Via Raul Ilargi Meijer’s Automatic Earth blog,
There are days, though all too scarce, when very nice surprises come my way. Case in point: yesterday I received a mail from David Holmgren after a long period of radio silence. Australia’s David is one of the fathers of permaculture, along with Bill Mollison, for those few who don’t know him. They first started writing about the concept in the 1970s and never stopped.
Dave calls himself “permaculture co-originator” these days. Hmm. Someone says: “one of the pioneers of modern ecological thinking”. That’s better. No doubt there. These guys taught many many thousands of people how to be self-sufficient. Permaculture is a simple but intricate approach to making sure that the life in your garden or backyard, and thereby your own life, moves towards balance.
My face to face history with David is limited, we spent some time together on two occasions only, I think, in 2012 a day at his home (farm) in Australia and in 2015 -a week- in Penguin, Tasmania at a permaculture conference where the Automatic Earth’s Nicole Foss was one of the key speakers along with Dave. Still, despite the limited time together I see him as a good and dear friend, simply because he’s such a kind and gracious and wise man.
In his mail, David asked if I would publish this article, which he originally posted on his own site just yesterday under the name “The Apology: From Baby Boomers To The Handicapped Generations”. I went for a shorter title (it’s just our format), but of course I will.
Dave has been an avid reader of the Automatic Earth for the past 11 years, we sort of keep his feet on the ground when they’re not planted and soaking in that same ground: “Reading TAE has helped me keep up to date..”
In light of the children’s climate protests today, which I have yet to voice my qualms about (and I have a few), it only makes sense to put into words a baby boomer’s apology. To have that phrased by someone with the intellect and integrity of David should have everyone sit up and pay attention, if you ask me. And perhaps it would be good if more people would try and do the same: apologize to those kids.
Here’s my formidable friend David Holmgren:
David Holmgren: It is time for us baby boomers to honestly acknowledge what we did and didn’t do with the gifts given to us by our forebears and be clear about our legacy with which we have saddled the next and succeeding generations.
By ‘baby boomers’ I mean those of us born in the affluent nations of the western world between 1945 and 1965. In these countries, the majority of the population became middle class beneficiaries of mass affluence. I think of the high birth rate of those times as a product of collective optimism about the future, and the abundant and cheap resources to support growing families.
By many measures, the benefits of global industrial civilisation peaked in our youth, but for most middle class baby boomers of the affluent countries, the continuing experience of those benefits has tended to blind us to the constriction of opportunities faced by the next generations: unaffordable housing and land access, ecological overshoot and climate chaos amongst a host of other challenges.
I am a white middle class man born in 1955 in Australia, one of the richest nations of the ‘western world’ in the middle of the baby boom, so I consider myself well placed to articulate an apology on behalf of my generation.
In the life of a baby boomer born in 1950 and dying in 2025 (a premature death according to the expectations of our generation), the best half the world’s endowment of oil – the potent resource that made industrial civilisation possible – will have been burnt. This is tens of millions of years of stored sunlight from a special geological epoch of extraordinary biological productivity. Beyond our basic needs, we have been the recipients of manufactured wants and desires. To varying degrees, we have also suffered the innumerable downsides, addictions and alienations that have come with fossil-fuelled consumer capitalism.
It is also true that our generation has used the genie of fossil fuels to create wonders of technology, organisation and art, and a diversity of lifestyles and ideas. Some of the unintended consequences of our way of life, ranging from antibiotic resistance to bubble economics, should have been obvious, while others, such as the depression epidemic in rich countries, were harder to foresee. Our travel around the world has broadened our minds, but global tourism has contaminated the amazing diversity of nature and traditional cultures at an accelerating pace. We have the excuse that innovations always have pluses and minuses, but it seems we have got a larger share of the pluses and handballed more of the minuses to the world’s poorest countries and to our children and grandchildren.
We were the first generation to have the clear scientific evidence that emergent global civilisation was on an unsustainable path that would precipitate an unravelling of both nature and society through the 21st century. Although climate chaos was a less obvious outcome than the no-brainer of resource depletion, international recognition of the reality of climate change came way back in 1988, just as we were beginning to get our hands on the levers of power, and we have presided over decades of policies that have accelerated the problem.
