Ah, me: the Boomers. Here I go, readers will think: taking the stick to my favourite whipping-boys. Not quite. Read on, geriatric Boomers, and don’t get your Depends in a knot, just yet.
Way back in the depths of the pandemic, I commented on social media that the response proved that Boomers are the most selfish generation. Because, I argued, the whole of pandemic policy was designed solely to try and save the elderly for just a few more weeks, at not just staggering economic expense, but at the cost to the well-being and future prospects of the very young. The Moloch Option, I called it.
But some Boomer relatives and friends disagreed. “We’re not all like that,” said one. They hated the lockdowns, too.
Which is a fair point. It might also have been pointed out that the politicians and bureaucrats behind the disgusting lockdown and mandate policies weren’t even Boomers (with the exception of the US, where geriatrics like Joe Biden and Anthony Fauci were responsible), but GenX or even (in the case of Jacinda Ardern and Siouxsie Wiles) Millennials.
So, yeah, even I make the occasional mistake. No, really. And, in turn, not all Boomers are completely indifferent to the plight of today’s young. Covid policies were wrong, and they know it. In fact, they’ve generally had an easy run through life, and they know it.
When I expressed flippant horror at the closing of my sixth decade […] it also made me reflect on the world of my actual adolescence and early adulthood half a century ago, with indignant sympathy for today’s real young. We hear much about generational imbalance, aggravated by Britain’s shamefully unmet housing, childcare and early-education needs. Angry young and pious mid-lifers reproach “Boomers” for our property wealth, triple-locks and annoying longevity. They do have a point (though rarely any useful suggestions) and this reasonable sense of injustice was sharpened when Covid propaganda and regulation valued the very old while carelessly damaging children, students and young adults not yet entitled to furlough.
So far, then, we’re on the same page.
Their mistake is thinking we don’t care. Millions of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, mentors (even some landlords) shudder at the difficulties of youth and by sacrifice and ballot box would rather help than hinder.
Is this true, though? Watching the streams of RVs passing through my country town, full of silver-headed Boomers cackling about “Spending the Kids’ Inheritance”, it’s hard to be so sure. Ditto, when governments regularly bleed the young working-age to fund decades of welfare and free healthcare for the old.
But, at least some Boomers are cognizant of how easy they had it.
We remember the differently structured society of the 1960s and 1970s. It had disadvantages: fewer and more expensive ways to communicate, crushing sexism, racial intolerance and bosses who make Dominic Raab look like Bambi. The country was riven by strikes and inflation. But upward social mobility was easier, rents bearable, the postwar wealth gap smaller. Fusty old classism was increasingly jeered at (why else did middle-class Mick Jagger go mockney?). In the early Seventies at least, unemployment was low: as a reporter I interviewed a group of kids considered exceptional for being one whole year out of school without a job. Their sense of shame was painful.
The many who did find jobs could probably find accommodation in the heart of the big cities, even if it was a squalid room with a hissing gas fire and shillings in the metre. London was scruffy and rundown, not yet pimped out to foreign money, so young Dick Whittingtons found squats, bedsits or studios and set up radical or artistic collectives in the aftermath of the 1968 excitements.
The Boomers benefited from a world of wealth and stability created by the toil and blood of their parents. A generation who’d endured the Depression and World War then endured being sneered at by their coddled children. But that coddling didn’t just feed the Boomers’ outsized sense of entitlement: on the plus side, it gave them the luxury of freedom to experiment and fail upwards.
What I would wish for today’s young is that atmosphere of insouciant, inventive risk-taking […] Couples’ ability to scrape by on one pay packet meant not housewifely stagnation, as some moderns assume, but energies freed for change. After all, half a generation earlier Denis Thatcher paid the bills while his wife Margaret studied law and prepared for politics.
Without today’s constant online status-judgment there was less pressure to make good money, or become a star, straight away. And if leftish artists and musicians had a taste for adventure, so did budding capitalists: by 20 Richard Branson had failed at selling Christmas trees and budgerigars, run a magazine and launched a record business. Others designed, crafted, wrote, composed or invented on a shoestring.
Not all the experimentation was for the better, of course. Much of the worst ills that plague the contemporary West — Queer Theory, Gender Theory, Critical Race Theory, the whole gamut of Cultural Marxism — festered in the uterus of the “New Left” from the 60s on. The Boomers also gave us the Long March through the Institutions. But, to be fair, too many of us GenXers became complicit foot soldiers.
But today, there is no such luxury of experimentation for the young. Any who dare rebel as the Boomers did against the certainties of the Establishment, by pushing back against leftist orthodoxy, are summarily cancelled. If not physically attacked.
It seems to me that 50 years ago it was easier to feel that it was both safe and a lot of fun to be young. There was less fear of ending up on the actual pavement, and it seemed as if youth was winning: taking over, brightening the world up, outstripping the monochrome boring oldies. Not envying or resenting them.
The Australian
Anyone who thinks the young Boomers didn’t resent the oldies is pissing on our legs and telling us it’s raining. But, it’s true that it was safer, freer and more fun for the young Boomers. Even we GenXers, coming of age in a world defined by stagflation and unemployment, could easily pool our dole money in a share house and pursue experimentation in music, art and writing, without fear of cancellation (the first recognisable “cancel culture” scandal that I can recall hit brutally in 1993).
So, we know that life sucks for kids today — the question is, what are we going to do about it?