HOW WILL the generations who came after the Baby Boomers be remembered? Every generation has a “signature”: a collection of ideas and aspirations that renders it instantly recognisable to the scholars and artists whose job it is to make sense of the past. Certainly, that is the case with the Baby Boom Generation. One has only to write a list of words and expressions: Beatnik, folk-singer, anti-war protester, New Leftist, civil-rights worker, feminist, acid rock, hippy, commune, Woodstock, New-Ager, environmentalist; and immediately, images, sounds, and a colourful cascade of defining historical moments conjure-up the generation born between 1946 and 1965 like a gaudy pantomime demon.
It is out of these vivid historical moments that the ideas and aspirations of Baby Boomers may be distilled. Like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle they fit together to form a complex generational portrait. The face we see bears the imprint of idealism and hedonism; rebelliousness and expediency; creativity and venality. The Baby Boomers may have set out to do good, but they settled for doing well. They may have been brave, but they weren’t stupid. They longed to be free, but drew the line at being poor.
Mick Jagger (who, like just about all of the cultural icons who enthralled and inspired the Baby Boom generation, is not a Boomer) happily adopted the persona of a street-fighting man, but fought the taxman harder. “Money, it’s a hit”, declared Pink Floyd, “don’t give me that do-goody-good bullshit.” Bob Dylan warned his young followers that “Up on Housing Project Hill/It’s either fortune or fame/You must pick one or the other/Though neither of them are to be what they claim.”
There has always been something disconcertingly sly about the Boomers. Sly, and a just a little bit cynical. The Who famously tipped their hat to ‘The Revolution’, only to bring their fans crashing back down to earth with that immortal sign-off: “Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss.” It was as if the Boomers, like the Russians, were saying: “Trust – but verify.”
So, what about the Generations that followed the Boomers? What about Generations X, Y and Z? What distinguishes these unfortunate souls, historically, is that, unlike the Boomers, they were not born into an age of plenty and limitless horizons, but into a world of reduced circumstances and abandoned dreams. The Boomers looked at their parents and felt mostly pity. A worldwide economic depression, followed by a world war, had created a generation whose over-riding desire was for security. Work hard, keep your nose clean, don’t rock the boat, and, most of all, be wary of people peddling big ideas – because that way lies trouble! They got their security, bless ‘em, but only at the price of enjoying it in a cramped and unadventurous society. Poor bastards!
The end-of-the-alphabet generations looked at the Boomers and felt not pity, but a contemptuous, envy-driven rage. It was as if the luckiest generation in human history had invited them into the wondrous ice-cream emporium it had inherited from the Greatest Generation, only to tape their mouths shut at the door, and continue scoffing. They were sorry, they said, observing the resentment in the younger generations’ eyes, but there just wasn’t enough for everybody. When you’re older, the Boomers promised, ice-cream dribbling down their double-chins, you will understand.
In the meantime, however, Generations X,Y, and Z have created a culture negatively defined by the cynical idealism and hedonistic excesses of the Boomers. If the civil-rights workers and the feminists wanted equality; if the New Left of the 1960s preached participatory democracy; and if the hippies worshipped freedom; then the inheritors of these big Boomer ideas would impose them without debate. When they got their hands on power, Gen-X, Y and Z were fiercely determined to actually do the things that the Boomers only talked, and sang, and marched about.
When it came to politics, arts and culture, bombastic White men would have to step back for people of colour, women and the rainbow community. It was their turn now to strut and fret upon the stages of the world. The prophets and peacocks, whose singular political and artistic voices defined the 1960s and 70s, were creatively superseded by the mad-cap kaleidoscope of social media, and the incessant buzzing of innumerable Spotified bees. So many masters, so few masterpieces.
But what about the ice-cream? Who got the ice-cream? It is in relation to economic and social policy that the awful legacy of the Baby Boomers is most plainly in evidence. Because Generations X, Y and Z are not socialists – not even in their dreams. The neoliberals (who, like most of the Boomers’ cultural icons, were not Boomers themselves) may have seduced the Baby Boom Generation (Boomers are easily seduced!) but they convinced the generations that followed them. Ice-cream is for the best – not the rest. Work hard, keep your nose clean, don’t challenge the ideological powers-that-be, and you, too, will be invited to dine at the big emporium – and this time your mouth will not be taped shut.
