Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Our Last Chance

When I was growing up in the 60’s, it seemed that our generation – the Baby Boom – was poised to usher America into a new era. Abbey Hoffman’s 1989 speech at Vanderbilt University captured the sense at the time:

In the nineteen-sixties, apartheid was driven out of America. Legal segregation— Jim Crow — ended. We didn't end racism, but we ended legal segregation. We ended the idea that you can send a million soldiers ten thousand miles away to fight in a war that people do not support. We ended the idea that women are second-class citizens. … [T]he big battles that were won in that period of civil war and strife you cannot reverse. We were young, we were reckless, arrogant, silly, headstrong – and we were right!

All this was accomplished and we were still under 30. Somehow, though, in one of those cruel twists of fate, the promise was never kept. The Boomers, instead, grew up to become the “Me Generation” – self-absorbed, self-indulged, and self-loathing. According to one narrative, spun out in Michael Kinsley’s recent article in the October issue of The Atlantic, “The Least We Can Do”:

The Boomers, were “bred in at least modest comfort,” as the Port Huron Statement of 1962, the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society, startlingly concedes. They ducked the challenge of Vietnam—so much smaller than the military challenge their parents so triumphantly met. They made alienation fashionable and turned self-indulgence (sex, drugs, rock and roll, cappuccino makers, real estate, and so on) into a religion. Their initial suspicion of the Pentagon and two presidents, Johnson and Nixon, spread like kudzu into a general cynicism about all established institutions (Congress, churches, the media, you name it). This reflexive and crippling cynicism is now shared across the political spectrum. The Boomers ran up huge public and private debts, whose consequences are just beginning to play out. In the world that Boomers will pass along to their children, America is widely held in contempt, prosperity looks to more and more like a mirage, and things are generally going to hell.
OK, so, now it turns out that tea party cynicism and everything else wrong today had its roots in Boomer attitudes. Whether or not this account is fair, it’s hard to deny that we haven’t exactly set the world on fire. We feel like a failed generation because, as Kinsley notes, we “had hopes. [We] had an agenda.” We believed that we represented a new chapter in American history. And, yet, the “Great Society” that we envisioned remains more elusive than ever. Instead, our society is growing poorer with greater inequity. Wages have been stagnant or declining for 30 years. There is more income inequality now that at any time since the Roaring 20’s. And the quality of our health care ranks at the bottom of that of the industrialized nations.

As Kinsley sets forth in his article, he wants us, now at this late hour, to redeem ourselves – to do some great deed that will gain us some favorable mention in the history books. He wants to get the band back together for one last, spectacular show.

So, what to do? Kinsley notes that Time’s Joe Kline raised the same question, but came up with this ludicrous answer: a campaign to legalize marijuana. As Kinsley says, "[a]s the Boomers’ parting gift to the nation, it’s like giving your mom a baseball mitt for her birthday.” Kinsley also rejects the suggestion that our parting gift be a universal national-service program. It’s a bad idea as of a matter of policy, says Kinsley, and places the sacrificial act, not on the Boomers, but on their grandchildren.

So, here’s Kinsley’s suggestion: Pay back the money we borrowed; in other words, eliminate government debt – state, local and national – and give future generations a new start. Kinsley estimates this amounts to a mere $14 trillion. Mostly, he wants to accomplish this by across-the-board estate taxes.

It seems worthy enough, and is something that is both measurable and achievable. And it has the symmetry of letting the penalty fit the crime.

But, I’m wondering if we might leave a better legacy, and I have two suggestions. One, we might secure real universal health care for future generations. That means we provide coverage for every last American citizen and, while we’re at it, we get control over spiraling costs. We’ve started the process. Let us, the Boomers, commit ourselves to finishing the project before we float out into the ether.

The second is a bit amorphous, I concede. But here it is: reverse the income disparity trend. In 1979, the lowest two quintiles (lowest 40%) of wage earners averaged $17,400. By 2007, the bottom two quintiles made an average of $20,500. That’s an increase of 18%. In 1979, the top one percent of wage earners averaged $167,500. By 2007, the top 1% made $352,000. That’s an increase of 110%. I confess that I don’t have much of an idea of what to do about this. One thing to do, I suppose, is to unflatten the income tax rates. After that, it’s not too clear. But, there must be some clever Boomers out there with ideas.

Anyway, I’m happy to throw open the blog lines. Anyone have other suggestions for how Boomers might atone for their many sins? The soul of a generation is at risk.

Last, a word from Tennyson:

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods
.


8 comments:

James R said...

Is a generation—Kinsley brackets it from 1946 to 1664—a meaningful identity or a granfalloon? Certainly, as the author acknowledges, it is an gross generalization. On the one hand I have known people around my age who seemed to come from another planet, let along another time. Yet I can also point to Shadyside as the perfect metaphor. It went from counter culture to Yuppie in ten years. Perhaps, if the generation wants to claim its remarkable legacy in civil rights, and anti establishment thinking, it must take some responsibility to what followed 1980.

However, the indictment by the author which you quote in your post is curious at best.