Over the years since, the adverse outcomes have shifted from distant risks to lived realities. These impact hardest on the most vulnerable peoples of the world who have yet to taste the benefits of the carbon bonanza that has driven the accelerating climate catastrophe. For the failure to share those benefits globally and curb our own consumption we must be truly sorry.
David Holmgren
In the 1960s and 70s, during our coming of age, a significant proportion of us were critical of what was being passed down to us by our parent’s generation who were also the beneficiaries of the western world system, which some of us baby boomers recognised as a global empire. But our grandparents and parents had been shaped by the rigours and grief of the first global depression of the 1890s, the First World War, The Great Depression of the 1930s and, of course, the Second World War. Aside from those who served in Vietnam, we have cruised through life avoiding the worst threats of nuclear annihilation and economic depression, even as people in other countries suffered the consequences of superpower proxy wars, coups, and economic and environmental catastrophes.
While some of us were burnt by personal and global events, we have mostly led a charmed existence and had the privilege to question our upbringing and culture. We were the first generation in history to experience an extended adolescence of experimentation and privilege with little concern or responsibility for our future, our kin or our country.
Most baby boomers were raised in families where commuting was the norm for our fathers but a home-based lifestyle was still a role model we got from our mothers. In our enthusiasm for women to have equal access to productive work in the monetary economy, few of us noticed that without work to keep the household economy humming we lost much of our household autonomy to market forces. By our daily commutes, mostly alone in our cars, we entrenched this massively wasteful and destructive action as normal and inevitable.
As we came into our power in middle age, the new technology of the internet, workshop tool miniaturisation and other innovations provided more options to participate in the monetary economy without the need to commute, but our generation continued with this insane collective addiction. In Australia, we faithfully followed the American model of not investing in public transport, which moderated the adverse impacts of commuting in European and other countries not so structurally addicted to road transport. By failing to build decent public transport and the opportunities for home-based work, and wasting wealth in a frenzy of freeway building that has choked our cities, our generation has consumed our grandchildren’s inheritance of high quality transport fuels and accelerated the onset of climate chaos. For this we are truly sorry.
In pioneering the double income family, some of us set the pattern for the next generation’s habit of outsourcing the care of children at a young age, making commuting five days a week an early childhood experience. This has left the next generation unable to imagine a life that doesn’t involve leaving home each day.
These patterns are part of a larger crisis created by the double income, debt-laden households with close to 100% dependence on the monetary economy. Without robust and productive household economies, our children and grandchildren’s generations will become the victims of savage disruptions and downturns in the monetary economy. For failing to maintain and strengthen the threads of self-provision, frugality and self-reliance most of us inherited from our parents, we should be truly sorry.
Some of us felt in our hearts that we needed to create a different and better world. Some of us saw the writing on the walls of the world calling for global justice. Some of us read the evidence (mostly clearly in the 1972 Limits To Growth) that attempting to run continuous material growth on finite planet would end in more than tears.
Some of us even rejected the legacy of previous generations of radicals’ direct action against the problems of the world, and instead decided we would boldly create the world we wanted by living it each day. In doing so, we experienced hard-won lessons and even created some hopeful models for succeeding generations to improve on in more difficult conditions. That our efforts at novel solutions often created more sound than substance, or that we flitted from one issue to another rather than doing the hard yards necessary to pass on truly robust design solutions for a world of less, leaves some of us with regrets for which we might also feel the need to apologise.
These experiences are shared to some degree by a minority in all generations but there is significant evidence that the 1960s and 70s was a time when awareness of the need for change was stronger. Unfortunately, a sequence of titanic geopolitical struggles that few of us understand even today, a debt-fuelled version of consumer capitalism, and propaganda against both the Limits to Growth and the values of the counterculture, saw most of us following the neoliberal agenda like sheep into the 1980s and beyond.
After having played with the privilege of free tertiary education, most of us fell for the propaganda and sent our children off to accumulate debts and doubtful benefits in the corporatised businesses that universities became. We convinced our children they needed more specialised knowledge poured down their throats rather than using their best years to build the skills and resilience for the challenges our generation was bequeathing to them. For this we must be truly sorry.
