What is the Responsibility, Good or Bad, of Baby Boomers?

Are we a generation or a bunch of individuals?

One question I’m hoping to answer in this blog is to what extent should Baby Boomers be held responsible or take credit for the state of affairs in the United States and the world. Within that question, there’s another: Should individual Baby Boomers be held to account for the impact of their generation?

As a generation, the trajectory of Baby Boomers appears to have gone from community to individual concerns. We (or at least some of us) went from fighting for civil rights and against the Vietnam War to checking out as blissed out hippies to seeking the good life as yuppies and ultimately becoming (over?) involved 30-something parents of carefully-raised children. These are broad strokes to paint a whole generation, but many members followed at least some of this route, or they would not have become such representative images.

Is Rennie Davis Representative?

I was struck by the appreciation of Rennie Davis in The New York Times Magazine’s “The Lives they Lived” issue about notable people who died in 2021. He was one of the Chicago Seven featured in the recent movie, The Trial of the Chicago Seven, and a key organizer of national May Day protests against the Vietnam War in 1971. But by 1973 he had dropped politics in favor of spiritual enlightenment, following a 15-year-old guru, Maharaj Ji (now Prem Rawat). Davis believed that if everyone followed the guru, it would “transform the planet into what we’ve always hoped and dreamed for.”

The article quotes from sociologist Stephen A. Kent’s book, From Slogans to Mantras, description of how the entire generation was changing along with Davis: “The early and mid-1970s saw ‘the wholesale transformation of many radicals and activists to new mystical religions.’” It may be that only those who threw themselves body and soul into the civil rights or anti-war movements found the similar all-in devotion to religion. But their followers who attended marches or sat-in at their schools, also switched to a focus on their individuals lives, if not their enlightenment.

I should note that Davis, born in 1940, was too old to be a Baby Boomer, which may be why he was old enough in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s to be a leader of the anti-war movement. Most of those who traveled south during the early ‘60s to fight for civil rights also were too old to be counted as Baby Boomers. Very few Baby Boomers participated in the civil rights movement, though many older ones marched against the Vietnam War. While this was a communal effort to end a foolhardy and unjust war, it was also motivated by self interest — the participants didn’t want to be drafted. From that point of view the distance from protestor to yuppie to engaged parent may not have been so far.

Aren’t We All Just Trying to Live Our Lives?

I also recently reread Julian Barnes’ Booker Award-winning novel The Sense of an Ending in which the narrator looks back at the end of his life at his school years and a significant romantic relationship, comparing his rather humdrum, go-along life to the courage and decisiveness of his most brilliant friend who committed suicide at age 22.

“He took his own life” is the phrase; but Adrian also took charge of his life, he took command of it, he took it in his hands — and then out of them. How few of us — we that remain — can say that we have done the same? We muddle along, we let life happen to us, we gradually build up a store of memories. There is the question of accumulation, but not in the sense that Adrian meant, just the simple adding up and adding on of life.

. . .

I don’t envy Adrian his death, but I envy him the clarity of his life. Not just because he saw, thought, felt and acted more clearly than the rest of us; but also because of when he died.

. . .

When you are in your twenties, even if you’re confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later . . . later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories.

How much do we shape our times and how much do our times shape us? Perhaps as a generation, we shape the times, but as individuals, they shape us. Spoiler alert: In a twist at the end of the book, the narrator learns what may have caused Adrian to take his life, not so much clarity of vision but despair over his situation.