Boomers were the yuppies, not the hippies

 

The “baby boom” began in 1946 and ended in 1964. I’m a boomer. In fact, I was born in the mathematical center of the baby boom. I was 14 when Woodstock happened.

Boomers have been credited (or blamed) for the tumultuous ‘60s of civil rights and hippie fame. But that’s anachronistic. Here’s Louis Manand in his recent New Yorker article “What happened to the yuppie?”

“Most of the baby boomers had nothing to do with the civil-rights movement or the launch of the women’s-liberation movement, and only a few who were born before 1950 had much to do with the antiwar movement. When the first U.S. combat troops were deployed to Vietnam, in 1965, the oldest baby boomers were nineteen, and still in college. The youngest were not yet one, and teething. On the other hand, the yuppies, if we define them as people between twenty-five and thirty-nine in 1984, were indeed baby boomers. The yuppie, not the hippie, is the baby boom’s contribution to American social history.

“ . . . [Jerry] Rubin was famous as a co-founder, with Abbie Hoffman, of the Youth International Party, the Yippies, in 1967, and as a leading participant in several iconic Vietnam-era protests, including the mass march on the Pentagon, in 1967, and the demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, in 1968. He was one of the Chicago Seven, whose trial arose out of those demonstrations, and was convicted, in 1970, of crossing state lines to incite a riot. (All the convictions were overturned on appeal.) Not one of the defendants in the Chicago Seven trial was a baby boomer. Rubin was born in 1938. Hoffman was born in 1936.”

So the baby boomers were not the drivers of American social consciousness that some have painted them. They were the drivers of American avarice, the “greed is good” life philosophy. They are the generation of cynicism, not the generation of civic virtue. I don’t believe in tarring every member of a generation with the same brush, but if we want to credit historical periods to generational traits, that’s the historical reality.