Boom Generation Midlife

On March 25, 1984, The New York Times declared the "Year of the Yuppie," the surprising transmogrification of the Boom Awakening--era hippie. America was awash in fads, diets, and jokes about Perrier-drinking sellouts engaged in what Newsweek described as "a state of transcendental acquisition." Literally, the word yuppie meant "young urban professional." Only 5 percent of the generation matched those demographics, but a much larger proportion fit the subjective definition: self-immersion, cultural perfectionism, and weak civic instincts.⁷⁹

Everything yuppies ate, drank, drove, watched, or listened to was an implicit rebuke of the Greatest's American High--era Wonder Bread culture. In their apparent quest for the perfect three-dollar chocolate-chip cookie, yuppies were needled for hypocrisy but didn't mind, since they set the new cultural standard by which hypocrisy now had to be measured. Having reformed the inner world, they were now engaging the outer at their own pace: a jog.

In 1984, Gary Hart tried in vain to mobilize yuppies as a political force, mistakenly thinking they still had an Awakening-era mind-set. But instead, yuppies were content to dabble, disperse, and leave affairs of state to an old Greatest President who shrewdly appealed to their new attitude.

Yuppiemania lasted less than four years. The stock crash of 1987 doused the media interest, and two years later the cultural accoutrements disappeared as well. This generation was moving on to something else, something more revealing of its true midlife persona. Come the 1990s, the Wall Street Journal noted that "deferring gratification has suddenly become fashionable," talk of family values filled the airwaves, and new churches (and prisons) sprang up everywhere. Three intensely generational mid-1990s elections produced much talk about God and children, along with a surge in what media pundits called "conviction politicians," "prophets with attitude," "rhetorical Robespierres," or worse.⁸⁰

In the 1990s, America was mesmerized by a midlife pastiche that included the nation's leading talk show host, "chosen by God" to explain The Way Things Ought to Be; a U.S. President who insisted he never inhaled (when he had tried smoking pot as a youth) hosting a White House conference teaching character; a House Speaker chided for his "blabby, effervescent, messianic" persona; a Vice President who held evening seminars on "the role of metaphor" while accusing opponents of a Jihad against the environment; academic enforcers of political correctness who punished "inappropriately directed laughter"; think-tank luminaries at competing Renaissance and Dark Ages retreats holding seminars on shame; the former SDS radical turned culture warrior whose Book of Virtues vaunted "moral literacy"; the ex-Black Panther juror who judged everybody in the courtroom, not just the famous defendant; and the Operation Rescue leader who declared hate to be sacred.⁸¹

"We all know these types," grumbled a prominent (Silent) critic of the U.S. Senate's youngest member: "critical of everything, impossible to please, indifferent to nuance, incapable of compromise. They laud perfection, but oddly never see it in anybody but themselves." President Clinton was "stereotypical" of them all, observed demographer William Dunn: "a little self-indulgent and pretty much convinced that he and his generation are smarter than everyone else."⁸²

Still the distracted perfectionists, the midlife Boomers handled their new phase of life the way they had thus far handled so much else: They applied a light hand, then (once they started paying attention) a crushingly heavy one. They grazed on munchies until they figured it was time to diet, after which they donned ashes and sackcloth--and expected others to do the same.

"We aren't baby killers," declared the leader of the Ohio militia movement. "We're baby boomers."⁸³

When the Greatest Lloyd Bentsen told the Boomer Dan Quayle, "You're no Jack Kennedy," the insult was partly generational: In midlife, Boomers were not the Greatest. They were not as eager to take JFK-style "long strides" or "get America going again" as they were to think deep thoughts or get America to tend to its soul. Offering themselves as America's midlife magistrates of morality, Boomers stirred to defend values (monogamy, thrift, continence) that other generations did not easily associate with them.

