Boomers, Alive or Dead?

Posted on September 21, 2008
Filed Under News |

At dinner last night a younger friend mentioned the baby boomers, and noted in passing how odd it was that “they all became Yuppies.” The conversation rolled onward with its larger themes and this small point was left unanswered. I thought about it today, and wished I could have mentioned, equally in passing, that many of the boomers did no such thing as becoming worldly and closed-down. Many, many of them I think simply retired from the field of battle with broken hearts.

In the war between the boomer children and their parental overseers, the exuberance of flower power was remorselessly ground into the dirt, and all of this is recorded starkly in the histories of the sixties. With the ending of youthful dreams and the returning home of defeated soldiers from Vietnam there came a darkness upon the heart of the nation, and a stilling of upward purpose.

This wholesale dampening of purpose has never since lifted yet, I believe, even though the waters of that great wave of encouragement have long flowed through all the currents of the culture, changing the positions of women and blacks and the disadvantaged, softening and opening the civilized toleration of America’s institutions, and leaving only the congealed and hardened clot of the fiction called “conservatism” to serve as the mouthpiece for the old, money-hungry, patriarchal slave game.

Evil has the effect of making you tired, wearied by your very contact with lies and distortion. It has often been remarked, but is usually left out of tactical equations, that repeated adversarial abuses of truth and fairness and reason will tend to wear down the simple spiritual strength of any who try the more difficult means of relationship such as respecting those of different views, such as allowing room for uncertainty and experimentation, such as honoring a sense of sacred in the world.

All of this matters because of the poisoned planet, and the presidential elections, and the essential, much larger question of how we will regain our sense of upward purpose in America, if in fact we are ever again to possess such a thing. Much can be said of this, and I wonder again, as I have so often wondered, if those broken hearts have ever healed, and if they are again ready to bloom in hope and lovingness, as the boomers come into their long-mistrusted “retirement” age, and swell the voting demographic.

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