One frequent criticism of the baby boom generation is that they thought that they were God. Having known many people of all ages, I knew only one person who actually thought that he was God. He was close to my age, and he stopped thinking that he was God when he got the right medication.
The good ones among baby boomers, originally, believed that the universe itself is divine, and that beautiful state of affairs can be had here. For this reason they fought for civil rights, human rights, social freedoms, peaceful instead of military solutions, and better treatment of the environment. There were others later who did bring in wrong ideas. These came to believe such things as that "there are no innocent victims" and "everyone creates their reality" (so abuse and victimize as many as you can, as it is them doing it and not you); "positive thinking good, negative thinking bad" (so ignore all criticism of your actions, however wrong they may be); and that self-esteem is a prerequisite for and a determinant of good behavior (it is neither).
Others, who were not hippies or New Agers and many of whom were not baby boomers, took these beliefs and used them to silence the scientists and the environmentalists who knew of the coming climatic catastrophe, claiming that they were negative; to put America $10 trillion in debt, claiming that anyone protesting this was lacking in optimism; to destroy public service, claiming that unless one has everything he cannot be of help to anyone; and to make abuse the norm of man-woman relationships, claiming that those at its receiving end were causing it or were negative or were losers or were lacking in self-esteem. The wrongful beliefs were used to perpetrate a monstrous world-threatening evil, with most of this evil coming not from the Left but from the Right.
The evil that did come from the Left was political correctness. A prudish hysterical love-hating beauty-hating sex-hating ideology took over America's centers of education and much of its media. This ideology not only militated against love and beauty; it militated against democracy itself. With standard of public discourse being "nobody can say anything that can offend anyone," was banished meaning as well as sincerity from public discourse. Anything that means anything will be controversial; and anything controversial will offend someone. With political correctness, insincerity, prissiness and hypocrisy became not only the aggressively imposed norm of public discourse, but also of people's behavior, people's thinking and people's lives.
None of this of course is causally linked to the stated claim that baby boomers thought that they were God. This was a result of exploitation of wrongful beliefs by the American Right that would use anything to advance its rapacity, as well as of short-sighted thinking on the part of frumpy brainy women who wanted to lord it over other women without realizing the damage their actions did to women, to men, and to man-woman relationships. But there is an attitude common to baby boomers that is very wrongful, and it is as follows. They identify with their generational interest more than they do with anything else. And that is a problem for anyone who has to share a planet with them.
I would describe it as bad-neighbor policy: bad neighbor to those before them and those after them. When they were young, it was "trust nobody over 30." When they had children themselves, they saw them less as their future and more as their competition. This led them to be ugly bullies, beating up on their children and later beating down on people one third their age and claiming them not to be as enlightened as themselves when their supposed enlightenment led them to act in such a despicable manner. First they were socialist, and everyone had to be socialist with them. Then they were capitalist, and everyone had to be capitalist with them. Then they were religious, and everyone had to be religious with them as well. No thought in either case was taken to any other generation.
At any given time, the world contains people of all ages, who all have different needs. One must be mindful of all these if one is to create any kind of a livable world. With some great exceptions, the baby boomers failed to see this and acted accordingly. But people who are now living, including the baby boomers who are now living, have a chance to avoid and atone for this terrible mistake.
Generation X had a different problem. They bought into the World War II generation's claim that their children - the baby boomers - were spoiled evil brats who destroyed the supposedly great culture. This is another major error. Yes, the World War II generation won the Second World War; they also fought the Second World War for the other side. And the dogmatic heavy-handed authoritarianism of that generation is just as responsible for starting wars as it is for winning wars.
The fact is, if the Gen-X'ers were brought up in the 50s climate they idolize, they would have wanted something different as well. Many of them would simply not have survived such an upbringing; and if they did, would have more to say about it than they do about the baby boomers. So that while they worship their grandparents and see their parents with contempt, they know nothing of the reality that their grandparents created and in which their parents lived. It is a common practice for grandparents to be wonderful to their grandchildren when they had been horrible to their own children. And while the Gen-Xers are seeing the good face of the World War II generation, they have not seen its terrible face that their parents had - and still have - to endure.
A lot of these people are pining for "traditional values." They have seen Leave It To Beaver and Ricky Loves Lucy, but they know nothing of the reality behind these decoys. The 1950s were not "happy times," and 1980s were not "happy times here again." There were huge problems with both decades, and baby boomers had every right to seek a different way of life - as much as the people now have every right to reject the short-sighted 1980s ethic that brought about the current catastrophe.
For all these things there are real solutions. But they are no more about "positive thinking" or "self-esteem" than they are about blaming "the sixties generation" or damning the world "of flesh" and thinking that burning it will get one into heaven. The real solutions are not a matter of attitude or faith or psychology; they are a matter of applied intelligence. And it is this, and not any of the preceding, that has the chance of actually saving the world.