The Boomers' midlife fire-and-brimstone judgmentalism was more noticeable when they were outside the fortress of power, storming its gates, and taking their first look around from the inside. But once their conquest was no longer news, once they had to manage the fortress themselves, their stern persona gave way to a wry philosophical detachment. Many of their best-known politicians tended to treat civic responsibility the way David Letterman might have treated a guest, dabbling and gesturing, never committing too much, spurning whatever wasn't quite up their lofty standards, spending more energy on discussing how power felt than on actually doing anything with it, When challenges grew too hard, they backed off, as though not yet ready to take full charge of the nation's direction. In the mid-1990s, Newsweek Magazine pointed out a "critical mass of baby boomers in the contemplative afternoon of life"--a comment no one would have made of the two prior generations in midlife.⁸⁴

Through the 1990s, Boomers were busy respiritualizing American culture and resacralizing its institutions. Even as they wrecked old notions of teamwork, loyalty, and fraternal association (a trend Robert Putnam chided as "bowling alone"), they tried to restore a new foundation for public virtue. A host of new Boomer magazines and newsletters inserted such terms as communitarian, citizen, and public virtue (or renorming such words as standard and paradigm) into their titles. "Interestingly," wrote Evan Thomas, "the people who seem most desperate to create a new civil society are baby boomers, the generation that was largely responsible for trashing the old one."⁸⁵

"It was great to be young in the '60s, when everyone threw responsibility to the winds," said John Leo, "but what's even better is that the very same people get to be middle aged in the '90s, which is shaping up as a great decade for stuffiness."⁸⁶

The midlife Boomer-style values politics had its roots in the Boom Awakening of the 1960s and 1970s. The temperament of the Boomer-dominated Congress had a recognizable link to the 1960s' kids in jeans with bullhorns. To Newt Gingrich, "values" were first "a way of dividing America." John Kasich viewed the national debt "almost like I look on the Vietnam War." What The New York Times called "the new churlishness" echoed what once occurred on radicalized Awakening-era campuses. The advantage went to whomever yelled the loudest and had the best conversation enders. Everything got hyperbolized: An offensive touching became assault, which became rape, which became murder, which became genocide. In Boomer battles over symbols, polarization was easy, compromise hard.

In 1992, when Americans elected their first Boomer President, his campaign slogan ("It's the Economy, Stupid") and governance showed a distinctly generational flavor. Bill Clinton was smart but distractible, habitually late to an event or issue, after which he focused "like a laser beam." Gifted in gestures of empathy, Clinton could persuasively flaunt his inner self to enhance his popularity. Yet Clinton generally polled worse among peers than among older voters. As Michael Barone observed, Clinton could seduce fellow Boomers but couldn't marry them: His values preaching never quite felt authentic to many people who shared his lifecycle connections. As a candidate and as a President, Clinton reminded many people (including his own peers) of his generation's best and worst qualities.

The 1994 Republican onslaught was the first election determined by Boomer votes, and the Twentieth Century's largest generational landslide. In the states, Boomer governorships rose from eighteen to twenty-eight, empowering a new peer-driven movement to devolve power to the states. In the House, Boomers gained the Speaker's chair and a solid majority. Only the U.S. Senate remained in Silent hands as an island of politeness and moderation. As Boomers stoked the talk shows, their first Congress drowned out consensus-seekers, talked openly of default, and demanded that the government be reformed or closed. Thus has the American government, from Greatest to Silent to Boom, gone from moon walk to gridlock to train wreck.⁸⁷

By 1996, the Clinton-Dole race (talker versus doer, "comeback kid" versus "comeback adult") updated the old Boomer-Greatest generation gap. Eight years had passed since Bentsen's old quip, and the two generations had moved along in life: Bob Dole was no Dan Quayle. He was a standard-issue Greatest on "one last mission for my generation"--not a credentialed Culture Warrior, not a person who could grok values in the now-dominant Boomer tongue. Dole's peers had earlier turned over leadership to their grown children; now, said Al Gore, "it's not fair to take back the reins." The mere nomination of Dole was a slap in the face to a generation that (he implied) lacked the character to exercise power responsibly. In his convention speech, Dole blasted a Boomer elite "who never grew up, never did anything real, never suffered, and never learned."