Kinsey first praises and lists the accomplishments of the "Greatest Generation". They "heeded the call and saved the world in 1941-45. Then returned home to build a prosperous society." They did indeed. "They forthrightly addressed the nation's biggest flaw (race relations), and defeated Communism on their way out the door." Huh? He is rewriting history not to acknowledge the "Boomers" greatest legacy.

Then he starts his indictment of the Boomers with "They ducked the challenge of Vietnam" and finishes with "They ran up huge public and private debts" Wait! The crushing debt at present is from a series of wars of questionable purpose and morality from the 1990's on. Is he saying the Boomers should have championed the Vietnam War, but should have ducked the challenge of Iraq and Afghanistan? It makes little sense. At this point I'll admit I stopped reading the article thinking it scattered and contrived. But, if Kinsley wants a simple answer for a contrived question, here is mine:

Q. What happened to the energy and idealism of the Boomers who started out with such a remarkable record?
A. They had kids.

All their energies, idealism, and, most of all, love went to their kids. While past generations saw their principle pursuit as work (a profession for the man; housework for the woman) and survival, the Boomers saw family first and work as secondary to support the family. Perhaps their reasoning was: we are not smart or compassionate enough to save the world, but maybe our kids will be.

Q. And what action can the Boomers still do to right their perceived wrongs?
A. An progressive inheritance tax to the extreme

By paying back the government with all or most of their savings above, say $50,000, debts are paid and income is redistributed.

James R said...

It's funny how a long comment gets a warning message that it is too long to be posted and then is posted anyway.

Big Myk said...

I agree with a lot of what you say. On specifics, the article is easy enough to pick apart. I'm sure that if you closely examined the behavior all the people born in this country between 1946 and 1964, I doubt that you'd find any significant difference in the level of Boomer sinning and that of people born in any other 18 year period.

And certainly, the parents of our generation do not get credit for the end of Jim Crow and legal segregation. For most of their lives, they were totally oblivious to race. We remember Mom saying that there was no discrimination in South Orange when she was growing up. We know better.

In all likelihood, there were members of the Senate and Congress voting for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the later Voting Rights Act who belonged to our parents' generation. But that was only after a lot of younger people were thrown out of lunch counters, and had fire hoses and attack dogs turned on them. Again, parents also came to oppose the War in Vietnam, but only after a lot of ground work was done by students.

You say that our generation put its energies into parenting. That may be true, but I don't think we made any better parents than that of prior generations. I certainly would not trade my childhood for my kids' childhood. And now we see a serious rise in childhood health problems: obesity, asthma, and learning and behavioral difficulties. Perhaps, there is something to be said for a benign indifference.

(Now that I think of it, there is a way we are better parents. We treated our daughters better, and it shows. Women now comprise 60% of all college graduates, and in major cities like Huston and New York, women in their 20's earn on the average more than men.)

Nevertheless, the article struck a chord with me. It's always bothered me that we set out to create a new social order and ended up refining the fine art of making loads of money -- via leveraged buyouts, for example -- without actually producing any goods or services. We thought we were better -- at least more socially aware -- than our parents but ended up making things worse. It's always felt to me like there was infinished business. As I'm eyeing retirement, I find myself checking the want ads for some great cause I might spend my last good years pusuing.

james said...

Great post and responses. I'll chime in with some impressions in a bit, but for now I wanted to share one of my favorite Tom Wolfe essays about material wealth and self-obsession, The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening. Apologies if I've posted this before.

Ted said...

I've noticed a couple of these types articles decrying the baby boom generation. My dad and have had this conversation in the past, and some have already said this, but as he noted, that if all you accomplished was ending segregation and improving the rights of all minorities in the US, that's not too bad. I've always thought that one of the "problems" is believing you could make a "great society." I've found that my generation tends to take a more tentative approach to grand ideas, acknowledging that the world has an unending list of flaws, but we are going to work on them. Maybe we're not gunning for a perfect world, but we'll work towards improving it as best we can. This sounds negative, or pessimistic, but I prefer to think this potentially more realistic perspective as positive. This isn't to say we should eliminate bold ideas, but acknowledge that things take time, often far more time than a single generation.

James R said...

No, that doesn't sound negative at all. I was going to write something like: As long as you didn't work for the CIA, as an investment bander, in organized crime or as a game show host, you probably helped civilization along. Bonus points if you did some volunteer service— anything from bringing medical supplies to Guatemala to little league coach.

James R said...

Investment bander is probably a noble profession. They may be the bane of Investment bankers, which I meant to put on the "fail" list.

James R said...

Here is the legacy I would like to cause: A complete Freedom of Information Act.

Congress, with pressure from the voters, should pass a law requiring ALL actions and laws by ANY government agency be open to the public. Currently it seems like half of government actions are clandestine and the right to know protected by "national security." (Daniel Ellsberg remarks that the Obama administration has been more secretive than even Bush's.)

First, I contend that if past actions by the CIA and other covert operators were made public at the time, our "national security" would be far better off than it is today.

Second, if the information would reveal actions to our enemies, then make public the information immediately after the action takes place. Even the worst terrorist groups do that.

Either the public would get over their squeamishness about the incarceration, torture and murder of civilians or they would severely limit those actions. We shouldn't be allowed the claim the "lack of knowledge" defense. (Is there a name for that? the German defense?)