A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America by author Bruce Cannon Gibney

Author Bruce Cannon Gibney says Baby Boomers are the cause of America’s moral, economic and social decline. Find out why he calls them “A Generation of Sociopaths.” Watch more at Salon.com/video.

Who Created The Baby Boomer Generation And Why

With this clip, I decided to respond to the battle going on between the generations which is so evident in the comments on my channel. So many blame the baby boomers for our current state of affairs (which they don’t like) while others blame the millennials. Yet we all know that parents are to a great extent responsible for the actions and attitudes of the children. This clip presents portions of my 6 part TV series titled Making Sense Of The Sixties where, in 1989, I asked parents of those who grew up in the 1960s about how they raise their children.

The Misconception about Baby Boomers and the Sixties

Thankfully, we are within sight of the end of the fiftieth anniversaries of things that happened in the nineteen-sixties. What’s left is mostly stuff that no one wants to remember: the Days of Rage, Nixon’s Silent Majority speech, the death of Jack Kerouac, and Altamont—although these will probably not pass entirely without mention.

One reason to feel glad to be nearly done with this round of fiftieths is that we will no longer be subjected, constantly, to generalizations about the baby-boom generation. There are many canards about that generation, but the most persistent is that the boomers were central to the social and cultural events of the nineteen-sixties. Apart from being alive, baby boomers had almost nothing to do with the nineteen-sixties.

The math is not that hard. The boom began in July, 1946, when live births in the United States jumped to two hundred and eighty-six thousand, and it did not end until December, 1964, when three hundred and thirty-one thousand babies were born. That’s eighteen years and approximately seventy-six million people. It does not make a lot of sense to try to generalize about seventy-six million people. The expectations and potential life paths of Americans born in 1946 were completely different from the expectations and life paths of Americans born in 1964. One cohort

  • entered the workforce in a growing economy, the other in a recession. One cohort
  • had Elvis Presley to look forward to; the other had him to look back on.
  • Male forty-sixers had to register for the draft, something people born in 1964 never had to worry about.

The boomers get tied to the sixties because they are assumed to have created a culture of liberal permissiveness, and because they were utopians—political idealists, social activists, counterculturalists. In fact, it is almost impossible to name a single person born after 1945 who played any kind of role in

  • the civil-rights movement,
  • Students for a Democratic Society,
  • the New Left,
  • the antiwar movement, or
  • the Black Panthers during the nineteen-sixties.

Those movements were all started by older, usually much older, people.

The baby boomers obviously played no substantive role in the passage of the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act, or in the decisions of the Warren Court, which are the most important political accomplishments of the decade. Nor were they responsible for the women’s movement or gay liberation. Betty Friedan was born in 1921, Gloria Steinem in 1934. The person conventionally credited with setting off the Stonewall riots, Stormé DeLarverie, was born in 1920.

Even the younger activists in the civil-rights movement were not boomers. John Lewis was born in 1940, Diane Nash in 1938, Bob Moses in 1935. The three activists who were killed during Freedom Summer in Mississippi, in 1964, were all born before 1945. Stokely Carmichael was born in 1941 (in Trinidad and Tobago), Bobby Seale in 1936, Huey Newton in 1942. Malcolm X was born in 1925, four years before Martin Luther King, Jr.

Mario Savio, the de-facto leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, was born before 1945. Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, and Abbie Hoffman were all born before 1940. Dennis Hopper, who directed “Easy Rider,” was born in 1936; Mike Nichols, who directed “The Graduate,” was born in 1931 (in Berlin); and Arthur Penn, who directed “Bonnie and Clyde,” was born in 1922.

Virtually every prominent writer and artist in the nineteen-sixties was born before 1940. Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor, Norman Mailer, and Andy Warhol were born in the nineteen-twenties, Carolee Schneemann, Yvonne Rainer, Sylvia Plath, Philip Roth, Amiri Baraka, Ken Kesey, Donald Barthelme, and Tom Wolfe in the nineteen-thirties, as were James Rado and Gerome Ragni, co-authors of the musical “Hair.” The chief promoter of rock and roll, Bill Graham, was born in 1931 (in Berlin). The chief proselytizer for psychedelic drugs, Timothy Leary, was born in 1920. Even Michael Lang, the original Woodstock promoter who can’t seem to quit, was born in 1944. Dr. Seuss was born in 1904.

Why you can’t fix retirement without fixing wages

Millennials needn’t worry about retirement, Alicia Munnell, 75, writes, as long as they “are willing and able to work longer than their parents and grandparents did.”

It may not be surprising that younger Americans, who will largely be responsible for cleaning up the financial wreckage the boomers are leaving behind, are not particularly enthusiastic at the prospectof working longer and harder for the same quality of life enjoyed by previous generations.

.. the proximate causes of millennials’ financial difficulties, such as the Great Recession and the dot-com bubble: “Millennials entered the labor market during tough times.

.. The “good news,” as she calls it, is that retirement is a long way off and that simply by working into their 70s, millennials will be able to make up a lot of lost ground.

.. Between 1989 and 2016, the real median income of houses headed by people younger than 35 increased by just 4 percent. That’s just about enough to keep pace with overall inflation.

.. The problem is, however, that many prices have been rising much more rapidly than the pace of inflation. Prices are rising fastest for the things that are absolute necessities: Health care. Food. Housing. Education. Things you literally need to survive. As a result, households have to take on more debt to make ends meet.

.. Overall compensation has been largely stagnant since the 1970s, even as productivity has increased. Median household debt has roughly doubled since 1989.

.. By asking millennials to work to age 70 you’re treating the symptom, not the underlying disease.

.. Selling American elites, who tend to be older and wealthier, on the notion that the young just need to work harder is easy. But the idea that workers urgently deserve an across-the-board pay raise — a raise that would come, often, from higher payments from those same older and wealthier people — is a much tougher sell.