Many of us have been the beneficiaries of buying real estate before the credit-fuelled final stages of casino capitalism made that option a recipe for debt slavery for our children. Without understanding its mechanics we have contributed to – and fuelled with our faith – a bubble economy on a vast scale that can only end in pain and suffering for the majority. While some of us are members of the bank of Mum and Dad, when the property bubble bursts we could find ourselves following the bank chiefs apologising for the debt burden we encouraged our children to take on. Some of us will also have to apologise for losing the family home when we went guarantor on their mortgages. For not heeding the warnings we got with the GFC, we will be truly sorry.
Some of us have used our windfall wealth from real estate and the stock market to do good works, including creating small models of more creative and lower footprint futures that have inspired the minority of the next generations who can also see the writing on the wall. But most of us used our houses as ATMs for new forms of consumption that were unimaginable to our parents, from holidays around the world to endless renovations and a constant flow of updated digital gadgets and virtual diversions. For this frivolous squandering of our windfall wealth we must be truly sorry.
While our parents’ generation experienced the risks of youth through adversity and war we used our privilege to tackle challenges of our own choosing. Although some of us had to struggle to free ourselves from the cloying cocoon of middle class upbringing, we were the generation that flew like the birds and hitchhiked around the country and the world. How strange that on becoming parents (many of us in middle age) we believed the propaganda that the world was too dangerous for our children to do the same around the local neighbourhood. Instead we coddled them, got into the chauffeuring business, and in doing so encouraged their disconnection from both nature and community. As we see our grandchildren’s generation raised in a way that makes them an even more handicapped generation, we must be truly sorry for the path we took and the dis-ease we created.
After so many of us experimented with mind-expanding plants and chemicals, some of us were taken down in chemical addictions, but it was dysfunctional and corrupt legal prohibitions more than the substances themselves that were to blame for the worst of the damage. So how strange that when in middle age we got our hands on the levers of power, most of our generation decided to continue to support the madness of prohibition. For this we must be truly sorry: to have seen the light but then continued to inflict this burden on our children and grandchildren. For having acquiesced in the global ‘war on drugs’ that spread pain and suffering to some of the poorest peoples of the world we should be ashamed.
When the ‘war on drugs’ (a war against substances!) became the model for the ‘war on terror’ (war against a concept!) some of us reawakened the anti-war activism of the Vietnam years but in the end we mostly acquiesced to an agenda of trashing international law, regime change, shock and awe, chaos, and the death of millions; all justified by the 9/11 demolition fireworks that killed a small fraction of the number of citizens that die each year as a result of our ongoing addiction to personal motorised mobility.
While the shadow cast by climate change darkens our grandchilden’s future, the shadow of potential nuclear winter that hung over our childhood as not gone away. Many of us were at the forefront of the international movement to rid the world of nuclear weapons and thought the collapse of the Soviet Union had saved us from that threat. Coming into our power after the end of the cold war, our greatest crime on this geopolitical front has perhaps been the tacit support of our generation for first, the economic rape of Russia in the 1990s, and then its progressive encirclement by the relentless expansion of NATO. In Australia we have meekly added our resources and youth to more or less endless wars in the Middle East and central Asia justified by the fake ‘war on terror’. For this weakness as accessories to global crimes wasting wealth and lives to consolidate the western powers’ control of the first truly global empire, we should hang our collective heads in shame.
While some of our generation’s intellectuals continued to critique the ‘war on terror’ as fake, the vast majority of the public intellectuals of our generation, including those on the left, have supported the rapid rise of Cold War 2.0 to contain Russia, China and any other country that doesn’t accept what we now call ‘the rules based international order’ (code for ‘our empire’). This is truly astonishing when looked at in the context of our lived history. Let us hope that sanity can prevail as our empire fades and future generations don’t brand us as the most insane, war-mongering generation of all time. For our complicity in this grand failure of resistance we should be truly sorry.
On another equally titanic front, the mistake of giving legal personhood to corporations was not one that our generation made. However most of us have contributed our work, consumption and capital to assist these self-organising, profit-maximising, cost-minimising machines of capitalism morphing into emergent new life forms that threaten to consume both nature and humanity in an algorithmic drive for growth. At a time of our seniority and numbers, we failed to use the Global Financial Crisis as an opportunity to bring these emergent monsters to heel. Do our children have the capacity to tame the monsters that we nurtured from fragile infants to commanding masters?
