventies – their last attempt at not actually trying to achieve anything – was littered with the-spaceship-will-come-tomorrow-and-rescue-us-all. No, I’m not joking, I got the back wash of this via older siblings. I think I lost any interest in the stuff around fourteen, because there was nothing there to hold onto.
This brings me to the final prong of the boomer madness – the one that’s still with us (Oh, very much with us.) – the image is substance thing. Part of this again came from their massive numbers and the hype surrounding them. They literally bent the culture around them. What they said was believed. When they took the colleges on relatively scant achievements – remember, they were protesting – the older generation bowed down or got out of the way. And the boomers, who knew they didn’t have that much substance, formed this idea that it had always been like this, that no one really knew anything, that it was all on how you presented it. They still feel that way – look at the fields they rule. Media, entertainment, education. Yeah. It’s the last prong of their madness.
Here we come to our own – birth dates of 57 or thereabouts to 70 or thereabouts – hostility towards the boomers. No use denying it started in "Jones" of course it did. I remember wishful envy to those ads in the back of mags and books, blooming to utter sneering resentment at the series Thirty Something when I was twenty something. But it went deeper than that. By the time I was twenty something it had become clear my generation wasn’t going to prolong the "boomer way", their modus vivendi, if you will. We went to school and expected to be taught. Worse, with few exceptions, we wanted to be taught what we’d come there to learn, not social consciousness or how to hold a mirror low and preen on the beauty of our sexual organs. And then we left college, cut our hair and went to work.
We followed boomer fashions, we might listen to – some – boomer music, but were not them. We were also the first time they got a wake up call: they were not the last and permanent "youth" generation. They too would pass away, and their works with them.
All I have for this is annedoctal – news reports describing how the "new kids" were evil. They didn’t care about others. They didn’t fight for social justice. They just wanted to make a buck. We were the material girls (and boys) that they sneered at. Personally I found myself at the receiving end of endless rants from siblings, from their friends, from teachers, about how "You don’t care" and about how "Your generation is just materialistic and empty."
This while we were going to school and college which had got filled with boomers as teachers and professors. I suspect most people in my generation have learned to foam at the mouth at two things: the "Call me Bob" teachers, always uttered with gracious condescension; and the "I’ll teach you less than you’ll teach me." Both of these were signs that you were about to spend math class listening to Woodstock tapes and being told how groovy and great and with it the boomers were and how our generation was ruining it all.
This did not make for kind feelings towards them, and I think started the long-corked hatred that erupted in poor neo’s comments. An this brings us to where we’re now, where this election is very much the boomers’ last huzzah and they know it, and they’re pushing with everything they have to get their golden boy in, because this will be their "legacy." They are blinkered by their own information means – lying to themselves has become a boomer thing – who never reported how bad the USSR was before it crashed. They’re blinded by their own self importance. Those that have an inkling they’re wrong are pushing it to the back of their minds. Socialism is what they’ve always pushed, and it’s become their brand new spaceship from Arturus, their new Age of Aquarius.
Pity them. Most of them don’t even realize if they get the golden boy in, what they’ll face instead is forced euthanasia at the hands of the State’s Health Care in another five to ten years, when they become "just a burden on the country." Worse, yet, I suspect most of them would acquiesce to it, happily, thinking they’re the most altruistic, the best, the brightest, the most peaceful.
And this brings me to the good things they did do – and the shining, never materialized shangrilla that might have been if their expectations hadn’t been set quite so high, if their illusions hadn’t been fed by merchants willing to cater to them, by parents who saw in them something new, and finally – and worst of all – by an enemy standing ready to delude them into turning against their own country.
It took me years – I was in my thirties – before I realized that the boomers had materially improved my life. Partly by the fact that they existed – a generation boom is useful and I have no idea if it’s a regularly occurring phenomenon in human societies. But when the young outweigh the old it is a time to break with some ossified rules. Equality for women – before it became the present "feminist" craziness was a good thing. So was equality for minorities. And – I’m libertarian leaning on this, sorry – the fact that gay people could come out of the closet. Same with examining traditions and loosening them some. (Not the complete untying was the result of the hubris described above.)
