There’s an article on The Plank today concerning the newest column in The New York Times (“Generation B“). Michelle Cottle writes that:
I realize how hard it must be for boomers to confront the reality that they no longer occupy the demographic sweet spot that makes advertisers and TV execs hang on their every word–or to accept the fact that all the Botox, Viagra, and Rogaine in the planet will not halt their steady march into the category of “senior.” But do they really need their own weekly column in the paper of record detailing how very, very difficult and disappointing it is to no longer be the center of the universe? Can’t they just vent their frustrations on individual Facebook pages like all the hip kids do?
It all reminds me of something my dad (a baby boomer himself) said over Christmas. We were talking about Hunter S. Thompson and the 1960s and my dad referred to the period as a brief blip of liberation followed by a culture where the baby boomers became more consumer-driven and materialistic than their parents and then proceeded for the most part to become horrible parents that spoiled their children.
I really hope that decades from now some anthropologist or sociologist goes back and does a comprehensive study of that generation and what influenced it to shift from the mantra of the 1960s to the one of the 1990s.
Link via The Boomers’ Latest Tantrum – The Plank .