Both Oars In Boomer to Busted

Jul 31, 2009

Technically, I qualify as a Baby Boomer since I was born in 1964, the last year of the swell of births that marks the post-war generation. I am also the youngest of eight children, so I can claim membership by association. Thanks to my siblings, I grew up listening to albums like Hair without a clue as to what psychedelic meant. You might say that I got the culture of the Baby Boomers without the chemical and psychological damage.

 

However, lately I have started to feel very distant from the Baby Boomer generation. Partly, this is because I have come to realize that my childhood memories of the historical events that formed the Baby Boomer generation are second hand. I didn’t actually experience the Vietnam War, Woodstock, the Kennedy and King assassinations and Vatican II. I saw these things on TV as history, not current events. What made my older brothers and sisters who they are didn’t actually occur in my lifetime.  

 

I remember when I got my first glimpse of this intra-generational divide. My oldest brother and I both went to Brown University. On one of my brother’s visits to our alma mater, I hosted a conversation between him and a gentleman who lived on the first floor of the three-family house that my family and I rented in Providence after we returned from our first years in Haiti. Early in the conversation, they realized that they graduated from high school the same year. The topic of the draft surfaced quickly.

 

After high school, one joined the Marines and the other, who had first attempted to register Conscientious Objector, accepted a college deferral. Although I was part of the first college bound seniors that had to pre-register for the draft to be eligible for government guaranteed college loans, I was a spectator in this conversation. I had nothing to say. This is when I first realized I had little in common with the real Baby Boomers.   

 

For me, the divide between my generation and the Baby Boomers has widened with the current economic crisis. This crisis has lent a new name to those too young to be true Boomers and too old to be Generation X—call us Generation Busted. Busted does not mean simply broke. It means “caught,” like when your mom finds you playing video games instead of doing homework.

 

Busted pretty much captures the reality of us late Boomer births. We have been busted—caught overextended in a failing economy. Like the men and women with young families in the 1930’s, the music has ended before we made it off the dance floor. Our older siblings, the real Baby Boomers, have lived it up and we are left explaining to our children why they will not have a car at sixteen and will be working their way through college. Busted, we are broke and caught.    

 

There are also several moral questions that are widening the divide for me, too. It’s a bit ironic that the generation defined by an increase in births has been the most active in supporting access to birth control and abortions. During 1946 to 1964, annual births escalated from under 3.0 million to 4.3 million per year.  Babies defined the generation culturally and economically. Men and women came out of the war tired of death, optimistic in victory and wanting families.  Yet, those babies from bigger families have spent a lot of time advocating for smaller families.  Maybe it is just because I am the youngest of eight, but I can’t identify with that reversal in trend personally or morally.

 

The Baby Boom generation is also defined by education. It is often called the “most educated generation ever.” Education was cheap at the beginning of the boom. My brother’s tuition at Brown was around $4,500 a year. A decade and a half later, I paid, or at least my parents paid, $18,000 a year. Now, tuition, room and board at major universities is topping $45,000 a year. Boomers asked, “Where is your kid going to college?” Generation Busted is asking, “Why has the cost of education risen several times faster than inflation?” Maybe it is time for the Baby Boomers who have taken over the universities they flooded as students to do something about the affordability of education. 

 

I do not feel at all like a Baby Boomer. I never owned a Beemer or a second home. I have four kids. I never did drugs and I think the draft may need to come back to make life fair again. And, I don’t understand why the President can’t stop smoking. I feel more like the straggler who got caught running in the back door of the theater while my older friends made it in unscathed. I feel busted.