“BOOM BOOM,” ISAAC ABRAMSON SAID. He was sitting in front of the iSight in his parents’ basement, Jerry Garcia’s upside-down face over his left shoulder. It was late afternoon at the end of June.
“Today I punched a baby boomer in the face,” Abramson said. “Today he punched back.” Abramson motioned to his eye, touched his face. He felt the blood tacky against his finger. “Tomorrow he won’t. This is the first Boomer Missive. Today I will lay out what there is to lay out when we think about the baby boomers, as Boomer Boomers, in the years ahead. There will be much more to say in the days ahead. Today I want to do two things, having already punched a baby boomer. I want to tell you a story, and I want you to think about just where you fit in that story yourself. Here’s the story I want to tell you:
“Sixty years ago your grandparents went across an ocean to the continent of Europe to reap the material benefits of a singularly promising business opportunity. There was a war going on overseas. Your grandparents, not your parents, they helped. They helped us all. They had the noble intentions, the greatest generation’s greatest generational intentions, the ones you’ve heard about your whole life. They were liberators, they were the deus ex machina Europe needed. They liberated untold treasure. It wasn’t their fault—there it was before them, so they collected it up and brought it home. They came back with this treasure. Unfathomable treasure. Maybe even enough to send you to college, to buy you expensive sneakers when you were a kid. But your parents, who did not help and did not themselves even plunder that treasure—they grew up with more and more and more and more. They were not liberators. They were not the purveyors nor the architects nor the executors of the noble task nor the players in the great game. They were the recipients of the spoils, and they basked in it. They received the signifier but not the sign, they were the first generation to have fall in their lap all the lucre without exerting one iota of the toil. This was not their fault, nor was it their responsibility—just as it was not your fault, nor your responsibility, when it fell a generation further, to you, when there was no more draft and no active war to join even if you wanted to. When you were too young to know. Some of it they may have given on to you in part. My parents, for an example, gave me a lot. They sent me to college. When I was a kid they bought me expensive Air Jordans and, later, Reebok Pumps. David Robinson’s Reebok Pumps. They live in big houses, our parents, the baby boomers. My parents, for example, allowed me to have a room in the basement of one of those houses. They cleaned out the basement for me, my old room, so I could move back in. Here I am, sitting in that house.
“Here I am.
“But now they are old. And we are young. And our grandparents are passing on. But our parents, they still have all that treasure their parents brought back from Europe. They live in big houses. They own the goods that all that resplendent treasure afforded them. They own tall, well-appointed brownstones in big cities. They have jobs. They own mansions and more mcmansions and mcbrownstones and mctwobedrooms. They have jobs.
“They have the jobs.
“They have all the jobs.
“They were meant to retire at the age of sixty-five, these parents of ours. They grew up amid a world in which they made a promise, signed an unwritten social compact: you worked until you were sixty-five and then you stepped aside. But not these baby boomers. That was the promise that was promised them—but more important, that was the promise that was promised us. And they have not retired. They have not. They have not.”
Abramson put his finger to his face again. He could feel it was flushed. For a couple of minutes he did not look at himself on-screen, but now he could see his red, red face. He barely recognized himself with his bulging eye, sweat-plastered hair—what remained of it—all over his forehead. He thought to pause the video, but he decided he would leave that long pause in. You could always edit later. Always. Then he continued.
“Now I want to tell you another story. A different story. I bet it’s not totally different from your story. It’s a story of failure. It’s the story of my own failure.
“I, Isaac Abramson, am a failure. An abject, complete, massive, total failure.
“I graduated from a very good liberal arts college with a degree in English. I graduated cum laude. No one told me how little it would matter. The day I walked onstage to be handed a diploma, September 11 hadn’t yet happened. No one would even have imagined it could happen. The tech boom was still a boom boom. I did the things I was supposed to do. I wrote good papers, I drank first bad beer, then good beer. Then bourbon, then scotch. I watched as the kids who graduated before me left for San Francisco and made money in Internet start-ups. Bought homes in Palo Alto, on the Russian River, in Sausalito. I watched that all go away. But I didn’t want that anyway. I wasn’t ever going to be in on the ground floor of Yahoo! or Google—I never thought Ask Jeeves was all that bad a site. Jeeves gave, I took. I had a MySpace account, wrote Friendster testimonials. I never once chatted in a chat room. I didn’t know what the eye and em in IM stood for. That was fine for me. I wasn’t greedy. I didn’t want a new-economy job. I wanted an old-economy job.
“I wanted a job.
“I want a job.
“I wasn’t a failure at first! I went to New York City, where I got a decent job. I lived there for ten years—ten years! one decade!—and I never once lived in an apartment alone. I had that job and then magazines went into the ground. Old media started to die. They didn’t publish words anymore. They created content instead of publishing journalism. So I went back to graduate school. It was like a job. I read books and prepared to be an educator.
“Then I finished.
“Then there were no jobs.
“Then I accrued debt and I could no longer afford to live on my own. Now I’m back in my parents’ basement.
“Does this sound familiar to you? Perhaps this doesn’t sound familiar and if it doesn’t, click away. Stop listening. Go stream some pilfered free music.
“But if it does sound familiar:
“Do you know who still had the jobs? I think you know who still had the jobs. I tried to get a job but I could not. I tried and tried. Then my money ran out. I could not find a job.
“This spring, I moved back into my parents’ house. They gave me the room I grew up in. The basement room. They did not give me a car. They let me drive the same beat-up old Volvo they let me drive in high school. Today I live in a basement. My father is sixty-nine years old, and he has not yet retired from his job. It will disappear so that his hospital can pay for benefits so that its employees can pay taxes. My mother is sixty-eight years old, and she is, again, a stay-at-home mom today. Only now I’m who she stays at home with.
“Again.
“I am infantilized.
“Again.
“Now I want you to do one more thing. If you have no job, I want you to look at the basement where you live right now. Is it a basement like my basement? Does it make you happy, this basement? Does it smell musty? Does it contain the same couch on which you kissed your first girl when you were in the eighth grade?
“But that’s not who I want to talk to right now. Instead, if you do have a job, I want to talk to you. I want you to do something different:
“If you do have a job, I want you to pull out your latest paystub. Or to pull it up online. Do you see the line that says ‘Social Security Tax’? I want you to see how much money you pay every month so the baby boomers can live off Social Security. And I want you to know one thing: You will never see a cent of that money. You will never receive Social Security. You will never have a retirement. You will never have your parents’ jobs, because those jobs will not exist. And you are paying not for you, but for them. You are not paying so that when you are sixty-five, you will receive security in the form of money. You are paying for them, now. You are paying so that they will be able to live well now, now that they are retired. But they are old and you are young and this is America, land of the young and home of the young, and when the system is broken you fix the system. Think about that until my next missive. Think about how this might look if it were different. Think this: Social Insecurity.
“Social Insecurity.
“Social Insecurity.
“Social Insecurity.
“Resist much, obey little.
“Propaganda by the deed.
“Boom boom.”