This then will be the signature of the generations that followed the Boomers. Idealistic authoritarians. Obedient conformists. Incorruptible puritans. Unflinching meritocrats. They will be remembered as the generations who, more than anything, wanted to have the Boomers’ ice-cream – and eat it too.
May God forgive us.
Boomers just take take take. They are like spoilt brats who demand attention and demand to get their own way. Jacinda is scared of them and takes from everyone else to feed these fat grubs.
The boomers parents generation deserved respect. Their greedy kids deserve none.
The Boomer generation gifted their grandchildren subscriptions to World Vision at Christmas, to sponsor poor children in distant countries and give those children opportunities to better their lives.
New Zealanders are now being asked to sponsor our home- grown children living in poverty in a country awash with noisy supporters of issues largely contrived by their hedonist selves, while the poor grapple with the guilt instilled in them for being so. ( I remember John Cleese referring to hope as a burden.)
A Prime Minister with the inability or reluctance to pronounce the word “poverty” while purporting to care about “ child povidy” leaves me sceptical, just as PM English did flying to Auckland to watch a pop star the weekend ‘Hit&Run’ hit the bookshops, singing ‘ nothing to see here. ‘ Same as.
What are the chances?
To be born on planet Earth in a rich developed country at the exact point in history when consumption was endless, sex was free, uncomplicated and unprotected, the environment was pristine, news and information came from a newspaper or a radio and petrol was 5 cents a litre!
Ignorance was definitely bliss.
It’s going to be interesting to watch the comments to this post @Chris.
I can understand @Ex Labour’s response and agree. The Boomers’ parents the product of the World War years genuinely wanting things to be better for their offspring – just as most parents in ‘developing’ nations often do.
Never ceases to amaze me how many boomers I know now rationailse and justify their behaviour and then wonder why there’s resentment from generations following.
The vast majority of the baby boomer generation were never anti-establishment etc. As Country Joe of Country Joe and the Fish said, you only had to drive inland ten miles from the west coast of America and you were in redneck country. The same goes for New Zealand. Hippies etc were only ever a small percentage of the baby boomer generation. Most got married, got a mortgage, raised children and then waited till they were in their sixties and seventies before buying a mobile home and going out on the road
“Boomers… born into an age of plenty and limitless horizons” Yeah, right. Not the NZ I remember. Strange words from Chris who was born the year after myself and I believe is originally another Mainlander as well. Truly, “the past is a foreign country”.
Yes. When the “Boomers” grew up in the 50s and 60s it was certainly not an age of plenty and limitless horizons.
How right (oops) you are, RosieLee. The 50’s and 60’s parents carried the memories and the scars of the Great Depression, and had some solid values, and even just some
commonday practices, which some of us acquired never dreaming how much we would need them one day too.
It may have been an age of plenty for the sheep farmers of Canterbury salivating over their fat wool cheques, and the Southland dairy farmers driving big shiny-finned American cars, but in the middle there, people still worked hard, and ladies like my mother rode bicycles to church every Sunday. It was the people at the bottom who were invisible, same as now, so no, this age of plenty business, may be a bit off centre.
The inequality landscape was different–most people had not very much and modest lifestyles–and it could be a rather boring, conformist place. But, it was cool too with barely 2 million people.
On a weekly car industry workers wage I could afford to live in Auckland and run a ’58 Ford V8, which I would drive to Wellington on several weekends a year and other regional destinations for social purposes, and just to see the country. Light traffic, great days. But not limitless horizons unless you were “outstanding in your field” on a high station or something!
Funny, the exact same discussion held the other day. When working on a car assemblers wage , you could have a family, own a house and car and with the population as it was, there was no “road rage” and driving too and in around Auckland did not involve stress related illnesses. The weekends involved sport and recreation + socializing. Oh how things have changed.
Heh, what was lost, and what was gained…consumer fetishism, flybuys points…
was in Auck a month back and went shopping…in New Market…needed an app on phone to get into the carpark, and the shopping “precinct”–we are over malls–is like a small town, spacious though with lots of well groomed people moving through for some reason or another.
“Boomer” is classic academic and statistical grouping as are “millennial” etc. and convenient shorthand for various social phenomenona, and correct enough in a broad brush way. People of the boomer cohort do not all conform however–I fought against Rogernomics in the 80s, Ruthanasia in the 90s, and fight to this day in various political formats.