The fact is the boomers came of age at a time of rapid technological development and society needed to adapt to that. If that was all they did, it would have been great.
And then there is the boomer selfishness, which has made our generation FAR more comfortable. No, no, seriously. The other side of boomer "I want it now" is that they got products made and designed – and social spaces too – in a way that makes common, regular individuals (Call us Average Joe the Plumbers) far more comfortable. This wasn’t as strong in Europe who only got sort of an attenuated boom and if you ever go through the Frankfurt airport, with two toddlers, no water fountains, and few and far spaced bathrooms which have one stall, you should thank the boomer selfishness for what we have here.
I look at my friends who served in Vietnam and at the boomers who woke up after nine eleven and I see what might have been, without the pernicious foreign influence. Without a very ill-timed war to send their rebellion through the roof. They would have grown up. They would have tamed. Their being a little smarter and a little healthier than previous generations would have been a boon to our country and to the world.
That’s not what happened. Call it enemy action. Call it the fact that the previous generation was scarred by WWII and put misguided hopes on the boomers. Call it the fact that by then a good number of their educators were left-leaning. (My father always said one communist in any group is enough to make the whole group act communist. It’s been my observation this is true.) In a way they’re victims. They drank their own Koolaid. They fell through the cracks.
Of course this does not absolve them. At some point we all must raise ourselves, and no one comes from a perfect family or grows up at perfect times. At some point we all must look at ourselves and change what doesn’t work. The boomers chose to perpetuate it. It is clear by how loud they scream that they’re the best that at least most of the know, in their hearts of hearts that they’re not.
However, given the same temptation, how would I have behaved. I don’t know. I didn’t have it. And that makes me squirm in discomfort when I hear wholesale screeds against faceless "boomers." Are you going to be one of those who encourages the state to murder them in their millions through mandated euthanasia? Are you aware the same beast will devour you?
Don’t fight the boomers, fight their hubris. Attack it at every chance and in every place. The best generation? Really? The most altruistic? In what way? Show us the money. Make our blinkered marketers see that while the boomers are still a massive demographic, there are more of us than of them. And by the way, the ten years right behind the boomers are at our peak earning – if somewhat diminished by what boomer hubris did to market and industry ahead of us. As usual.
But most of all, if you are one of my people, keep working. Keep your head down. Make things work. Have fun. Raise your kids well. The time might come – if the boomers win this election for their messiah – that you need to fight and your kids by your side. This is the boomers’ last attempt to make sure they are special and have a special place in history. Don’t give it to them. They don’t know what place they’ll have, if they win. They’ve blinded themselves so they don’t see.
Vote McCain/Palin even if it all seems lost. Don’t give it to Obama. Make him STEAL it. And then fight him when he steals it.
Take a page from the boomer book. Tell your elders to shut up. Tell them they don’t know what they’re talking about. Speak truth to power. Question authority. Look behind the carefully tacked-up cloth of boomer rhetoric that hides the fact that they really are nothing special. Work for the tipping point. And if all else fails, start our own long march through the institutions.
It is not given to us to choose in which times we live, but how we live is ALWAYS our choice. We might be forgotten or never mentioned in history, that’s okay. We were never mentioned while alive. But religious or not, I’m sure most of us agree that we will be judged. Perhaps not by a supernatural entity at the end of time, but by how well our children and grandchildren live after we’re gone. And if even they don’t know our names and forget we existed, their future, and the future of humanity matters.
Don’t let the boomers destroy us. Make sure they go out of natural causes, quietly, in a free society that honors their real accomplishments and ignores the rest because it is no longer relevant. And that my friends is not only the best, but the only true revenge.