http://www.sfweekly.com/2007-05-02/news/boomtastrophe--------------------
Baby Boomers hoped to die before they got old. They lied. And now they’re dragging the whole country down....snip...
But as sure as Woodstock's free love gave way to Altamont's bloodshed, the promise of Boomers succumbed long ago to egotism. Beneath the middle-class nostalgia lies an American dystopia of their making, a state of disgrace now laid bare by social critics and the online hordes.
Boomers traded tree-hugging for money-grubbing and unraveled the social welfare net. Their refusal to reform Social Security and Medicare threatens to bankrupt federal coffers, while their talk of "reinventing" retirement conceals the bleak fact that almost half of them can't afford to quit working, thanks to deficient savings. Their budget woes derive, in part, from checkbook parenting, an indulgent manner of child-rearing that has yielded a cultural anomaly once thought impossible — a generation of young adults more narcissistic than Boomers.
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Yet as Boomers voice faint concern about the widening economic divide — everything's fabulous on our side, thanks — they persist in lionizing their role in the civil rights crusade. "They don't like to admit hypocrisy," says Males, who's writing a book titled Boomergeddon, an analysis of his generation's influence on America. "They like to think, 'We are good, we are just, we do almost no wrong.'"
The tendency of Boomers to claim the moral high ground as their private domain explains the popular perception that they alone agitated for civil rights. In fact, their parents and grandparents, the Silent and G.I. generations maligned by Boomers as social conformists, supplied the movement with brigades of foot soldiers and its most visible leaders — Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Stokley Carmichael, and Rosa Parks, among others. "Boomers take the credit, but the Silent Generation should get it for civil rights," says social historian and author William Strauss, an expert in generational studies. "What the Boomers were doing was starting riots."
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*Hides from the Boomer hordes...* :hide: