Although Cross, an aging academic boomer, was a student leftist, he believes that 1960s radicalism became "a retreat into childish tantrums" symptomatic "of how permissive parents infantilized the boomer generation." And the boomers' children? Consider the television commercials for the restaurant chain called Dave & Buster's, which seems to be, ironically, a Chuck E. Cheese's for adults—a place for young adults, especially men, to drink beer and play electronic games and exemplify youth not as a stage of life but as a perpetual refuge from adulthood.This is, of course, a pet peeve of mine. The Baby Boomers were a wrecking ball cutting a swath of destructioni through our society. Well, to be fair, not all Baby Boomers--just the self-appointed spokesmen of the generation who glorify their unwashed, selfish, protest days as the height of social progress and enlightenment. They were not all of the Boomers. Boomers like my brother who was drafted into the Army and didn't go to Canada, my other brother who served in the Air Force in Vietnam, or my sister who didn't whine about life but set about building a life for herself and her daughter. I'm immensely proud of them. But they aren't considered to be representative of the idiots who got to define that generation.
And I must say that for those who want to jam me into the Baby Boom generation by ending that blighted period in 1964, I say BS. I'm proudly a Generation Xer. One of the oldest, I'll grant, but still of Generation X and not the Boomers. Although I remember well the latter part of the Vietnam War (with a brother over there, even a child knew), and the 1972 election was formative when I saw George McGovern as an alternative to lead us against the Soviets, I stand in the 1980s and 1990s, for sure, as my age of growing up. My war was almost Desert Storm (with a minor in Bosnia possible), and my military service spanned Presidents Reagan, Bush 41, and Clinton, on either side of the Berlin Wall.
The Boomers will loom over us even as they pass from leadership and cultural hegemony. As our media defines the generation, I say don't let the door knob hit you in the butt on the way out.
For the other boomers who were not of the counter-culture and who accepted responsibilities and adulthood even as your peers were celebrated for their flower power and rejection of the system, you have my deepest thanks for preserving something good through that Dark Age of Adulthood.
