It is well known that Baby Boomers and their successors, especially Generation Xers, do not see eye to eye. One commentator suggests that popular elections of the new Millennium's mid-teens will reflect a battle of generational interests. Boomers would have benefited from reaching out to their predecessors and their successors; but the media picture of them is one of a cohort who defined themselves by setting themselves apart from other age groups. Those age boundaries may ironically come back to haunt them.
We have far to go before we see the full implications of today's generation wars. Some Boomers have only in the past few months discovered that their generation is widely and increasingly despised. They react to vitriolic attacks with hostility, puzzlement and surprise. If today's online comments are anything to go by, Boomers face harsh retributions and social vulnerability once they head into their 80s. Even their power to sway elections may not mean much in the face of the coming generational backlash.
The backlash is mostly sparked by fears of downward mobility. This critique of Boomers, including a rigid and one-dimensional view of their youthful history, is gaining momentum.
Boomers are not alone in failures and shortcomings. To pick a not-so-stellar Gen X example, consider Mireille Silcoff, a writer for Canada's conservative paper, The National Post. Her column on 10 November 2012 (p. wp12), was spent vaguely puzzling over the fact that she employs Gen Y workers in an constant stream of unpaid internships. And when one of her journalist interns was actually paid on a recent job, she was paid 20 cents per word, which "is less than I made per word 20 years ago." And publishers wonder why print media are dying?
I don't mean to pick on Silcoff specifically. But her acquiescence in, and bland ponderings about, a plainly toxic system of training and employment typifies individual choices made on a day-to-day basis; and these choices generate many greater ills. Mid-late 20th century and early Millennial work cultures have taken professions, occupations and trades back to pre-1830 levels. At least in the 18th and 19th centuries, apprentices were supposedly (but not always) given enough to keep themselves alive. If you can't pay your interns, your recommendation is not worth the paper on which it is printed, because you are exploiting and reinforcing attitudes that are part of a vast systemic malaise. Any employer could rethink their model rather than slide passively into quasi-benevolent exploitation. And if you can pay your interns, but don't bother because, 'that is the score, 'that is how the system is now,' 'that is how they learn the ropes, by starting at the bottom, etc. etc.,' how do you sleep at night?
This is the complacency of those who can and do pass the buck and dump the cost of their errors or shortcomings on anyone beneath them in the hierarchy. Equally culpable are those who recognize the problems but do little or nothing about them in terms of larger action. These attitudes are gutting anything that once made the pillars of industry and society worthwhile. Those worthwhile values were not entitlement, profit, material wealth and self-righteous exploitation of one's place in the hierarchy, but of mutual responsibility, duty, dignity and human decency. Nor is this simply a critique of capitalism. Soullessness is the heart of the problem and it equally plagues different political persuasions, our social behaviour and our bank accounts.
In short, Boomers are not the only ones to blame for the brutalization and impoverishment of politics, culture, the economy and society. We are all suffering, in different ways, from a loss in our ability to sympathize - with others, with ourselves. (
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