In the 1996 election as elsewhere, the old generation gap found new expression, despite Boomers' frequent encomia about how grandly the Greatest once ran the nation. Where middle-aged Greatest had come to Washington striving to fix the economics of everything, intent on curing poverty and building power plants (like a Time Marches On newsreel), middle-aged Boomers wanted to change the culture of everything, intent on altering minds and calming the spirit (like Steve Martin contemplating the Grand Canyon).

Where midlife Greatest had believed the public money was an earth-moving answer to social problems, Boomers were more likely to see it as a narcotic that made social problems worse. In 1995, the National Taxpayers Union reported that two-thirds of Congress's fifty thriftiest members were Boomers (six of them Democrats), versus only one-third of the fifty biggest spenders.⁸⁸

Where the Greatest had believed in The End of Ideology and the power of technocracy, Boomers rediscovered ideology and the power of spirituality. Instead of the best and brightest, they would have just as soon let a Dave or a Forrest Gump rule. Instead of a New Deal Coalition, they were building a Christian Coalition. The Greatest had had a reputation as better doers than talkers, Boomers as the reverse.

Where the Greatest's midlife Power Elite had included scientists and manufacturers adept at inventing and refabricating things, the Boomer elite comprised what Newsweek called the Cultural Elite, a new Overclass studded with "talking heads" and "symbolic analysts" adept at inventing and refabricating thoughts.

Where the Greatest had "ac-cent-tchu-ated the positive," Boomers were constantly "going negative." Defending against their attack ads proved to be futile; politicians who stayed positive only got torn up worse. Where Greatest political adversaries had been friends after hours, Boomer enemies were not.

Where Greatest voters had been habitual party loyalists, Boomers were slow to embrace candidates, quick to discard them, and disinclined to vote when uninspired. In the voting booth, they have leaned toward candidates who were preachers (Jesse Jackson, Pat Robertosn) or apostles of gloom (Jerry Brown, Paul Tsongas, Pat Buchanan), all of whom fared poorly among the Greatest.⁸⁹

Before the early 1990s, when Boomers finally wrested national power from the Greatest, most of those who wanted to turn the status quo upside down had argued with (but mostly voted for) Democrats; since then, those who felt like revolutionaries argued with (but mostly voted for) Republicans. Between 1987 and 1994, the Times-Mirror survey recorded a doubling of "moralist types" as a share of all voters, two-thirds of the increase coming from Boomers alone. By the mid-1990s, more than twice as many Boomers came to call themselves conservatives than liberals, a difference that said less about their politics than about their self-perception as totally rooted and self-secure, beyond the reach of opinion or edict or even sociability.⁹⁰

"He's got a new way of walking. . . . He's getting back to his roots," sang Alan Jackson of Boomers who were "Goin' Country." During the Boom Awakening of the 1960s and 1970s, the Boomers' political voice had been mostly coastal, urban, and secular. During the 1990s, Clinton, Gore, Gingrich, and many of the freshman Republicans displayed a southern, rural, and evangelical bent. "Values" were not "add-ons," insisted Bennett. "They are the very enterprise." Add to that a new preoccupation with families, and the term family values became a catchall for the new midlife Boomer agenda. By pushing society toward an attitudinal conversion. Boomers were convinced that an institutional rebirth would follow. "The key is leading the culture, not leading the government," said Gingrich. "Because if you change the direction of the entire dialog, everything else falls in place behind it."⁹¹

