“Don’t trust anyone over 30? No, I meant don’t trust anyone under 30.”
— Revised Boomer creed.
There’s a time when every generation hears its calling and rises to greatness, Barack Obama reminded us last night. The trouble is that the ancient Greeks were right: Oedipus always seems destined to kill his father before he can take the throne.
It’s not that we hate the preceding generations. It’s that they seem so loathe to relinquish power.
The coming war is not one about religion, or race, or gender, or class. It will be — it already is — a clash of generations. And it’s quite evident that the Boomers will not surrender gracefully.
I agree with Obama that it’s more accurate — and respectful — to call them the Moses generation. By fighting to end racial segregation, gender discrimination, and the Vietnam War brought us as a nation to the Promised Land. But it was not for Moses to cross the Jordan. That, we are told, was left to Joshua.
It is clear that these modern-day Moses not only want to enter the Promised Land, but keep everyone else out.
When you have Moses figures like Jesse Jackson and Gloria Steinem demanding that upstarts like Obama pay their dues and wait their turn, you realize that an entire generation’s identity is at stake here. This is not just a phenomenon of the political “left.” Mike Huckabee represents an upstart voice too, one that is ready to declare the culture war against hippies not so much won or lost as just merely irrelevant.
All respect is due to the Moses Generation for getting us as far as we have. It is hard to imagine an America as fair, as prosperous, as free as the one we live in without their contribution. But it is also time for them to consider what Mitt Romney might call a “succession plan.” There must be some way to heal the rift that the hippies tore in our national fabric. There are basic issues that we cannot trust the self-interested Boomers to solve — Social Security, above all, but also our tax codes and the national deficit. More importantly, it’s time that we come out of the reinforced trenches we have dug to fight and re-fight the battles of the 60s and 70s that look to me like fetishized Civil War reenactments.
This post is brilliant, and spot on. I particularly like the reference to “fetishized Civil War re-enactments” …
One of the difficult things about these leaders who are reluctant to release the power is that the conversation is too often about, or cast in the perspective of, what happened 30-40 years ago. I might think about their claim to continued leadership differently if they were touting what they did in the 90s or early 00s; or if they were talking about what has changed since the 60s and 70s and adapting their rhetoric to the generations that are coming up right now. However, it seems that the Boomers are planning to rest indefinitely on the laurels of what happened decades ago, and to jealously guard their right to the power – as well as the wealth – they’ve accumulated since then.
Perhaps the most bizarre accusation Boomers have leveled at “youth” is that we’re not out there protesting the war on the streets. Not only is that kind of protest less effective today than during Vietnam because of better counter-measures, but, well, what the heck??? You’re the ones who control the levers of power: why can’t you use that power to get what you want? Or is the Boomer generation a lot less noble than they’d like us to think?
I just read your reply to this – what a good point! 🙂