Total Boomer Death

The Boomers are Sunsetting. What Now?

Memorial Day services were a formative experience of my youth. I remember standing in the cemetery on a partly cloudy day a couple miles out of town. A row of old men in uniform stood at attention, next to a large stone monument with a list of the fallen. The men, largely from World War II, would fire their rifles in salute of their dead comrades while the local priest would lead everyone in prayers for the dead. There was an air of dignity and repose they gray-haired seniors personified, and even the degradation of old age never altered their sense of self and purpose.

The years passed on, and the WWII generation got older. Fewer men could attend the service, either due to infirmary or, more and more the case, death. Once a guy who meant well exclaimed how sad it was that fewer WWII vets attended these ceremonies and had to be gently reminded that their numbers among the living was dwindling rapidly. Now, you’ll be hard pressed to find any World War II vet alive, let alone take part, as their minimum age is now in the high nineties.

*Note: For simplicity I’m merging the “Greatest Generation” with the “Silent Generation”. *

The Silent Generation is almost extinguished, and lived up to their name. They were stoic, often to a fault, and I’ve heard countless stories of old fighters who refused to talk about the war to their dying breath. Others, like my grandfather, only really opened up in the last few years of life. Their formative experiences being the Great Depression and a World War, few ever had childhood memories of a life of leisure, and circumstances forced them to become adults as fast as possible.

A lot of kind words have been spilt regarding the Silents, but they had plenty of flaws as well. Fathers were often distant and harsh to their children, as was a cultural norm, and many took to alcohol to deal with their inner demons. Bored housewives kick-started the second feminist revolution, paving the way for no-fault divorce and a continuing dissolving of cultural norms. While blamed on the next generation, the upheavals of the 1960’s happened on the Silent’s watch. All these issues coalesced in creating the Baby Boomer Generation, the most hated age-demographic that has ever existed.

A lot of people take issue with this animosity, either because they because the cohorts are too diverse to make blanket statements, or because such hatreds for age demographics is damaging to previous moral foundations, and respect for elders that is a bedrock of traditional views. I agree that visceral hatreds are unwarranted, but there are still general lessons we can take from generations, some positive and some damning, and what life will look like as their sunset approaches.

The Silents lived in a world of strong inner cohesion, even in the wake of a devastating depression. They were largely homogenous, with the embryonic stages of the radicalism still in the shadows. While FDR’s administration was littered with communists, and rabble-rousers like Clarence Darrow were setting the legal stage for mass violence, the common man had no insight into these dynamics, and social trust in the United States was high. Their main enemy was external, in the form of Nazi Germany and Japan, supplanted immediately after the war with the Soviet Union, our once ally.

The Boomers came of age after the radicals in the Silent Generation had twenty more years to seep through the system and grow powerful enough to work in the open. Their propaganda networks were vast and powerful, infiltrating and redirecting once conservative institutions to progressive ends. The Boomers, instead of being inundated with propaganda of an external enemy, were taught to fight the enemy within. They were taught to “Fight the System”, meaning the old conservative order. Most Boomers who were activists of this era still don’t realize that the radicals they fought for were “The System” by the time the sixties rolled out. They were battling a cultural force that was pushed out of power a decade ago. In other words, they were “The System”.

Instead of bombing foreign countries, revolutionaries bombed and terrorized their own homeland, a part of the 60’s revolution that has been thoroughly swept under the rug. As before, most of the Boomers have no recollection of the race rioting, the terrorist-to-academy pipeline, and other socially dysfunctional behaviors. They believe, still to this day, that the Civil Rights and Sexual Revolution was an organic upswelling of the masses to make the world a better place. The Vietnam draft, while a legitimate grievance, was the opposite of the mindset of the Silents. The Silents were against going to war until they were sucked in, then they took their draft papers and reported in with enthusiasm, the entire country moving to a war footing. The Boomers assumed that once the United States stopped meddling, there would be peace (to be fair, they had a point). Through all the turmoil, they really believe they facilitated creating a world where everyone of any race or creed could live in peace and share a Coke.

The Boomer propaganda one-shot that allowed this to happen was the television and the University system. To those in an internet age, it would be mind-boggling to comprehend the level of information control that existed from the 60’s to the early 90’s. While the silents had the radio, a very useful tool of control in its own right, the television with its audio and visual cues and the rise of supposedly “objective” news sources such as Walter Cronkite allowed a mass psychosis to form, with the majority of young people believing in a world model exactly opposite of reality. Even among the most conservative of Boomers, try to get one to admit the 60’s were catastrophic, or tell them about the mass violence and terrorism of their civil rights heroes. The best you’re going to get is hemming and hawing about how things might have been taken too far.