And if they do find the will to withdraw their work, consumption and capital enough to contain the corporations, will the economy that currently provides for both needs and wants unravel completely? This is a burden so great most of us continue to believe we have no responsibility or agency in such a dark reality. We trust that history will not place the burden of responsibility on our generation alone. But for our part in this failure of agency over human affairs we apologise. Further, we should accept with grace the consequences for our own wellbeing.
Most of us feel impotent when thinking of these failures to control the excesses of our era, but on a more modest scale we have mindlessly participated in taking the goods and passing on the debt to future generations. No more so than in our habitual acceptance of antibiotics from doctors to fix the most mundane of illnesses. For our parents’ generation, antibiotics represented the peak of medical science’s ability to control what killed so many of their parents and earlier generations.
For us, they became routine tools to keep us on the job and our children not missing precious days at school. Through this banal practice we have unwittingly conspired with our doctors to rapidly breed resistance to the most effective and low-cost antibiotics. We took for granted that future generations would always be able to work out ways to keep ahead of diseases with an endless string of new antibiotics. For having squandered this gift we are truly sorry.
Further, despite the fact that some of us have became vegetarian or even vegan, our generation’s demand for cheap chicken and bacon has driven the industrial dosing of animals with antibiotics on a scale that has accelerated the development of antibiotic resistance far faster than would have been the case from us dosing ourselves and our children. For supporting this and other such obscene systems of animal husbandry we apologise to our grandchildren and succeeding generations and hope that somehow an accommodation between humanity, animals and microbes is still possible.
We experienced and benefited from the emergent culture of rights and recognition for women, minorities and the people of varied abilities, and many of us who fought to extend and deepen those rights have pride in what we did. However some of us are beginning to fear that in doing so we contributed to creating new demands, disabilities, and fractious subcultures of fear and angst unimagined in previous generations. While we might not be in the driving seat of identity politics and culture wars, we raised our children to demand their rights in a world that is unravelling due to its multiple contradictions.
In this emerging context, strident demands for rights are likely to be a waste of valuable energy that younger people might better focus on becoming useful to themselves and others. For overemphasising the demand for rights and underplaying the need for responsible self- and collective-reliance, perhaps we should also be sorry.
And is this escalating demand for rights by younger people itself connected, even peripherally, to the increasing callous disregard for the rights of others? Especially in the case of refugees, this careless disregard has allowed political elites to use tough treatment of the less fortunate to distract from the gradual loss of shared privilege that once characterised the ‘lucky country’. To the shame of those in power over the last two decades (mostly baby boomers) those policies are now being adopted on a larger scale in Europe and the US.
In our lifetimes religious faith has declined. For many of our generation, this change represents a measure of humanity’s progress from a benighted past to a promising future. But the collective belief in science and evidence-based decision making has now become a new faith, “Scientism”, which seeks to drive out all other ways of thinking and being from the public space. At the same time, religious fundamentalism is now resurgent. Is this too something that our generation unleashed by preaching tolerance while enforcing an ideology we didn’t even recognise as such?
A significant sign of the good intentions of our generation has been our recognition that the ancient war against nature, which has plagued human life since the beginnings of agriculture, and indeed civilisation, must end. One powerful expression of our efforts has been the valuing of the biodiversity of life, especially local indigenous biodiversity. In the ‘New Europes’ of North America and the Antipodes, seeking to save indigenous biodiversity has grown into an institutionalised form of atonement for the sins of the forefathers.
While this seems like one of our achievements, even this we have bastardised with a new war against naturalised biodiversity. Perhaps the worst aspect of this renewed war against novel ecologies is that we have accepted the helping hand of Monsanto in using Roundup as the main weapon in our urban and rural habitats. The mounting evidence that Roundup may be worse than DDT will be part of our legacy. While history may excuse our parent’s generation for naïve optimism in relation to DDT, our generation’s version of the war on nature will not save us from harsh judgement. For this we should be truly sorry.
Of course any public apology in this country invites comparisons to the apology by governments to the stolen generation of Australian indigenous peoples for the wrongs of the past. This unfinished sorry business is beyond the scope of this apology, but it is an opportunity to reflect critically on our common self-perception of supporting indigenous peoples’ rights in contrast to the normalised racism of previous generations.
