Baby boomers get criticized a lot. One response I have seen was them claiming that they were the coolest generation and listened to the best music.
I have listened to their music, and I have found undesirable things.
We have Moody Blues with “take your share of the gifts that are there, they all belong to you.” What is being encouraged here is greed and a sense of entitlement. The gifts that are there don’t only belong to you. They belong also to 7 billion other people and to some things that aren’t human, such as God. What is being encouraged here is greed and a sense of entitlement; and that leads many people to become jerks.
We have Led Zeppelin with,
And it’s whispered that soon
If we all call the tune
Then the piper will lead us to reason
And the new day will dawn
For those who stand long
And the forests will echo with laughter.
The piper that they got was Ronald Reagan. The forests didn’t echo with laughter; they got cut down. A situation was misdiagnosed and mishandled, and it was the kind of people who listened to Led Zeppelin that suffered for it the most.
Then there’s the Beatles with “It’s gonna be all right.” It has not been all right. We have global warming and rainforest deforestation. We have the federal debt. What is encouraged here is naïve optimism; and naïve optimism leads to many wrong things. People fail to see the problems, and the problems keep getting bigger. Because I pay attention to these problems I have been accused of being negative. No; I care about what world we live in, which many of these people obviously do not.
Led Zeppelin with “a girl who took my heart – she’s only three years old and it’s a fine way to start,” Jim Morrison with “take me to the next little girl,” Beatles with “she was just 17” – no need for comment.
I both sympathize with baby boomers and am critical of them. They started out like me: seeing what’s wrong in the world. However their solution – positive thinking, self-esteem and believing in yourself – were wrong. Positive thinking leads people to overlook problems and do foolish things. Self-esteem encourages the wrong set of incentives. If you have higher standards for yourself, you will find it harder to feel good about yourself than if you have low standards for yourself, and self-esteem therefore rewards low standards. As for believing in yourself, the most successful people I’ve known did not believe in themselves; they believed in something greater than themselves. If you believe in something greater than yourself, you will be more likely to do difficult and dangerous things than if you believe only in yourself.
Were baby boomers, as some claim, a bad crop? I do not think so. I have known a number of admirable baby boomers. However not all their influences have been good, and it is important that such be scrutinized. That being done, good things about baby boomers stand to gain greater currency, and that generation will have stronger legacy in the world.