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.