Is it all the Boomers' fault?

[Goldstein1984]

I've seen a few posts that attempt to place the blame for current problems on "Boomers." I'm not that the Boomers became the bastion of liberal thought that they appeared they might be in the 60s. And I'm not going to argue that Boomers didn't have a hand in electing Neocons like Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II. But 28 years of a steady drift of the U.S. population, and the Democratic Party with it, toward neoconservative political and economic values and militarism cannot be put solely in the lap of the generation that was labeled "commie pinkos" back in the day.

But how responsible are the Boomers for getting us where we are now? And do the subsequent generations that freely joined in "Reaganomics," the Gulf War, the DotCom Bust, the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, and the housing bubble have room to criticize?

I don't blame the Boomers for Reagan, but he couldn't have been elected without a lot of Boomer votes. I was one of those naive kids who thought the space station in "2001: A Space Odyssey" would actually exist by 2001. I often wonder if many in my generation didn't sell out once the Vietnam War was over and the draft was ended and race was no longer the barrier to voting it had been. Did too many of them go neocon and materialistic and chase the American Dream instead of American ideals?

It was the Boomer generation that marched en mass for the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. It was the Boomers that caused so much civil disruption in opposition to the Vietnam War that the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommending against sending more troops to Vietnam after the Tet Offensive specifically because they were concerned that there would be too few left in the U.S. to control growing civil unrest; when I got out of the Marine Corps and attended college in the 80s, the "Young Republicans" and "College Republicans" either didn't exist or were so rare that we never noticed them. With this in mind, the attack on Boomers came as a shock to me.

Economics seem to be a major driver in this issue. The Boomers are coming to retirement age. As they retire, they're going to become a significant burden; if they don't retire, they'll be holding onto jobs that could be going to younger citizens. I understand the job argument very well. I was born just after the peak of the Boomer curve, and throughout my life it's been like following in the wake of a swarm of locusts. I didn't help myself by spending 4.5 years in the military and letting even more Boomers get into the college and job scene ahead of me. So, from that perspective, I can at least empathize with post-Boomer generations.

This issue has the potential to be very divisive if played well by the divide and conquer folks (We each have our own perception of who "they" are). Thus, I'm tossing it out for discussion.