The Self-Indulgent Generation

We thought we were the greatest generation, Brokaw's book notwithstanding. We were the generation of promise and destiny. We were the generation of change, enlightened societal change and better social thinking. We were the '60s generation and the babyboomers.

We would author movement to higher ground: greater civic virtue, and elevated democratic and humanitarian principles. A new and better vision of society would be our gift to the great unwashed of other generations and other places. We would make this happen. And to a notable extent, we did.

But I don't know just when it became clear that the sense of promise would be unfulfilled, the sense of destiny a delusion. Perhaps it was the early promotion and exercise of license more than liberty, the self-aggrandizing presumption and self-indulgence, the selfishness and assumed entitlement. But we were the anointed; we were smarter, more self-assured than those who came before. We were not subject to the same constraints, the same disciplines. We were governed by a new, inspired paradigm of our own imagination and creation. It would play out in so many areas. We could not go wrong. We could have it all.

For me it is hard not to see the fingerprints of the baby boomers, and especially we '60s folk, our presumptuousness and collective self-indulgence, on the stock and housing market excesses, all the bubbles and busts of the last 15 years, the financial crisis, and great recession now weighing upon us all. And yes, the indulgences and indiscretions of Wall Street, on those too--and all this without any sense of culpability, only an individual and collective sense of impunity for all we authored or that unavoidably resulted.

For as a generation, we were never able to deny ourselves anything--and if unavailing, the system would have to be changed to provide it, whether those changes represented solvent, workable ideas, wishful thinking, or mere reverie. There were too few workable ideas, and too much wishful thinking. And now the chronicler of the other greatest generation, the real one, makes a few observation about we boomers and our generation at this most inauspicious time of reckoning about our predicament and our legacy. Mr. Brokaw:

Aging Boomers Face Stark Economics:

Decling finances, rising health care costs threaten a generation

Not so long ago, Michael Blattman lived in the upscale Washington, D.C., suburb of Potomac, Md., earning $225,000 a year as senior vice president for a student loan company. As he reached his 50s, it never really occurred to him that his job wouldn't last forever.

"To be perfectly honest, I didn't really go there," he said. "Yeah, there was always a risk. Everything in business is a risk." In January 2008, Blattman, along with 500 other employees, was laid off by his company. With an $188,000 severance, he wasn't worried at first. "The barometer was always something like five or six months until you landed something comparable," he said. "So I figured, 'Oh, OK, six months?' OK, I could do this for six months. And find the next one. Well, there was no next one."

As his generation confronted an economic storm of historic proportions, Blattman found himself humbled — and living in a one-room apartment. After applying for 600 openings and getting only three interviews, he was still looking after two years. Blattman gets some solace from the knowledge that he's far from alone. More than 4 million baby boomers are unemployed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For many, retirement at 65 is no longer an option. Facing shrinking nest eggs and mounting bills, they need to work, but they wonder if anyone will hire them again.

"Blattman starts every day checking out online job sites and sending out resumes for jobs that pay much less than his old salary. "I have applied for jobs that are one-fourth, one-third of my previous income level," he said. "And I would have been thrilled to get it. There are just too many of me and everyone else out there. I just wish there was a place for us, to kind of land."

It's a double whammy: no job and no health insurance. Many boomers are in far worse shape than Blattman. Some have turned to free clinics. It's just one indication that the health care crisis is really an economic crisis. And for the boomers it's only going to get tougher, according to Harvard financial historian Niall Ferguson.

"If they've done their homework, then they'll be afraid," he said. "Very afraid." Ferguson says it won't be easy to care for a generation with ailing bodies and many more years to live.

"The baby boomers have set us on a path towards a massive fiscal crisis," he said. "Which is going to hit as the baby boomers retire." The recession, though devastating, will pass. But rising health care costs as boomers age may bring lasting harm to this generation's financial well-being. By the time all boomers are 65, the senior population will have grown from 40 million now to about 72 million. Who will pay their medical bills?

--"Aging Boomers Face Stark Economics," by Tom Brokaw, CNBC as reported on msnbc.com (3.4.10)

This is the financial burden, the legacy lost we've visited upon our children, a generation with much less reason to expect greatness, and little sense of grand destiny. But more, we've presented them a polarized, dysfunctional political system and apparatus; an outsized, unworkably expensive and dysfunctional health care system; faltering, underfunded schools; huge, dispiriting levels of national debt; and the beginnings of national decline.

Of course, our slowly declining place and power in the world would likely have evolved subject to the same external forces, regardless. But we have hurried it all along, made the unlikely, likely, perhaps inevitable. And yet, so many of us are still in denial, attaching our accusations desperately, frantically to any other contributing culprits or events. Anything, anyone, but not we of such promise and destiny. For now our hope must be that our children, the next generation, are wiser, more disciplined than we, that they might sacrificially, heroically, join their grandparents as true people of promise and destiny, and visit upon America a prudent, disciplined, and responsible identity again.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35675368/ns/business-cnbc_tv/