This midlife obsession with values propelled a huge growth of evangelical and New Age believers. Two Boomers in three said they had been touched by a supernatural power. (Among their elders, less than half did.) Back in the American High (the two decades following World War II), atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair had battled to get prayer out of the public schools; now her born-again son William battled to put it back. Only 1 percent of Boomers said they definitely did not believe in God, but 80 percent believed that attending church was unnecessary. Amid all the spiritual talk, church going declined for Boomer age brackets, whereas among the Greatest and Silent it had held steady. America's middle-aged believers fled mainline churches for fast-growing fundamentalist, charismatic, and breakaway redeemer sects that dressed casually or ethnically, sang lively songs, listened to guitar-and-brimstone homilies, erupted in periodic applause, and engaged in other rites drawn from the recovery movement.⁹²

Boomers added new chic to old "S words" such as sacred, spiritual, soul, sin, shame, and Satan. Books on heaven, hell, and out-of-body experiences became best-sellers. Angel books sold five million copies in 1993 alone. By the mid-1990s, Utne Reader described how "shamanic journeys" were becoming "for people in their thirties and forties and fifties what rock concerts are for people in their teens." Gradually, the two main spiritual camps converged: Evangelicals turned to "devotional" therapy, while the New Age was discovering family values.⁹³

Middle-aged spiritualists retooled America's commercial culture. By the mid-1990s, half of all small businesspeople claimed they were born again, and large corporations began pursuing what Saturn's Skip Lafauve described as "more of a cultural revolution than a product revolution." Value (traditional workmanship, enduring quality, correct politics) became the 1990s marketing buzzword. Boomer-led companies mixed politics with products, applying The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success and tending to what Thomas Chappell called The Soul of a Business. "To do well you must do good," advised Stephen Covey, "and to do good you must first be good." As Boomer corporatists read Jesus: CEO and accumulated Money of the Mind, their peers sought products believed to be good because they were made by good people. A virtuous company could gain a listing in the Shepherd's Guide's religious yellow pages, while a bad company could end up on the National Boycott News's 124-page target list.

Many of America's largest corporations replaced The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit with a Boomer facsimile the Christian Science Monitor dubbed "The Man in the Cotton Twill Slacks." These new executives prided themselves on fostering a healthy corporate culture and managing through shared values. Even so, the 1990s erosion of corporate loyalty left many midlife "open collar" workers feeling more loyal to their calling than to their bosses. Laid-off professionals often masked underemployment by becoming self-employed contractors or consultants. Whatever the cover, Boomers looked for simpler careers and home-based work so they could spend more time with children or just slow down.

The Boomer-led family was predicated on a rebirth, and blending, of gender roles. Midlife women recalled their Greatest mothers as not assertive enough; midlife men recalled their fathers as not reflective enough. Both took steps to correct this in themselves--and others.

Midlife Boomer women admired what Clarissa Pinkola Estés called the "wild woman" who came "ahead, claws out and fighting." These included "mother lion" antimedia crusaders; lesbians and ecofeminists; a surge of female gun owners and hunters; heartland spouses who comprised roughly a third of radical militia membership; and authors of countless books about menopause, goddesses, and "sage women." New Victorians in women's studies programs showed less interest in liberation than in punishment--and in censoring porn, regarded by Catherine MacKinnon as "the root of all women's woes." What the New Yorker called ultrafeminists moved beyond the Silent crusade for sexual equality to the belief that women, being closer to nature, were superior to men.⁹⁴

Midlife women emerged as a political juggernaut, writing big checks for both parties and quadrupling the female share of state legislators. At times, the wives of Boomer male candidates made voters think they should run instead of their husbands. Polls of middle-aged voters generally showed women significantly more liberal than men--but just as disapproving of the old institutional order.⁹⁵

Boomer men largely accepted their female peers' incursions. Without a second income, most of their households would have fallen below the living standards of the Silent at like age. Many Boomer wives had steadier and higher-paying jobs than their husbands'--a situation that would have mortified Greatest males. Half of all Boomer fathers described themselves as better dads than their own dads had been--evidence (said the National Fatherhood Initiative's Don Eberly) of a "regret bordering on anger" that revealed a "substantial gulf between the Boomer Generation and their fathers."

