I'm gonna tell you younger people something

[the_sly_pig]

149. I think its fitting to be disrespectful.

As a first year GenX I remember sitting in 8th grade Biology in 1979 and thinking the trajectory of global solutions would have our problems solved by the time I retired.

Health care, education, public safety and world safety for that matter, all solved. How naive I was. I listened to boomers wax nostalgic about the 6% raises that they were given annually, bragging about working half a day because they had two black russians with lunch, smoking cigarettes at their desks, describing the low cost of a college education and the low cost of housing. I now ask myself what changed? After all, my parents provided for a family of five on one middle-class income.

Where did all the money go? Who voted for all this garbage? Where is all the rage from the 1960's?

Did someone pull up the ladder behind them? Boomers were in charge during the transition from taxes subsidizing society to taxes subsidizing profit.

During our recent election where a school bond issue was on the ballot the loudest and most ill-informed were, of course, boomers. "I don't want the traffic near our house", "I don't want the increased tax", "My kids already graduated" they said. They didn't care about classroom size and they didn't care about improved security measures.

They complained about the $220 increase in annual local tax because their Social Security benefits weren't enough. Government is bad. Government is wasteful. You need to learn to live within your means, they wrote. The diseased irony oblivious to the posters.

To be absolutely clear, to describe all boomers as narcissists is both ignorant and perverse. However, the rest of us cannot be blamed for looking at the state of the world we've inherited and demanding an explanation from those responsible. I believe, right or wrong, the world boomers were given is vastly different than the one being handed to Millenials. And not for the better.

In 1977 I thought the future meant wealth would less important than people. I was wrong. And my cohort is, and always has been, irrelevant.