Into the Era of Consequences We Hold Hands and Leap
Boomers, Star Trek & Transforming Generational Anger
The mark of a good politician is determined by how much time they can put in between the start of a policy and the consequences showing up. The longer, the better.
This cynical message is one I heard in my early life in the 80s and 90s. Today, it’s not lost on me that this message coincided with the early days of Trickle-Down Economics and Climate Change Denial.
This was the sentiment behind the policies sold to my Boomer parents, Silent Generation grandparents, and Gen X role models.
Trickle Down was going to be a boon for everyday working people by investing in, decreasing taxes on, and letting “Job Creating” Big Business run wild, and Climate Change wasn’t something people needed to worry about. It was a conspiracy theory… or the science wasn’t clear… or it was natural and not human caused… or something else Big Oil spun up.
These were the fallacies that American policies in the '80s, '90s, and pre-recession '00s were built on. Even as the evidence mounted decade after decade that record-breaking wealth was moving from the ground to the top and that climate change was undeniably real, human-made, and on top of us.
My generation, the Xennials bridging Gen X and Millennials, and those younger than us are surely and undeniably stuck with the consequences of policies that began before or during our childhoods.
We are generations firmly living in an Era of Consequences.
But the older generations — the remaining Silent Gen, the Boomers, and the now-aging Gen X — who lived much or most of their lives in the Era of Causes are here too.
Impacted by, made vulnerable by, and trying to grapple with an Era of Consequence they were told wouldn’t happen… or if it did, such times would surely not be a part of their lifetime.
Before we go any further, I want to note that this letter uses generalities and personal perspectives so please keep a few things in mind:
Older readers, don’t shoulder the burdens of our time. Sometimes, I have seen older individuals put way too much personal blame on themselves as they come to grips with, for instance, the climate emergency. My friend, my elder, as we’ll dive into, that’s not where the burden belongs.
This letter speaks to one common pattern of many in American generational relationships. It shouldn’t be used to essentialize entire generations of people or to assume the character of an individual person.
Additionally, it comes from my personal perspective and speaks from experiences mostly located in the (white) American lower middle-class.
That said, if you are concerned about things like unchecked corporate power, the fragility of democracy, economic failings, the culture war, and the environmental crisis, you may find the insights here helpful.
Defining and understanding generations is cloudy business. Pew Research, one of the US’s most trusted non-partisan research centers, has largely discontinued intergenerational comparisons due to the way media and the general public have wound up mischaracterizing and stereotyping age groups.
Additionally, The Baby Boomers are a unique generation that has a clear starting point due to the end of WWII. Since then, the start and end points of generations are less clear.I’m going to use popular American generational language, but please try to think of these age groups as having unclear, smudgy edges that overlap with one another.
Ok? Ok.
I am of a young enough generation to know generational anger, even though I'm not young.
If you were to look at my group, the Xennials roughly born between 1976 and 1983, you'd notice that every single one of our adult rite-of-passages is marked with a paradigm collapse. Roughly, our generational timeline runs as follows:
Age 17: Columbine
Age 21: 9/11
Age 29: The Great Recession
Age 35: Polarization & the Return of Nazis in America
Age 40: The Pandemic & Profit-flation
Our next adult rite-of-passage (Age 50) takes place around 2030, and all I can tell you is:
Buckle up and wear a helmet.
The adulthood of the Xennial, just like the Millennial right on their heels, is firmly shaped by the beginning of the Era of Consequences.
These paradigms shifts have marked and destabilized my adulthood. All along the way, my parent and grandparent generations, instead of listening to us, patted us on the head and said “these things always work themselves out.”
Because of these shifts and the headpats, I know the quiet rage of generational anger. An anger I don’t see trending out anytime soon with younger generations.
It’s understandable that the experiences of many Boomers, particularly economically affluent or stable ones, gave credit to the idea that “things always just work out in the end.” After the uproars of the 1960s and 1970s, things in many a Boomers’ immediate world did settle down. Even the Cold War, the seemingly immovable object of their childhood, came to in an end in 1991.
And so through each of the collapsing paradigm shifts that have occurred through their children’s lives, many Boomers stuck to their mantra.
Right around the Pandemic, the Boomers around me stopped saying such things and handed over the reins of “real adulthood” as if to say, “the world is yours now.”
Something else new started happening in my Boomer relationships around that time.
Some of them, who had never done so before, started listening.
Since more and more Boomers are listening now, let us be wise with our words. It can be hard to resist making the goal of such a conversation simply about communicating our anger or telling them about what we see as their role in ignoring the warning signs.
We must recognize, however, that they are not the root cause of these problems. And if we are interested in solving these problems, our goal in conversation should revolve around creating understanding and possibilities for turning things around in our lifetimes.
We also need to recognize and give back to the Boomers a missing part of their own story:
The part where they were misled.
For decades.
Boomers & Trickle-Down Economics
By the 80s and 90s, both American political parties were prioritizing the interests of corporations and the ultrawealthy ($50 million+) over everyday people. To varying degrees, they both proposed that cutting the social safety nets and focusing on the flourishing of big business would “trickle-down” into widespread job opportunities and prosperity for the rest of us.
(Can we hear now the elitism packed into that phrase… “trickle-down”?)
At the time, this economic approach and its logic sounded appealing, especially to many middle-class folks. However, it failed to address the economic reality that was changing the previous generation’s flourishing into an era of dwindling opportunity:
The Deindustrialization of the 1970s which began an era of job exportation. In other words:
Boomers are the first Post-War II generation to experience a decline in living-wage jobs.