The idea of being the underdog, even when one was in power, is endemic in this group’s morality. The nebulous idea of fairness and equality runs through their psyche, a mindset they successfully transmitted to most of the next generation. The Silents had their ideals, but ideals grounded on pragmatism and a general localized identity. They saw prosperity in their earlier years, but deprivation also, tempering the thought of never-ending progress. The Boomers only saw prosperity and saw it as their purpose to expand that prosperity to those who, in their minds, were unjustly deprived of it. It didn’t really work out. If you bring up The Civil Rights Act and destroying segregation in the South was disastrous to the very minorities they wanted to uplift, delegating them to a parasite class in urban hellholes, the cognitive dissonance will likely short-circuit their brains.

Probably the oddest disconnect is the mythology of World War II. Every vet I talked to who fought on the Western front had a sort of grudging respect for the Germans. The vets who fought the Japanese had more harrowing opinions.

Think Cotton from King of the Hill

The Boomers did not live through World War II, while for the Silents lived its reality. Still, for the Boomers is became a mythology, a moralistic epic. While the Silents knew little about the treatment of the Jews, the Boomers grew up in an education system that made Jews the sole focus of the war. The war was a cartoon to use for political purpose, not the lived experience. Again, try to talk to a Boomer and tell him it was a war of great powers and not a morality play. Many veterans who went through it would agree. A Boomer never will.

As stated earlier, the cultural upheaval of the 60’s largely happened in the older generation’s watch, the different is the older generations who were swept into it did not understand the radical underpinnings of the new legislation or that their trusted institutions had been corrupted to their core. There was a trust in civic institutions and norms that has only recently been cast away conservative minded people. Meanwhile, the Boomers embraced the new order as a core aspect of their identity.

The new liberation of women to the workforce somehow created a family dynamic that was even worse than the already frayed family structure of the previous generation. Instead of just a distant father, you now had distant mothers who worked outside the home, creating latchkey kids that were left to fend for themselves. Divorce was already reaching endemic proportions in the previous generation, especially after WWII.

Many returning soldiers got a nasty homecoming

With the Boomers, it outright exploded. Broken homes, once a social stigma, now became so commonplace every extended family had some. The children of boomers were largely raised by their peers left to fend for themselves at a young age. Hence the meme of the self-raised, rough and tumble Gen-Xer.

It should come as no surprise that they also did an awful job of transmitting their religious faith. Even such intimate conversations were largely left to the religious schools, most of whom embraced the zeitgeist. Church services that now catered to the modern sensibilities of the Boomer generation with folksy trash and empty platitudes. In Church, it was always the 60’s. The next generations, understandably, started opting out when they became adults. Their children either opted to believe the true religion of their parents, the precursor to modern woke, or delved into cynicism. The biggest cope I hear from this generation as their children inevitably shack up with someone without marrying him is “I just want you to be happy.” as the little spark of traditional faith they had died even more.

For all these flaws, one aspect of the Boomer that will be missed is their work ethic. While many oldheads are rightfully mocked for bootstrap platitudes and “give a firm handshake” nonsense that was outdated thirty years ago, they were excellent, reliable workers. This is the last generation where a man really could start on the factory floor and become president of the company after thirty years. There was a stability and sense of belonging that allowed them to work at the same place their entire lives, creating a treasure trove of knowledge and experience that surpassed even their forefathers. There is so much tribal knowledge in every domain that relies on an old guy remembering what happened thirty years ago to make a certain decision. It’s going to be painful to relearn those lessons and recreate that sort of expertise.

That being said, the Boomers also refused to relinquish power to the next generation. There are few to no proteges in Boomer world continuing their legacy. Such transmissions went against their individualistic framework. Their ideology of bootstrap-ism has, paradoxically, reduced agency in both their progeny and society as a whole. Instead of creating a generation of independent, confident people, it left the next generation feeling rudderless, not knowing who they could trust due to being deprived of personal bonds. This eroded loyalties, and with it the company structure and stability they enjoyed. Corporations, following the tenets of individualism, now fire people on a whim whenever the spreadsheet tells them to. My old man experienced this firsthand. He worked at the same company for 30 years, working up from building maintenance to Director, and was told of his unemployment when his keycard no longer worked.

Honestly, I can forgive all this. Like the Silents, they were caught up in a force they didn’t understand, indoctrinated in an ideology they had no antibodies for. There is still time for a redemption arc, working in their senior years to ensure the next generation is able to rebuild the cohesive, safe society that was destroyed. It means using their political and cultural capital to benefit the younger ones with no wealth, even if that means hard shocks to the system that will create uncertainty in their pensions or 401k’s.

oh…..

