Does anyone ever feel any anger or resentment toward the baby boomers?
I have spent probably the last twenty years (I am forty-three) debating this, and have first come to the conclusion that if no one else does, apparently I do, although I believe there is some generational undertow that many of us younger Americans feel ... but just can’t quite put a finger on it.
Disclaimer! I do love so many great boomers. When you break down that generation into individuals, I don’t really “hate” them or feel direct anger. It’s the entire group of them that has me in an emotional fix. Let me add that I was born in 1965, which by most calculations, places me exactly one year after “that generation,” the ones born from 1946-1964.
This makes me what one could call an “old” Generation X-er, or even debatably, among a group of people that are called “tweeners,” those of us who are too young to get the Boomers, yet too old to get the younger Gen X-ers, who are considered more tech-savvy.
We are the ones who actually lived our precious twenties through Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s, that time that is now looked at behind rose-colored glasses by seemingly everyone. It was not a time of job growth or environmental insight.
And Mr. Reagan cut social programs down to next to nothing and it was during his “reign” that the horrendous stereotype of unwed women (particularly of color) taking welfare for each baby they had was magnified recklessly into the political landscape, simultaneously perpetuating both the villainy of women and race.
I graduated during the Orwellian year of 1984, and my cohorts, both male and female, had significant difficulty finding jobs. Computer technology was beginning to bloom, but my age group had nary a notion of what that meant.
So I was part of the group that went on to college, if not for the higher learning, then for the fact that there were no jobs for us young folks in the eighties. Manufacturing jobs were dominated by boomers, who have and have held an iron grip on the good-paying jobs in the Midwest.