Our generation’s invitation to, and enabling of, Australians of indigenous descent to more fully participate in mainstream Australian society may have been a necessary step towards reconciliation; or could it have been a poison chalice drawing them even deeper into the dysfunctions of industrial modernity that I have already outlined. We can only hope that people with such a history of resilience and understanding in the face dispossession will take these additional burdens in their stride.
In any case, this apology is not one that comes from a position of invulnerable privilege, giving succour to those who are no threat to that privilege. For many baby boomers, now caring for parents and dealing with their deaths, we are more inwardly focused. For some of us, especially those estranged from parents, through this both painful and tender processes we are finally growing up. But a comic tragedy could play out in our declining years if a combination of novel disabilities, the culture of rights and amplified fears lead to our children and grandchildren’s generations mostly experiencing harder times as far worse than they might really be, and deciding we are the cause of their troubles.
We baby boomers will increasingly find that in our growing dependence on young people we will be subject to their perspectives, whims and prejudices. Hopefully we can take what we are given on the chin and along with our children and our grandchildren’s generations we can all grow up and work together to face the future with whatever capacities we have.
We might hope this apology is itself a wake-up call to the younger generations that are still mostly sleepwalking into the oncoming maelstroms. In raising the alarm we might hope our humble apology will galvanise the potential in young people who are grasping the nettle of opportunities to turn problems into solutions.
We hope that this apology might lead to understanding rather than resentment of our frailty in the face of the self-organising forces of powerful change that have driven the climaxing of global industrial civilisation. Finally, the task ahead for our generation is to learn how to downsize and disown before we prepare to die, with grace, at a time of our choosing, and in a way that inspires and frees the next generations to chart a prosperous way down.
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Taking groveling to a whole new level.
I would ask David how to plant a garden, definitely!
I wouldn’t ask for explaining the woes of the world because expertness in one field transforms to pompousness in that case, qed.
David Holmgren’s treatise, as it relates to oil being “fossil fuel” is just dead wrong. Oil is “abiotic” and is constantly being replenished by yet unknown process deep within the earth, far deeper that the depths that fossils have been found. Old depleted oil wells are “filling back up” as oil is migrating up to the surface. For a present-day example, all one has to do is look at the La Brea tar pits. There is more oil being discovered, eve in the USA, which is becoming one of the largest oil exporters in the world. Ecological oil in action. In fact, there are celestial bodies (planets) without fossils that are known to have massive hydrocarbon deposits…
He is correct about many societal ills, but his hatred for personal transportation–the automobile, is misplaced and just wrong. Public transportation is fine in cities, but is insanely expensive for the amount of people that it serves. Of course, there are exceptions, such as New York City and Chicago, but those systems were built a century ago when the mass population of the city was much less; public transportation making cities more livable and less congested.
The automobile makes it possible for a person to live anywhere without relying on mass-transit schedules. This mobility is a freedom that has never been reality for almost all of human history. Cities were (and still are) cesspits filled with diseases, both from a physical and mental health aspect. Automobile mobility is a great freedom that should never be discounted.
Of course, there are the “central planners” who just hate the idea of personal mobility- “baby boomer” communistic environmentalists- who would like to take that freedom away from us mere mortals, herding us into soviet-style apartments in cities, where they could achieve their goal–control of the masses. These same “environmentalists” would reserve rural life for themselves, with their “country dachas” and other amenities–off limits to us mere mortals. They claim (erroneously and arrogantly) that they “know what is best for us”.
Where boomers “went off the rails” is birth control. I will probably get a lot of hate male for this, but I don’t care. Birth control made it possible to separate sexual behavior from procreation. While not a “bad ” thing, in itself, it helped fuel the “free love” indiscriminate sex movement. This movement affected whites the most and is resulting in declining white populations in majority-white countries. Blacks and browns have no compunction about raising large broods, as many of them get government assistance, which actually encourages such behavior. Abortion, coupled with rabid out-of-control feminism is responsible for the “push” to legalize abortion up to the day of birth–outright murder, as viability is taken out of the equation. Assigning total responsibility and decision-making for pregnancy to the woman, taking the male out of the equation is just dead wrong. As it “takes two” to procreate, it should “take two” to decide whether to abort.