The slight problem we have in NZ now is that 50% own just 2% of the wealth, so there is a class mountain to climb to turn that around. All struggles are linked in the end, and that is the challenge. Trying to deal with racism, gender, sexism etc. within a neo liberal state without some class unity is a losing proposition given the Climate Disaster pressure we are under. That is where X,Y, Z come in. They are different from boomers in their attitudes to various things so disruption is definitely on the cards.
Unity of the oppressed and exploited against the 1%ers is the goal–and more difficult in an environment of Uber, social media and obsessive individualism. But there is quite a bit of unity at the moment over dealing with COVID which may have been a lesson for some people that collectivism is a good thing.
Those icons of the ’60’s that people ascribe to the 60’s were just minor anomalies. Carnaby street was just one street in London and Flower Power lasted one year and was restricted to Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. The rest of us got on with our lives as best we could. There were more mods and rockers than there ever were hippies.
We definitely did grow up with the best music though. It represents a freedom of expression that no longer exists.
I am 33. Fortunate to be from a well-to-do family. I can’t help but detect a self-centred-ness in many older than me, as in my contemporaries. One isn’t to say whether or not it afflicts oneself, or how much. Probably does to a degree, though none is all good/all bad. Have acutely felt Bob Dylan’s words ring true in many of the choices I have faced to date.
I can’t help but think a lot of this thinking in terms of single generations – single lifespans – is related to a collapse of faith. We see it on both problem and solution side. We can’t spend our way out of a mental health crisis, because we have a meaning crisis. If there is only now, there is only now. And only now kinda sucks. A Nietzsche point, I think. May indeed God – whatever He/She/Zir/Zee is – forgive us.
“That is where X,Y, Z come in. They are different from boomers in their attitudes to various things so disruption is definitely on the cards.”
In my personal experience I have found generation Z the most entitled in my lifetime, probably due to technology?
It is a want society now rather than a need.
What distinguishes the so-called boomer generation is the large number of people at the same age, at the same time, over a long period. “On the baby’s knuckle or the baby’s knee…” sang George Clooney’s aunt, while their pretty young post-war parents awaited their birth. “Hope I die before I get old” sang The Who, as they flexed their teenaged muscles. Phenomena like Beatles mania were able to occur because of the number of people at a receptive age at the same time.
Politically, you can look at almost any episode of Prime Rocks and observe the mixture of socialism, hedonism and libertarianism that they largely took to be facets of the same thing – a broad opposition to the conservative, capitalist “man.” This left them wide open to manipulation when the monetarist creed (developed for the most part by people born into the “heroic” generation) came into play. The biggest mistake of the boomer generation, in my opinion, lay in taking social democracy as achieved, and open to being extended, rather than precarious, and open to being dismantled. A mistake amplified by their number.
I am a boomer and I think I was born in the luckiest era.
I fell for younger kids today. Where do I start….student loans, housing crisis, the climate going to hell (floods today in West Auckland). Covid denying them the freedom to do their OE.
And neo liberalism taught them individualism. Focus on self rather than collectivism. Aspiring to dream jobs (rather than organising collectively). Getting caught up in dare I use the words woke virtue signaling. Meanwhile poor kids don’t stand much of a chance. I am truly sorry for them.
I think boomers must shoulder some responsibility for the mess we are in. But the real question is what can be done about it?
Every generation has its challenges and we had ours too. The Millennials won’t face DDT, asbestos and lead in the fuel. Their diet and clothing will be far better because they will avoid post war rationing and gain the advantages of modern medicine. No polio for them or smallpox! They’re also less likely to be fried in a nuclear holocaust.
Also the Boomer experience varied greatly from country to country and also covered quite a wide span of years – from ’46 to ’64 in fact. So we cannot generalize. Certainly your halcyon experience in NZ of the 50’s and 60’s seems a damn site better than mine in the UK!
I was born in the East Midlands of the UK and we were surrounded by RAF and USAF nuclear bomber bases which although fun for plane spotting, meant that we were ground zero if the Cold War had even become tepid. My generation came out of education and into the job market to face high inflation and a collapsing industrial base, caused by nationalization and high taxes. So after being laid off twice, I left the country, along with many others to seek a better future (and here I am!)
Well said….We wanted to save the world and employing our work ethic, got seduced into consumerism.
