April 10, 2021
Boomers vs millennials, vaccinations and gratitude
I listened to an interesting podcast by Ezra Klein (who works for the New York Times), in which he talked to Jill Filipovic (a left leaning lawyer and activist) and Helen Andrews (a right leaning journalist) about the generational fissure that has developed between the “boomers” (born in the 1950s and the early 60s) and the “millennials” (born in the 1980s to the mid 90s). There is a great millennial rage in America today that can be summarized as “Ok boomer, let’s talk about how your generation’s self-obsession and narcissism left my generation behind.”
Are the boomers leaving the world better than they found it? Are the millennials a self-pitying lot who want to blame everything on everyone else? Here’s a summary of what I heard.
Boomers are possibly the most intellectually and politically polarized generation. They have always stayed split down the middle between the left and the right. So, the argument heard from boomers (especially the left liberal ones) is that “Hold on. No generation is perfect. There were political forces in our generational cohort who didn’t do the right thing for America and the future generations. So, let’s not blame the entire generation.” There is some fairness to this defensiveness. As things turned out in America over the last five or six decades, the liberals won the culture battles and the conservatives won the political wars. Even so, it’s a stretch to say that the boomers have left things better than they found it. The fact is we are now living on a planet that is flooding and burning.
The great mistake, if we can call it that, of the liberal boomer politicians was their transformation from being champions of the working class to becoming warriors in identity battles. The old left became the new left in the 1970s, and it left the American middle class at the mercy of the libertarian and conservative decision makers, who used the opportunity to systematically hollow out the working class during the Reagan years, and then performed a volte face by claiming to be the working class champions during the Trump years. The clashes between the boomers and the millennials have somehow led us to Joe Biden, who’s a pre-boomer and from the old left, as the POTUS, an astonishing turn of events.
The other reality is that America is a much more diverse society than it was when the boomers were growing up and watching “Leave it to Beaver.” We have more immigrants from more countries. We are much more racially diverse. We are now in fertile territory to be more creative than ever. Technology has played a huge role in fostering this creativity. The millennials are taking to new forms of expression on social media like ducks to water, and using it to educate the boomers who grew up amidst comfort and in a monoculture. This is indeed a positive offshoot of technology.
It is important to note that the leaders of movements in the 60s and 70s were not boomers. Martin Luther King Jr was not a boomer. Neither were Gloria Steinem or Malcolm X. Boomers were the foot soldiers in their movements. They showed up. They put their bodies on the line. But, they did not come up with the intellectual underpinnings of such great movements, which changed America profoundly.
The boomers, as a generation, may have committed their most egregious faults when it came to higher education. They were that generation in which college educated Americans went from under 10% to over 30% and yet on their watch, college education costs have skyrocketed. It’s almost as if the boomers have climbed to the top and pulled the ladder up behind them. We now face a situation where the millennials are destined to be less affluent than their parents and even their grandparents. The millennials who are relatively lucky - folks who graduated from college, members of a professional class, etc - are going to be okay. The problem is that there are so many members of the millennial generation who are Black and Brown who are going to do much worse than the previous generations.
The boomers are accused of dismantling the church and shredding the concepts of marriage and families. Personally, I don’t see these as problems. These institutions are old, imperfect and not all of them are beloved anyway. Surveys show that the millennials view marriage differently from previous generations. They marry in their thirties but have had the stablest marriages in half a century. They tend to have happy marriages. They view marriage as a capstone rather than as a cornerstone. Marriage isn't a place from which millennials build life. Rather, it is something that arrives when they’ve put the other pieces in place. This approach has unleashed a tidal wave of women participating in the workforce. At the same time, millennial women are on track to have 25 percent of them be childless. They have been left to handle this biological reality largely on their own, without much help. As people like to point out, there are more dogs than children in San Francisco now.
The real failure of the boomer generation was not in that they weakened institutions, but in that they did not replace these older institutions with something different and something that would support those who followed them, especially when it came to things like race and gender. The work of building a country that hosts a variety of viewpoints and people who want different things, and strains to meet their aspirations remains an unfinished business.
In other news, I got vaccinated today :) We took the Johnson and Johnson shot, a single dose vaccine. All good so far, other than a feeling of low key simmering and mild internal heat (not quite a fever). I guess I’m done with the vaccine until they tell us that we will need to do this again. It feels incredible even now when I look back on the last 12 months. Back in April last year, I watched the numbers at work crater and the business fall off a cliff. There was a moment I thought that everything was about to go under. A year later, we are still here, standing on our feet, a little shaken, but most things are okay, even stronger in many ways. Not to mention, the providential escape we had last November when Biden won the election. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to have Trump in charge of distributing vaccines and restoring normalcy. More miraculously, we now have several vaccines, all of which are showing that they can reduce hospitalization and death rates to nearly zero. It’s like we narrowly escaped being struck by a meteor. Now more than ever, as we see the light emerging at the end of the tunnel, it’s a time to be grateful and humble and get vaccinated and find our way out of danger.
Stay safe. Please get vaccinated as soon as you can. Have a wonderful week ahead.