The Worst Generation

One of life's great ironies is that America's "Greatest Generation" that lived through the Great Depression and was victorious in World War II, gave birth to America's Worst Generation, which introduced abundant drug use, abundant divorce, promiscuous sex and the mainstreaming of teen pregnancy and single-parent families, a blurring of the roles of men and women, and a level of rudeness, debauchery, and a coarsening of our society not contemplated by the generations which had lived before.

I have a subscription to American Heritage magazine. In their October 2005 issue, their flagship article for that issue was entitled, Boomer Century - How the Baby Boom Generation Changed Everything. On page 41-42, there is an article entitled, Is It Really "The Worst Generation"?, by Benjamin Cheever. A boomer himself, Mr. Cheever's article defends his generation against the charges that they changed this country for the worse. But at times, even he concedes that some damage has been done, especially in the raising of the subsequent generation(s) that were produced by the boomers. Mr. Cheever explains what his generation has wrought by giving an example of the behavior of today's youth:

We were spoiled. No denying that. And we have spoiled our children. Is this a moral failing? I think not. More a philosophical development. Freud startled parents with his news about the tender childhood psyche and the terrible predictive force of rejection and pain. Since then, we've had Dr. Spock, Mr. Rogers, Bob Dylan. Authority has been unhorsed, declawed, and even taunted.
We weren't nearly as frightened by our parents as they were frightened by theirs. The generation that we've raised is not afraid at all. Or not of us.
Do I miss the ranks of silent, tidy children who used to dress for dinner and call their parents Father Dear and Mother Darling? You bet I miss them.
A flock of teenage girls came and settled in the seats around me recently when I was on the train to New York City. I had a laptop and was trying to work. Too much noise. I attempted to read the [New York] Times. Too much noise for that. The girls poked one another, shrieked with glee. The one seated directly behind me plucked the batter out of one of her electronic toys and blew hard on it, in attempt to clean the contacts. She blew so hard that all my hair went up in the air and then fell back down in a horribly emparrassing display of the stratagems of the partially bald. Furious, I bit my tongue.
When the train wheezed into Grand Central, I stood and saw that I had not been the only adult seeded among this gang of noise hooligans. The other grownups looked as sour and angry as I was. Nobody peeped. We were like Jews sitting with SS troopers. Kids rule. For decades now, we've treated them as gods. Has this been a terrible miscalculation? Perhaps. They are happy. Isn't that what we had hoped for?

As a middle school teacher, I can certainly identify with the fact that respect for authority has gone out the window. I deal with the children of baby boomers and the children of children of baby boomers on a daily basis, and it isn't pretty. My authority is indeed taunted regularly.
And are today's children really happy? Not really. Too many of them live in a single-parent home where they do not see or even know one of their parents - overwhelmingly the father in most cases. They are angry because many of today's parents are afraid to enforce standards or boundaries of behavior or are unaware that there are any standards or boundaries in the first place. The cliche really is true; children appreciate and seek boundaries. They purposely test the will of their parents or other authority figures to see if those adults really mean what they say. It is a relief to a child when that adult follows through. If the adult doesn't follow through, that is when children begin to treat that adult with contempt. This permissive method of raising children was exacted upon the baby boomers by their put-upon parents who did not want their brood to suffer the privations experienced during the depression and World War II. Unfortunately, the coddling backfired, and instead of thanking their parents for their kid-glove treatment, baby boomers rebelled instead.

I do agree with Mr. Cheever when he writes that you can't generalize 76 million people (the approximate number of baby boomers). I know that not every baby boomer dropped acid or belonged to the SDS, or firebombed an ROTC office. But as anyone can easily see, the cultural history of the United States can easily be divided by the 1960s. There was the culture before that decade, and now we're living in the culture after. With the exception of the condition of black civil rights in the southern states, tell me one cultural benchmark that is better now than it was before the baby boomers got their hands on our national culture in the 1960s.

Good Day to You, Sir