Our gen continues to prod govt to address environmental, Treaty, welfare and inequality issues… just saying eh?
More divisive identity politics! Don’t think you can tar people’s personalities and generations by their age group!
There are as many greedy people from every age group but the neoliberals like to have someone to blame as it’s against modern woke rules to take responsibility!
How can people take responsibility when nobody is good enough, aka the school climate groups had to cancel themselves under the suggestion and guidance of the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Colour)” members of the group, “as well as individual BIPOC activists and organisations”.
Constant pandering to identity politics is making a mentally ill, intolerant society that wastes time blaming and cancelling everything, instead of finding real solutions and not dividing people.
British influencer ‘identifies as Korean’ after 18 surgeries
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/british-influencer-identifies-as-korean-after-18-surgeries/ZLPAHQDT5LGWPMEY5AQTAI6S7I/
Nurse who describes herself as ‘Australia’s limited edition Barbie doll’ wants more cosmetic surgery
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/nurse-who-describes-herself-as-australias-limited-edition-barbie-doll-wants-more-cosmetic-surgery/6DOHORKF2LUCCSVE7FFQYWGAAE/
A brief history of NZ Police marching in Uniform in the NZ Pride parade
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2018/11/24/a-brief-history-of-nz-police-marching-in-uniform-in-the-nz-pride-parade/
It is easy to make a list of the good thinks from this era and there were plenty but there was bad as well. Women were raped and were at fault because they wore a short dress. Racist attitudes were not noticed as if you were not white you had no voice and the same was applicable to those with disabilities who were invisible. My wife’s wages were not counted when we went for a mortgage and she could not get her own credit card unless I guaranteed it .
The good old days were only good for some not all.
Of course, yes there was that side of things. Apart from the credit card pilferers, sadly the rest hasn’t changed much Trevor.
And also today is only good for a very small minority, not all.
Goes without saying Trevor for those of us that were there. Kids, disabled of all kinds, women, girls, Māori and Chinese and Samoans, Tongans and others could regularly have a tough time of it. Shops closed all weekend, Doctors word was law, cops made their own version of the law, and anyone half academic was regarded with suspicion.
For younger people, Level 4 lockdown is a good example of 70s traffic flow on a weekend!
There were underground scenes of every type though, and bohemians and writers and artists etc. (loudly ridiculed if the put their heads up). No paradise, but we made our own fun and worked on our own cars.
I wholeheartedly agree with the comments of “New View” but also suggest that the notion of such a huge social demographic, all those born between 1946 and 1965, wantonly and knowingly advancing their own selfish agenda, is nonsense.
Like a ship at sea, the vast majority of people go where the prevailing wind blows. And the wind that prevailed throughout our time, which is still blowing today, was Capitalism, and Capitalism has never favoured our sails being set for the course Chris says we could and should have sailed.
So how could we be expected to have done otherwise when the wind and the chart in front of us, rolled out on our media’s chart table everyday, not only kept us on Capitalism’s doomed course, but demonised anyone who dared call for a course change .
Whatever the topic, be it public ownership of vital utilities, the demise of the 40 hour week, neo-liberalism, pollution, nitrate leaching, global warming, racsim, Zionism, the exposure of war mongers and those who blow the whistle on them, the media keeps us on Capitalism’s course.
The fact is, collectively, people aren’t as smart as is pretended, a fact well know by the Capitalist moguls and the media they control, which constantly manufactures our consent not only to our own inevitable demise but that too of countless others along the way, all in pursuit of profit over people.
I am Gen X.
I did not fight reforms, I did not challenge authority.
I accepted shit, and still do.
I should have burnt stuff to the ground and fought tooth and nail.
I do not blame specific generations.
I blame the professional managerial class and their on going bullshit.
Most boomers born in the late 1940s that I know started with very little. The idea that your parents or the State were your safety net was not even in our radar. Sure, there was plenty of work, but it was a given that it was over to you to shape your own future. Our generation lived through a period of incredible technological change, but we seldom see history when it’s happening, do we? If you’d told me 30 years ago that I have my own home computer, giving me access to all the knowledge in the world at the push of a button, I wouldn’t have believed it. By the way, we had to deal with little inconveniences such as 20% mortgage interest rates in the 80s – difficult to comprehend now. We were a fortunate generation, but nobody I knew had any sense of ‘entitlement’ to anything that they didn’t create ourselves.
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