"Everyone [in the United States] born after 1945 is a boomer. The only difference is that, over time, precarity increases and technological sophistication also increases."
– Matt Christman, Hell of Presidents Ep. 10
This is it. This is the one good take on yankeedom’s generational politics. The generation we traditionally define as “boomer”, people born within the first twenty years after the end of WWII; that generation has far more in common with subsequent generations than any of us do with any generation before. In the broad view of history, we’re the same.
The early boomers were the first to attend a nationally standardized schooling system – what is, by and large, still the same system we have today. The early boomers were the first generation to grow up with television – with audio/visual mass media dominating not just the public consciousness, but also the early developmental phases of children. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say they were probably also the first generation of US citizens where the majority reach adulthood without knowing chronic hunger. Hell, the first generation in which the majority have not seen the unadulterated night sky.
We have all these things in common with them. Getting mad at them for being how they are is an understandable response. But, I also think it’s kind of silly. Those first boomers had to navigate all that without the benefit of older adults who had grown up in similar conditions.
What about all the immigrant boomers who did not experience all the developmental things you mentioned (standardized education, unalderated night sky, coomer childhood) who still end up more or less identical to their native born counterparts? I unironically believe that all thwme traits we associate with boomerdom comes from lead poisoning. I saw some study saying their rate of cognitive decline is much higher than previous generations at the same age. I can only hope that lead concentrations had gone down sufficiently during our childhoods such that we won’t suffer the same fate.
They would have been exposed to the same cultural pressures as people born into it, on top of the self selection of choosing (or having your parents choose) to emigrate to the United States.
I’m… hesitant to lay it all to blame on lead poisoning. It seems like too convenient an explanation, for one thing. Our culture selects for a certain way of viewing the world and our relationship to it. Lead poisoning seems to exacerbate the very worst traits this culture creates. Remove the lead and you remove the stressor, but the other conditions - both material and cultural - will still continue to shape people.