The stigma of “single motherhood” is gone. What was once looked upon shamefully and encouraged marriage is affecting society to this very day. Boys without father figures are affected the most. Today, to many feminists, the male is looked upon as merely a “sperm bank”, not necessary for raising children–a BIG mistake.
It is easy to blame baby boomers for many of today’s ills, but the “greatest generation” is partially responsible–spoiling their offspring–the baby boomers…
It is not.
State your “evidence”…
When oil is found at levels “too deep” for animal and plant remains to have been “compressed”, it is “abiotic”. There is no other valid explanation…
Other planets have hydrocarbon deposits without having “fossils”.
Oil IS migrating from the depths, far deeper than where fossils exist…
This whole “fossil fuel” charade was started in the 1950s when little was known about the origins of hydrocarbon deposits.
The last thing communistic environmentalists want is acknowledgement that oil is a “renewable resource”. It blows their whole “peak oil” hypothesis out of the water…
There is no “too deep” in the known oil wells.
There is no sensible connection to simple hydrocarbons like in the atmosphere of Titan and complex hydrocarbons in oil.
The process of development of complex Hydrocarbons is very structured; you can explore the diverse steps in nature, is calculable in a scientific theory and can be simulated under laboratory conditions, exception is of cause the time. And, last but not least, the theory makes predictions which you can test. This process of prediction making and testing has made some people quite rich because of “yupp, right!”
These are the milestones which the abiogenic theory hasn’t quite mastered…
This article provokes the image of Trump, while being elected by Boomers to try to rectify all the problems and injustices of the world that his generation allegedly created; grovelling and apologizing to the 95% AntiTrumpMedia, HolyWood, “academia”, corporations, the Deep State, the War Machine, and the un-elect Kakistocracy for upsetting their applecart.
Although a retired architect, I had no more power to advance good ideas to change an evil world than you did. And since they weren’t part of the ‘born elect’, our parents, grandparents and further ancestors had no more power to change the generational inbred oligarchy’s plans than your typical family pet. Get real.
Debt burden? Srsly? Boomers individually fight the Money Changers century long campaign to abolish saving and teach us – beat into us – that their issued debt IS money? Though counterfeited into existence and one step concealed? Debt IS money? Debt IS good? Borrow more. Rinse and repeat. The economy – your survival – depends on it.
And for those that went into PolyTICs (Many Thugs In Charge), where is the admission of their acquiescence to the establishment via ‘Plata o Plomo’? Could Boomers – or Silent’s, or Greatest, or X’s, Millinals or Z’s accept – or even see – the idea the USA.guv was and is merely a Rent-A-Cop for hidden interests and stakeholders beyond the law? Neither serving or responding to our interests?
Climate change? I do have to fault the Boomers for not ridiculing and smashing the conversion of science to religion. Didn’t Maurice Strong write the directive at UNFCCC 1992 to ONLY label ALL weather changes as anthropogenic? To establish a new industry of big.gang.guv + big.gang.biz fascist merger to tax profit themselves Trillion$ or Quadrillion$ by ignoring the Sun and the galaxy and blaming then looting us? My SUV causes Globull Warming on Uranus? Sanity lapses … conformity rules. Boomers failed to abolish conformity too.
Could any generation in history have accepted and enacted Molyneux’s Maxim:
“If people are good, you don’t need a government.
If people are bad, you can’t have a government.” ???
The Boomers overturn millennia of man’s tribal nature – conform or die? Right.
Has humanity only reached the cultural/social maturity of a passive/aggressive 13 year old girl? Those in charge having abolished violence by “de-testosterone-ing” men? Women and the ‘oppressed’ rule! Does it get any better than this?
What sort of gang or majick juju does the collectivist author think ‘we’ Boomers have? So powerful that ‘we’ can abolish even forced public Propaganducation? So powerful that ‘we’ can overturn the existing order? So powerful that ‘we’ can reverse the weaponized anthropology / cultural demolition ‘experiment’ of C_A SubProject 58? If ‘we’ were so powerful to abolish democracy, then at least ‘we’ could avoid the effects of the defining characteristics of MPTBAGs (Men Pretending To Be A Government): Projection displacement disorder and blaming the victim. Why should ‘we’ accept blame for every evil we had no part of, and actively opposed? Apologize to not-yet-responsible young people who also have advantages undreamed of by any generation in history? So they can vote their Communist Indoctrination and have their masters ‘Green’ and disarm and silence us all?