Crafting a post-Awakening masculinity as suitable for churches as for homes, Boomer males rejected the Greatest man's-manliness and Silent angst for a new gender definition Newsweek called "the Godly man." They massed in wilderness retreats, the Million Man March, and evangelical Promise Keeper rallies where men held hands in football stadia. The new men's literature extended from Dave Barry's "guy" culture to mythopoetic tales of gender spirituality.⁹⁶

On race, Boomers rerooted a traditional ethnic consciousness and asserted an intense new spirituality. From Muslims to the NAACP's Benjamin Chavis and Kweisi Mfume, Boomers refused to be what Ntozake Shange described as "trees white people walk through." While values liberals such as Stephen Carter attacked The Culture of Disbelief, values conservatives such as Clarence Thomas, Armstrong Williams, and Alan Keyes demanded a fresh examination of what Shelby Steele called The Content of Our Character. Across ideologies, Boomer blacks agreed that Awakening-era laws and programs helped them as individuals but also engendered a culture of poverty that damaged their communities. They were more likely than their white peers to be born again and favor school prayer--and often voiced regret that the core of African American leadership passed from churches to government.⁹⁷

As they backed away from traditional civil rights organizations, Boomer blacks were less likely than the Silent to stress pluralism or solicit money from white taxpayers or private donors; instead, said one Muslim, they were intent on "replacing the integrated head on the civil rights movement's black body--with a black head." Much of the new race talk was moving away from procedural rights and equal opportunity and toward strengthening families, stopping crime, and saving children.

If rectifying civic virtue required harsh new restrictions on child freedoms, Boomers everywhere--from inner cities to walled suburbs--were fully prepared for that. The child's world was the one place where this middle-aged generation had fully focused. The severe, intrusive, perfectionist approach Boomers applied here was a sure sign of what would gradually happen elsewhere as the new millennium approached.

As Boomers move more deeply into midlife, their collective mindset will grow more judgmental, snobbish, and severe. By nurture and habit, they will remain disinclined to do the regular or polite things that facilitate community life. Yet by midlife conviction, they will become what E. J. Dionne describes as "civic liberals" and "civic conservatives," obsessed with restoring shared values. This will pose a conundrum for Boomer parents and leaders as they traverse the millennium: How can a generation that can't march in a row tell others to do so? Graying Boomers will respond by tying their Awakening-era credos about personal growth and authenticity ever more tightly to new imperatives of social altruism. Many will redefine their jobs to stress the inspirational or preaching role. America will see more of what Newt Gingrich calls "didactic politicians," public crafters of what Bennett calls "the architecture of the soul."

Come the Oh-Ohs, Boomers will begin to find new uses for government. Where the first half of the Unraveling saw the rerooting of Boomer conservatives, the second half will see the rerooting of Boomer anti-conservatives. From the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, as Democrats lingered to defend vast public institutions that had not been resacralized, Republicans made big inroads among Boomers. To the extent Republicans in power have to defend those same institutions, a new Boomer-led opposition will mobilize a rejuvenated alliance of "Duty Democrats" opposed to the Christian Coalition. Like Mickey Kaus in End of Equality, Boomer liberals will propose replacing the remnants of the Great Society with something less materially promising but more morally exacting. Yet no matter who gains high office, liberals or conservatives, many backers of the winning faction will wonder if high office in an era of ideological rage and train-wrecked government is where they really want to be--and if a tactical loss might not prove to be a strategic victory. For Boomer partisans who are out of power, the late Unraveling will mainly be an occasion to retool and jockey for long-range advantage.⁹⁸

