By John O’Kane
Wars have consequences. After WWII babies were the national obsession. Returning servicemen felt it was their patriotic duty to procreate, pump up the most powerful empire on earth with their likenesses.
Young men and women had suffered through the Depression in dysfunctional families and sought stability in the postwar years. The pent-up demand for security in the nuclear family was supplied by a booming economy, its surplus of jobs and bennies that supported one breadwinner and left women with “free” domestic reign. And what better way to challenge the commies in the Cold War than putting palpable evidence of the better way in their faces!
The mandate was to make babies and products, all those durable goods that were supposed to help the species endure the pitfalls of survival. And of course weapons, an extra bit of security just in case. Happiness was the inevitable byproduct.
It was about expanding the human stream, embracing more, bringing in more bodies. It was about partners, legal domestic couplings and legit social arrangements that fostered cooperation. There was belief in a social contract between business, labor and government indebted to Henry Ford’s idea that increasing the rewards for individuals made the whole more productive and prosperous. And it mostly worked. There was improvement in the equality indices well into the 70s.
But these results only went so far. Those maturing babies stretched institutions to their breaking point, leaving many outside looking in. The existing structure of American society couldn’t absorb the surplus, which had the effect of depressing wages for the college grads who could even find jobs. During the early phase of the boomers’ ascendancy, up until about 1973 or so, expectations were high, driven by the idea that they inherited a world that would deliver so much more affluence and progress than their parents could ever imagine.
But just as they merged into the workaday stream, after a few experimental years on the cusp of mainstream society, the economy began its protracted decline. Many of the boom babies stopped blooming. They slipped into tracks of downward mobility, finding existences not much better than those of their parents, if that.
How ironic that the generation targeted for entering the age of endless affluence is now at the butt of the worst economic crisis since the Depression! How ironic also that this generation mounted the most sustained challenge to injustice and poverty since the Depression. In the midst of the Great Society programs that firmed up the New Deal, movements were born that wanted to carry them further, even to the point of institutionalizing a more equal society.
The 60s movements were dedicated to creating a humane alternative to our profit-driven society of privilege, one that made war, racism, sexism, and poverty seem natural. It’s mind-boggling now, but we actually had a War on Poverty back then, a commitment to the idea that poverty in itself was simply unacceptable! And this during a stretch when the economy worked extremely well, when equality indices were on the up and up. But for the movements this was unacceptable. They were committed to trumping LBJs liberalism!
It was all connected. The system was a network of unfairness that reduced to power and domination. This was the gist of “Port Huron,” that precocious statement from the early SDS visionaries echoed to a great extent by Obama’s recent speech to Congress. Without confronting the root problem of unequal power, nothing else can change. This was a great idea. And it still is. But we’re suffering from the fact that it remains only an idea! Some boomers as a group now manage the system once so vigorously rejected…
But the fact that the movements didn’t take sufficient steps to institutionalize change is an old story. The power challenge wasn’t completed. That generation dropped out and returned to business as usual.
The real revolution was mounted by the conservatives during the 70s. And those revolutionaries did institutionalize change, the effects of which we are now experiencing. Letting the neoliberal, get-government-off-our-backs mantra become sectarian gospel has provided the power base for eliminating the boomers as a generation. A precarious fit in the good days, the boomers are now again a conspicuous bulge in the system, at the butt of a significant transfer of wealth to the younger generation. Known for its celebration of the generation gap, it’s now being unwittingly revenged by it.
Though almost everyone’s losing equity these days, those who most lose are the retired and ready to retire who’ve built up stakes in stocks and property. The young, Obama’s army of supporters yet to secure these stakes, stand to gain through cheap properties and prices for investment. According to Dean Baker in Truthout (2/16/09), President Obama is considering cuts in both Social Security and Medicare. And there’s a larger assault on these programs financed by billionaire banker Peter Peterson, whose friends in the financial industry brought us the inflated markets! He’s spent decades trying to cut benefits for the elderly, and recently established a foundation for this purpose with a billion dollars of his money. Many on Capitol Hill have gotten the message and are looking for creative ways to cut these programs.
Perhaps the slogan of the future will be: “Don’t trust anyone under 30!” But the boomers have reason to fret. This was the generation that paid into the system at the current 12.4 rate for its entire life and will be forced to wait until age 66 or 67 to get full benefits. And, their average returns are expected to be “lower than the generations that follow and far lower than the generations that preceded them,” according to Baker.
It would be a good policy move for the Obama administration to assure the boomers that their benefits will not change. They’ll feel more confident in spending and help boost our ailing economy.
John O’Kane has been the editor of AMASS magazine, a publication of mass culture and society, since 1988.