As the apology moves focus to the future, we Boomers do have to take the lead as Conservators. Dave’s skills, and the rest of ours, have to be transferred to following generations regardless of the Rulers and THEIR current failed paradigm. We will have to stick around – healthy – to fix things, physical, technological, and philosophical. Where are the Milli’s or Z’s with the initiative, skill and dedication to help, then replace us?
Hey Dave, a couple of things you got wrong.
Re not investing in public transport, I call bullshit on that because we had a marvellous train system that went out to even the smallest one horse towns until the government dismantled the whole system.
Re pioneering the double income, I call bullshit on that too because we had to have two wages to pay our increasing bills.
Re blaming us for our debt laden households when it was the banks ursury that keeps us chained (I have paid off more than my mortgage loan and yet on paper I have not even paid off $30k)
Re windfall wealth….you might have had windfall wealth but most of us didn’t.
Re GFC…how do you bring the emergent monster to heel when the government is the monster itself stealing from the hardworking to hand out to the wealthy so they can survive while we go down the gurgler.
You strike me as being one of the priveleged whiners so please don’t apologise on my behalf.
Bukowski’s “Dinosauria, We” isn’t nearly as long-winded and is more moving. But hey, he wasn’t a boomer, so it’s gotta be better, right?
DINOSAURIA, WE
Born like this
Into this
As the chalk faces smile
As Mrs. Death laughs
As the elevators break
As political landscapes dissolve
As the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree
As the oily fish spit out their oily prey
As the sun is masked
We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes
Born into this
Walking and living through this
Dying because of this
Muted because of this
Castrated
Debauched
Disinherited
Because of this
Fooled by this
Used by this
Pissed on by this
Made crazy and sick by this
Made violent
Made inhuman
By this
The heart is blackened
The fingers reach for the throat
The gun
The knife
The bomb
The fingers reach toward an unresponsive god
The fingers reach for the bottle
The pill
The powder
We are born into this sorrowful deadliness
We are born into a government 60 years in debt
That soon will be unable to even pay the interest on that debt
And the banks will burn
Money will be useless
There will be open and unpunished murder in the streets
It will be guns and roving mobs
Land will be useless
Food will become a diminishing return
Nuclear power will be taken over by the many
Explosions will continually shake the earth
Radiated robot men will stalk each other
The rich and the chosen will watch from space platforms
Dante’s Inferno will be made to look like a children’s playground
The sun will not be seen and it will always be night
Trees will die
All vegetation will die
Radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men
The sea will be poisoned
The lakes and rivers will vanish
Rain will be the new gold
The rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind
The last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases
And the space platforms will be destroyed by attrition
The petering out of supplies
The natural effect of general decay
And there will be the most beautiful silence never heard
Born out of that.
The sun still hidden there
Awaiting the next chapter.
-Charles Bukowski
Oddly, by the end of that poem I found myself snapping my fingers repeatedly.
Keeping a beat, or did you develop a nervous tic by the conclusion?
That was good.