Boomer communitarians--liberal and conservative--will gradually prevail over the libertarians in the Culture Wars. The dittohead Rush Limbaughs will lose listeners to the shame therapist Laura Schessingers, and the free-enterprising Steve Forbeses will be overwhelmed by the family-minded Gary Bauers who insist that "the marketplace unleavened by virtue" produces "junk." The new Boomer ascendants will zero in on what Martha Bayles terms the Hole in Our Soul, "the loss of beauty and meaning" in America's Unraveling culturama. What John Leo calls "hair-trigger puritans" will attack licentiousness in the belief that the whole community is threatened by misdirected private pleasures. To galvanize the community to save itself against the darkness of human evil, Boomers will continue to allude to cleansing catastrophes, like the impending birthing pains predicted by the Earth Changes movement. Back in the Awakening, any bout of unusual weather prompted Boomers to predict the new Ice Age; today, it prompts them to predict global warming. Charles Krauthammer asks, "Is there a primitive religion that can match 'environmentalism' for attributing natural calamity to the transgressions of man?"⁹⁹

Boomer virtuecrats of all ideologies will increasingly distrust any path that doesn't hurt. Their prescription will not be a sugar-coated cure, but a purgative tonic. Addressing America's unmet social needs, Boomers will insist (with Karl Zinsmeister) that "we forego the comfortable, and ever so easier, responses of softness" and (with Texas Governor George Bush, Jr.) that "discipline and love go hand in hand." From chain gangs to "diet loaf" prison food to courtrooms where victims confront criminals, Boomers will restigmatize crime and emphasize "expressive justice" that judges the sinner along with the sin. According to the Economist, "Many of those baby-boomers, who once marched for peace and love, now want to see murderers injected, shot, or fried." They will seek to cleanse rather than comfort the poor, applying what John Kester suggests will be "blunt instruments" and "crude solutions." "Amputation is a tough treatment," he says, "but it does get rid of gangrene."

Boomer rhetoric will offer many polarizing arguments but few big institutional changes. National politics will become an arena for fierce arguments about new proposals that even the strongest partisans will know can't yet be enacted or enforced. As the Overclass argues for a flat tax (stressing the virtue of simplicity and moral desert), it will be stymied by less affluent recusants who will say they have "chosen" not to pursue a life of wealth. Similarly, Boomer Congresses will find ways to separate arguments about the federal budget from the budget itself, which will grind away without fundamental change. Not able to decide who is worse, the rich or the poor, Boomers will censure them both and impose symbolic (but minor) punishments: Some supposedly excessive income will be taxed from the one side, undeserved welfare slashed from the other. The result will be a vast and rusted-out public sector stripped of an engine--but with nothing yet ready to replace it.

Influencing these policy debates will be new stock figures: the roving philosopher professionals, their careers held together only by the twisting thread of their own personality. The cutting-edge idea prescriptors will be author-politicians such as Al Gore, William Bennett, or Bill Bradley, people who fuse spirituality with grass-roots activism. Questing after the elemental, primitive, and austere, Boomers with means will travel to abbeys and convents, kayak with aborigines, and backpack in orangutan sanctuaries. Those without means will retreat to a farmhouse or take a sabbatical teaching inner-city children. Upon their return, they will declare themselves renewed and issue stirring appeals to the national conscience. Many Boomers who preach honesty and sacrifice will remain personally self-indulgent. Like Bill Gates (whose ecofriendly mansion has a garage for twenty cars), the Cultural Elite will consume heavily while pretending otherwise.

