Why We Don't Thank Boomers Enough
We as millenials have no idea what boomers experienced. Because what they fought for became our reality.
The oldest boomers were pivotal civil rights movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, pushing back against fears that racial integration could destabilize society. Back then, even having a black friend in Peanuts made national news in 1968. The creator, Charles Schulz, had to threaten the distribution company with quitting to include a black character.
As Boomers came of age in the late 1960s, 70s, and 80s, they embraced a counterculture that shocked their parents. The Vietnam War protests, the rise of rock ‘n’ roll, and the sexual revolution seemed like a disaster to elders who thought it was dangerous for girls to dance with people of other races. The Greatest Generation (1901-1927) and the Silent Generation (born 1928-1945), who experienced the Great Depression and two world wars, couldn't fathom why their children were so eager to rebel against an arguably stable status quo.
Boomers Pushed For Changes that Seemed Drastic Back Then
As someone born in the 90s, it's incredible to think about the basic rights that Boomers had to fight for:
Unmarried women couldn’t access the pill until 1972.
Spousal rape wasn’t criminalized until 1993.
Sexual harassment wasn’t recognized as sex discrimination until 1980.
Women couldn’t serve on juries in all states until 1975.
Women couldn’t get a credit card without a male co-signer until the 1970s.
Boomers even helped with the advent of LGBQT rights.
For someone born in the 1960s, U.S. society has progressed really far.
I think we don’t thank boomers enough - and boomers might think of millenials and Gen Z as lazy and ungrateful - because younger generations didn’t have to experience those battles.
But, I think that if my boomer dad was born in the 90s or 2000s, he wouldn’t be content with today’s status quo either. Admiring the status quo is not what the Boomers did despite living in older generations’ post-war bliss.
Just as the Silent and Greatest Generations weren't thrilled by the boomers 1960s-90s activism (but millenials like me are!), it’ll be my children and grandchildren, who will be glad. Our grandchildren won’t experience our fight for a sustainable planet, better living and working conditions, and technological ethics - they’ll simply get to live it. And that Gen A or B or C probably will not thank us either.
This lack of understanding other generations might just be how societal progress feels like. People think very highly of whatever the world was like when they were around 15 years old. Boomers likely saw music that resonated with their societal angsts, two-parent families, and suburban life as what made their teenage years great. The battles they took on were simply improving life as they knew it from their teen years, their anchor point. The world in the 2000s and 2010s is anchor point from where Millenials and Gen Z plan to start improving on the world.
This seems easiest to illustrate with the case of 9-5 jobs. 9-5 jobs likely seem nostalgic for Boomers, who got to experience teen years where one parent could sustain a family with a stable decades-long career at one company with a pension. Gen Z and Millenials likely experienced both parents being lucky to have 9-5 jobs that are 9-7 jobs with no pensions and little job security. The stable 9-5 job that Boomers saw as a privilege doesn’t command the same respect from Millenials and Gen Z.
Will a young generation ever be content with the status quo?
Boomers and earlier generations might now be asking the age old question: How do we know when society has gone too far? It's worth noting that right-wing movements have sometimes been right to oppose certain left-wing ideas, like Stalinism, which resulted in millions of deaths.
I think philosophy, or applied ethics, helps guide when society should keep striving. For example, Rawls' theory of justice asks us to create society's rules as if we didn't know our own status, ensuring fairness for all.
Boomers went the ethical route when they went against the religious establishment by fighting racial discrimination. Applied ethics can help us when to be skeptical of when norms conflict with what appears to be the moral thing to do. Philosopher Peter Singer highlights today’s dilemma where, while racial discrimination is no longer justifiable anywhere on religious grounds, some countries affirm their right to sexual discrimination i.e. limiting women’s right to work, study, and travel, based on religious grounds.
To keep building a better world, we need to enhance our ability to communicate across the powerful anchor points of each generation. And maybe read a bit more philosophy.
I am a Boomer, as are my two elder siblings. If you want to thank us that's okay I guess, though all things considered we don't deserve it. In any case thanks should be reserved for things that we actually did.
U.S. "Baby Boomers" are formally defined as those born in this country between 1946 and 1964, and at the level of collective culture or social cohesion those brackets work pretty well. Other than a single outlier year of 1949 the peak of the baby-boom bell curve (the period of most annual births) was the years 1956-1962.
The Civil Rights movement became a national force in the late 1950s and made its greatest legal and social achievements between 1963 and 1970 (MLK was killed in 1968). Boomers had nothing to do with it, being mostly still in grade school, unless our parents let us stay up late to watch the news.
Approximately none of the adult activists, lawyers and others who achieved changes such as Roe v Wade (1973), national legalization of birth control regardless of marital status (1972), women being allowed to get credit cards (1970s), and women being allowed to serve on juries (1975), were Boomers. Only a minority of Boomers were even legally adults by that time, and obviously very few of us were yet public-interest lawyers and the like. We _benefited_ from those changes but did not make them happen. For example I remember my elder sister, a college sophomore, being surprised and amazed to receive her first jury summons.
We Boomers have been brilliant at taking credit for things that our older relatives did, and collectively deluding ourselves into feeling we deserve it. As a high school friend of mine once put it: "The actual attendance at Woodstock was around 500,000 but at least 10 million Boomers will tell you how amazing it was listening to Hendrix play the Star Spangled Banner."