We are the generation that changed everything. Of all the eras and epochs of Americans, ours is the one that made the biggest impression—on ourselves. But that’s an important accomplishment because we’re the generation that created the self, made the firmament of the self, divided the light of the self from the darkness of the self, and said let there be self. If you were born between 1946 and 1964, you may have noticed this yourself.
That’s not to say we’re a selfish generation. Selfish means “too concerned with the self,” and we’re not. Self isn’t something we’re just, you know, concerned with. We be self.
Before us, self was without form and void, like our parents in their dumpy clothes and vague ideas. Then we came along. Now the personal is the political. The personal is the socioeconomic. The personal is the religious and the secular, science and the arts. The personal is every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his (and, let us hasten to add, her) kind. If the Baby Boom has done one thing it’s to beget a personal universe.
And our apologies to anyone who personally happens to be a jerk. Self is like fish, proverbially speaking. Give a man a fish and you’ve fed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and, if he turns into a dry-fly catch-and-release angling fanatic up to his liver in icy water wearing ridiculous waders and an absurd hat, pestering trout with three-pound test line on a thousand-dollar graphite rod, and going on endlessly about Royal Coachman lures that he tied himself using muskrat fur and partridge feathers … well, at least his life partner is glad to have him out of the house.
We made the universe personal, and we made the universe new. New in the sense of juvenescent. We have an abiding admiration for our own larval state.
We saw that the grown-ups were like primitive insects. They never underwent metamorphosis. They didn’t emerge from their home and office cocoons with brilliant, fluttering wings. They just continued to molt, getting more gross, lumpy, and bald and, as it were, bugging us. Better that we should stay nymphs and naiads. Plus we were having more fun than the adults of the species.
“Don’t ever change!” we wrote in each other’s high school yearbooks. “Stay just the way you are!” What strange valedictions to give ourselves on the threshold of life. Imagine if we had obeyed them, and now everyone possessed the resolute solipsism of adolescence with its wild enthusiasms, dark lethargies, strong lusts, keen aversions, inner turmoils, and uncontained impulses. Life would be exactly like it is today. You’re welcome.
So here we are in the Baby Boom cosmos, formed in our image, personally tailored to our individual needs, and predetermined to be eternally fresh and novel. And we saw that it was good. Or pretty good.
We should have had a cooler name, the way the Lost Generation did. Except good luck to anybody who tries to tell us to get lost. Anyway it’s too late now, we’re stuck with being forever described as exploding infants. And maybe it’s time, now that we’ve splattered ourselves all over the place, for the Baby Boom to look back and think. “What made us who we are?” “And what caused us to act the way we do?” “And WTF?” Because the truth is, if we hadn’t decided to be young forever, we’d be old.
The youngest Baby Boomers, born in the last year when anybody thought it was hip to like Lyndon Johnson, are turning fifty. Those of us who were born when postwar birthrates were highest, even before Ike was liked, won’t (statistics tell us) have to wait as long for death as we had to wait to get laid.
We’d be sad about this if we weren’t too busy remarrying younger wives, reviving careers that hit glass ceilings when children arrived, and renewing prescriptions for drugs that keep us from being sad. And we’ll never retire. We can’t. The mortgage is underwater. We’re in debt up to the Rogaine for the kids’ college education. And it serves us right—we’re the generation who insisted that a passion for living should replace working for one.
Nonetheless it’s an appropriate moment for us to weigh what we’ve wrought and tally what we’ve added to and subtracted from existence. We’ve reached the age of accountability. The world is our fault. We are the generation that has an excuse for everything—one of our greatest contributions to modern life—but the world is still our fault. This is every generation’s fate. It’s a matter of power and privilege demography. Whenever anything happens anywhere, somebody over fifty signs the bill for it. And the Baby Boom, seated as we are at the head of life’s table, is hearing Generation X, Generation Y, and the Millennials all saying, “Check, please!”