One generation before them, huge numbers of the Silent Generation owned a home, supported a family, and retired with one adult working a factory job that may or may not have required a high school degree. (This economic period’s one deep failing was discriminatory hiring exacerbated by a lack of a jobs-guarantee program).
By the 80s, the advice had become ‘you need college to get a good job.’
Something essential has fallen out for everyday people, and the engineers and policymakers pushing Trickle-Down Economics were not addressing it.
For the middle-class, home-owning Boomer, these changes in job opportunities and stagnant wages may have appeared subtle at the time, but the slippage was real. The skyrocketing home values that have cut off younger generations from homeownership have been for many Boomers the saving grace that secured retirement.
Their wages stagnated for decades, and 401K and Roth IRAs replaced the previous generation’s pensions and robus social netting. These retirement strategies were sold to the public as easily producing 6-7 figure wealth over the course of Boomers’ working lifetime… if they disciplined themselves and saved enough for long enough.
Ask an everyday Boomer how that turned out.
For poor, working-class, and renting Boomers, the increasing economic challenges of their working lives and the results in their retirement (if they can retire) have been far more precarious than their economically stable counterparts. Profit-flation has only exacerbated the vulnerability of our elders as Wall Street and the ultrawealthy continue to break wealth records.
Instead of abundance pouring down onto everyday people from the top, Trickle Down rained money on the hyper-wealthy while the rest of us have gone dry.
Big Oil… Like Big Tobacco Before Her
Big Oil covered up the climate crisis to the Boomers in the same way Big Tobacco covered up cancer to their parents and grandparents.
Aware of climate change since the ‘70s, Big Oil backed extensive misinformation campaigns through the late 20th and early 21st centuries in an attempt to deny the dangerous reality of climate change.
Everyday people’s economic fears were further rattled by sayings like 'what’s good for the environment is bad for business' from Trickle-Down champions, as well as by class-insensitive environmentalist approaches that threatened the economic security of working-class and lower middle class people in industries like fossil-fuels and logging.
Unfortunately, what would change many people’s minds about the reality of climate change would be the crisis itself barreling down on us… earlier than expected.
For decades, older generations were told there were no negatives to Trickle Down or Climate Change…and yet here they are alongside younger generations, facing down the Era of Consequences.
I hope these essential, often-missing pieces of the Boomers' story help those of us with generational anger transform our view of them. I hope it helps us turn from making them objects of our anger to understanding them as our potential partners.
Partners who have been misled, who need to help seeing the grift, who may know a little something we don’t, and who have every right to be angry at how vulnerable a position they, and the rest of us, have all been left in.
Surely, there’s some individual come-to-jesus moments to be had, but when considering the Great Grifts of the Late 20th Century, ask yourself:
Are the Boomers really the right recipients of our anger? Or are we falling into some accidental scapegoating of a group who’s been left holding the bag?
We must also keep in mind that our Boomers are cycle-breakers.
For instance, Boomer women of all ancestries and Boomers of color broke prejudiced boundary after boundary. The generation also redefined aging and celebrated turning 40, 50, 60, 65, 70. Vietnam vets, who for 40+ years said nothing of their experiences, are saying for the first time the word ‘PTSD.’
Even in old age, they are still breaking cycles.
I see them now continuing to learn new emotional and social skills alongside us. I see them facing the inevitables of old age bravely, living as best they can, without giving in to cynicism.
I have seen the struggle in their eyes as they try, often for the first time, to give their childhood wounds space… while grappling with the overwhelming, wordless feelings of disloyalty to their elders that doing so brings up.
Before we #okboomer, let's consider whether we would want to trade childhoods with them deep in the emotional frozenness of the Cold War. Before we #okboomer, let’s balance the nightmares that were passed down with the ones they put an end to.
Before we #okboomer, let us keep in mind that this is a description of our elders who have enough economic stability, and that poor and working class Boomers cannot find the security needed to rest easy.
The Boomers were also the first generation of children who grew up on Star Trek, a Sci-Fi show that dreamt of space exploration made possible by an Earth-At-Peace and sealed with America's first on-screen interracial kiss.
Although we next to never see this Earth, the characters let us know war is a thing of the past, bigotry has been put aside, and life essentials like food, water, and medicine are secure. While climate change wasn’t a thing in the ‘60s, it’s obvious that these humans are from a biodiverse Earth with a stable climate.
Off this Platform-of-Peace, Star Trek’s humans leapt into the Stars to follow their inborn drives for exploration, curiosity, wonder, awe, challenge, fulfillment, and self-understanding.
It is just such a platform we must commit to building now. No matter what generation we are a part of. No matter how “small” what we can do may appear. Imperfect as it and we may be.
Let the first generation of children who watched a vision of Earth-at-Peace on television become the first generation of elders to help build it in the real world.
Let that be the legacy of the Boomers. That a generation grifted throughout adulthood, then shocked late in life into an Era of Consequences, responded by helping initiate a Platform of Peace.
One from which humanity can leap freely into the Stars.
We will not escape the Era of Consequence otherwise. Nothing else can overcome the interrelated web of today’s intensifying crises except for building into reality a Vision of Peace that is bigger than the problems we have.
Thanks to Star Trek, just such a vision has been running in America’s cultural waters for generations. We need only claim it, agree to it, and then insist on finding our way to There from Here.
Where we are now. Out on this precarious and precious edge, this Era of Consequences.
From here, my dear elder, midlifer and young one, we need only take each other’s hand and then, with the Stars in our eyes,
we must bravely leap.