It sucked to be Gen X for so many reasons. The boomers always outnumbered us so we never had a chance to have any say in the course of politics or foreign policy. Now we are overcome by the millenials and its as if we dont even exist. But we haven’t complained, we made due with anything we had. Just like when we were growing up and our boomer parents were smoking weed, inviting all the neighborhood pedophiles over with their liberal ideas that everyone was just one BIG happy family! We didn’t complain. We got up and went to school. While our parents learned to juggle the two income household with their own desires for continuing the party/hippy lifestyle, we struggled to deal with the foreigners and alienation and not belonging. But we didnt complain because our parents were struggling with each other and then, one day-BAM-divorce! It was difficult at first to come out of the shock and upheaval of no longer having our dad around but we didnt complain because, obviously, our parents were in pain. Suffering through the fighting and divorce court, the child support and the visitation. How never-ending it all seemed to us. How traumatic! But we knew better than to complain. Mom seemed to always be trying to quit smoking and I was always her favorite stress reliever..well me, and the belt. Or the handle of the fly swatter, or a stick. So while she was falling apart, and destroying our family, we tried to keep up a facade of normalcy for our own pride. And when the neighbors happened to notice the welts on my legs one day while I did my paper route, they quickly lost interest when I wouldnt tell them my father was to blame for it. Apparently my mother was just too beautiful for anybody to believe capable of beating her children. And it didnt matter anyway. The last thing I needed was for her to get more angry at me. We were latchkey kids. The first generation expected to grow up alone, while both parents worked. Another nightmare. But I always got good grades, did my chores, checked in every half hour I played outside, and fed my mothers ego. I was so responsible that I was given the job of teaching my brother cursive, my other brother german (I dont know german), and doing my sisters homework for her every night. And my parents were able to have some free time, after work, with each other. With all this turmoil happening around me, I still had to be the ‘stable’ one for my siblings and I didnt complain. I cooked us all food and tried to be everybody elses anchor. What did it matter what I was going through anyway?!
THIS is the untold story. The story of how boomers cared so much and fought so hard to change the world, that at the end of the day generation X paid the price. We didnt get to be children because we were too busy parenting our siblings and our parents. And after practically raising ourselves, our responsible votes to STOP GOVERNMENT SPENDING were just a drop in the ocean of boomer demands for more support for Israel, etc. I had a 401k retirement account worth more than $16,000 when the Enron scandal happened and I lost everything. The younger generations arent less capable than boomers at all. We didnt get any inheritances of houses, and whatnot, that boomers enjoyed. We got screwed by immigration, jobs leaving, but mostly by the boomers frustratingly blasé attitude towards guarding the safety and the future of this nation. Their largely liberal ideals are communistic and destructive beyond belief! How is my tiny generation supposed to protect my own kids from the massive, sucking black hole of debt, that boomers continue to support while selling out countless future generations as collateral?! The boomers are an enormous group of people. They used their numbers in the hippy days effectively. Which makes it all the harder to hear boomers retelling the same excuses that THEIR parents once told them. The boomers were so antagonistic of the efforts that their parents put into ensuring their future. Yet every generation younger than the boomers would have given ANYTHING to have had parents like their parents!
Boomers had hope.
That is something I rarely knew and something gone forever now. We, the younger generations, have nothing to look forward to in this life, except death. My generation has the shortest lifespan of any other. Because we would rather be dead than work to death to pay boomer debt and the destruction of our country and our safety. The benefits of living here that Americans once received are gone now. Its a lie to say we have the same advantages boomers had. We are homeless and poverty stricken. We cannot get jobs because we, as white people, arent protected from discrimination. Affirmative action did this. In the boomer lifetime. My generation never had a chance to reign the boomer failures in. We tried but there werent enough of us.
This letter helped me.
So thank you to the kind author for his apology.
Its the only one I have ever gotten and it means a lot.
Brother, you describe the Gen X experience perfectly. We appear to be the most voiceless generation of our times, but I believe our moment to be heard is coming.
Well at least someone taught you how to blame. Don’t let anyone say you don’t have a talent.
Just to be clear, I for one ask for no apologies nor do I blame any one group,person, generation,etc. I only commented on Crash’s description of our experiences coming up.
This giant shit show has been a long time in the making and there is plenty of blame to go around. I have seen what’s coming for decades and what have I done? Nothing that could have changed the course. I feel some guilt about that but still don’t know what I could have done differently.
I raised 2 sons, both gen xers. One is married and a successful architect in N.Y.city. The other is married and runs his own excavation business. Both are fathers and are thriving. Both refused the limitations you seem to have been tripped up with. You cannot change what is past, but you sure can have a much better future. Go for it!
All well and good but, in the end, the next generation will just continue to make the same mistakes the last did. Everyone is altruistic until THEY are in POWER/CONTROL. Evidence the boomers that protested the war they had to fight and yet not just continued but, expanded and accelerated the trend when they could send OTHERS’ children to do it. John McCain, for the win, Alex?
Look at the polls of young people today. They want what THEY want…NOW. And demand the GOVERNMENT make it so. Spending un-godly amounts of money (debt) on transportation systems that won’t be fully (profitably) utilized.
They will apologize to the following generation…or not.