It looks like there will be a final “fuck you” from this generation at the ballot box. We’ve all seen the geriatric and pathetic protests from the elderly, who should be playing with their grandkids instead of making fools of themselves. The once Republican, conservative bastion will become the progressive’s most damaging force as they’re stricken with terror that the necessary short-term instability that we need to bring back long-term sustainability will make them poorer in retirement. It’s also the final revenge of television, their main medium of information, that will die with them.

Don’t Look Back In Anger

Even after that excoriation, I still hold that malice towards that generation is counterproductive. It’s only going to waste emotional energy in rebuilding and, more importantly, hurt our soul. If the biggest flaw of the Silents was naivete, idealism was the Achilles Heel of the boomers. This deadly combination allowed a subversive counter-elite formed in the reign of the Silents, unseen by the common man, that took their children and formed them in their own image.

Go back to the 1950’s, and you’re going to see the rot forming in our government and legal system. Go back to the 1920’s, you’re seeing the groundwork for FDR’s Managerial revolution. No matter how far back you go, you see the cracks forming that spread to the next generation. You can even go back and see the start of wokeness in the hyper-moralism of the Pilgrims sailing to Plymouth Rock.

The boomers were the generational accelerationists that embraced all the contradictions of the American project and largely brought them to their logical conclusion. The rhetorical flourishes of the founders were taken with grim seriousness; the morality of egalitarianism and individualism accepted with no limiting factor. The flaws in the historic American ethos were bound to be exploited and deconstructed, and the boomers were simply the agents of destruction who fulfilled it.

After Boomers

The United States is still one of the world’s youngest civilizations at 250 years old, and the most powerful. The American Mythos, with all its enlightenment, universalist precepts along with the heartiness and agency of the great men who inhabited it, turned forest and swamp into the greatest power the world has ever seen. Yet now our self-conception is at its death-throes with a critical mass of new citizens with no connection to the historic land. The great question of our time is now what America means. A homogenous nation of diaspora Europeans will never exist again. Even if Trump deports twenty million people, America will still be multi-ethnic. The Silents and Boomers destroyed old Americana, and it’s not coming back.

There is going to be a painful competency crisis in the next twenty years as this upheaval begins. The Boomers are bringing a wealth of knowledge, only written in their minds, to their graves. Those nuggets of wisdom will need to be rediscovered, won from hard experience that the current crop of credentialed fools who look at spreadsheets as reality can’t begin to understand. Short-term, we are going to miss them.

There’s largely wreckage left of our social capital. The United States will reach stability as a multi-racial nation that exists in name only. The hippie ideology of universal peace and love will be seen as an anachronism as the in-group and out-group will become most important in our hyper-balkanized society. Instead of individualism, we are going to see freedom of association takes hold, whether legally or extra-legally. Freedom is no longer going to mean the ability to act like a rootless cosmopolitan, but living in peace with one’s own people.

The idea of pluralism is no longer going to mean tolerating the Muslim next door, but creating a peaceful coexistence with countless different enclaves, all with their implicit rules. Covenant communities will slowly become the norm, even if still technically against the law. These already exist in Jewish and Muslim communities, and Whites will soon follow suit, though cloaked in pleasant language. This will fall under ethnic lines as well as religious ones. Altogether new identity groups will form.

The idea of self-sufficiency is not going to mean going to college and moving away from the parents but building networks with like-minded people who have the ability to survive in a low-tech as well as modern society. As communities self-isolate, this will grow in necessity, as supply lines become more brittle in a low-trust society. Small scale skirmishes between neighboring communities will become more common as the raw power of the state diminishes.

The idea of World War II as a morality play will finally be put to rest, and reading history and making decisions in moralistic terms will make way for pragmatism again. The idea of creating Heaven on Earth through human effort will be swept away for more practical local concerns. Universal goods will be ignored in favor of, “is this good for my people?”. Again, every small ethnic and religious group already does this.

The age of mega-corporation will likely die as the civic mindedness that once allowed massive projects to form deteriorates. That being said, I’m of the opinion that the Apples, Boeings, and Intels of the world are hopelessly bloated, and the dawn of AI for menial paperwork and review tasks will allow far leaner organizations with impeccable talent to really thrive. Managerialism will die with the Boomers.

The Trillion-dollar question is whether such a country can remain a world superpower, and the answer is likely no. We’re lucky that our geography, along with the militancy of the population, makes invasion and conquest near impossible, but our ability to flex our muscles at the rest of the world is ending.

I’ve always considered the frontiersman to be the avatar of the American Spirit. If the American spirit is anything, it’s adaptive and full of grit. There is always new frontier to found, new opportunities that require superhuman resolve. Old American ideals will be reinterpreted. New ideas will form. Social organizations, once thought impossible, will become commonplace. Instead of mourning the old order, perhaps we should celebrate what we’re capable of building from its ashes.

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