Aided by the Internet and other media inventions, Boomers will carve new concepts of community within mental and moral rather than physical and institutional boundaries. In affluent suburbs, Boomer homes will buzz with offices, day care co-ops, food delivery, phone shopping, and other infrastructure around which will grow a new civic life, at times behind security gates. Those who live far from their parents and childhood homes will struggle toward their own definition of real community. Surveys show that Boomers today value neatness less than older or younger people. In the Oh-Ohs, their preferred style will lean toward the organic, the genuine, the unordered. They will reject Oldsmobiles, pavement, face-front garages, big lawns, and suburban sprawl for sturdy 4x4s, gravel driveways, front porches, spreading oaks, and rural hamlets (what some call "oldfangled new towns"). They will not mind letting age show on their homes or in their cities, where they will let parkland once cleared and mowed by the Greatest revert to native grasses and wildflowers.¹⁰⁰

Boomer values will increasingly be driven by a profound antipathy for much that is modern in American life. Where the Greatest once liked to surround themselves with regular and rational and progressive things, Boomers will prefer the unique and sacred and traditional. Elements of today's Luddite Congress will make a mark on the Oh-Ohs' U.S. Congress, as Boomers struggle to redefine what progress means. Already, they are attacking such old Greatest yardsticks as the Gross Domestic Product on the grounds that they overmeasure the mere payment of money (since divorce lawyers and industrial pollution technically add to GDP) and undermeasure what truly matters (since saving a species or teaching values to children count as zero). To replace these, Bennett has crafted the Index of Leading Cultural Indicators; the Clinton Commerce Department, a Gross National Welfare measure; and a liberal think tank, a Genuine Progress Index, which concludes that the quality of American life has declined by 40 percent since the mid-1970s.

Materially, most Boomers concede that they're not living much better in middle age than their parents did. At age forty, where a typical Greatest worker (during the American High) enjoyed a two-thirds rise in real pay over the prior generation at the same age, a typical Boomer worker has shown no real improvement. Yet their self-esteem remains indomitable: By a five to one ratio, 1990s-era Boomers consider their careers better than their parents', and by nine to one, their lives more meaningful. By the Oh-Ohs, those views will harden. Boomer recusants who choose not to achieve by any worldly standard will have second thoughts about Information Age technology. Spurred by magazines such as Simple Living and The Tightwad Gazette, and by Miserly Moms and Use Less Stuff movements, Boomers will find spirituality in what Fortune calls "non-ism," exalting whatever it is they will not be consuming, from no-nitrate meat to no-color gasoline. For many, the Oh-Ohs will be time to shed the tech toys, abandon workaholism, and "downshift."¹⁰¹

In family and financial affairs, the late Unraveling will be a sobering time. Boomers will have to say farewell to most of their remaining Greatest parents, often after a geographic separation dating back to the Awakening era and fumbled efforts at reconciliation that betray mixed motives on both sides--as in Bud Lite's "I love you man!" commercial. Parental death will confront Boomers with an embarrassing reality for people their age: that the providers they had somehow counted on are gone and that what's left (in inheritance) is somehow not as much as they had imagined. Thrift will become a big late-Unraveling buzzword among Boomers as they make a big deal out of all the income they are diverting into mutual funds. But, as always, this generation will have trouble following through. Some will resist the notion of disciplining themselves for the sake of lucre. Others, looking at the runup in stock and bond prices caused by their sheer midlife numbers, will assume the market boom to last forever--and they will cut back on savings accordingly. Boomers will continue to support Social Security and Medicare for their own parents while also believing that both will be bankrupt by the time they retire. Into the Oh-Ohs, their leaders will talk constantly but do very little about this looming threat to the material security of their own age--a threat that will loom ever closer.

Gradually, the old wry detachment will give way to a jarring new focus. Boomers will at long last be ready to accept full responsibility for their own old age--and for the hard choices facing their nation. Increasingly, graying Boomers will "muster the will to remake ourselves into altruists and ascetics," as Rolling Stone urged in 1990. "But let's not fake it," the magazine warned, the yuppie persona still in its rearview mirror. Or at the very least, advises Hillary Rodham Clinton, "fake it until you make it." By the Oh-Ohs, this generation will be of no mind to fake anything. "There is no way to avoid the coming confrontation," the Catholic Eye declared in 1992. "Fasten your seat belts--it's going to be a rough ride."

Continue

This page was last modified on 08/14/2025 05:39:37