Report Card for Generation Handover
Hey, younger generations, it’s us, the Boomers, giving you this report card on the world that we’re turning over to you. Since the oldest of us, born from ’46 to ’64, are turning 80 soon, we need to do it before we forget.
Let’s start with the positives: technology. We’ve figured out how to make every gadget and creature comfort imaginable. It’s your choice whether to use them for pleasure and enlightenment or turn them into isolating fixations, tools of aggression, and/or choking landfill, but such has been the double-edged sword of technology since Man first started to farm. Not our fault.
That’s pretty much the whole list on that side of the ledger. Now for the section entitled ‘Room for Improvement.’ Since this is a self-graded assessment, we’ll start with the biggies. First is global warming. Perhaps 50 years from now you’ll be living underground to escape the UV rays, or in what were previously mountains, to escape the sea, but that’s for you to find out. I have only one hope: that by then you’ll have abandoned the denialist euphemism ‘climate change.’ Please, please, please… I can live with having destroyed the planet, but not honest discourse, too. On the plus side, I learned on the telly that Mother Nature will rehabilitate the Earth in as little as 50 years after our disappearance. Exterminated species will take a few million more years.
Next is the rise of authoritarianism. Some would say this is inseparable from, and a direct result of global warming, since that’s what’s causing much of the exodus from poorer countries and the resultant xenophobia that fertilizes demagogues. That faux dystopian George Orwell thought this sort of societal plague would be as bad as it gets. He just didn’t have the imagination to anticipate planetary cataclysm in which we burn our own biosphere. What a naive optimist he turned out to be.
Then there’s defunding secondary education. (Or, one might say, education overall. Witness the fact that many teachers have to buy their own school supplies.) This worked out well for us, but not so well for the below-median population, many of whom are locked in soul-crushing, eternal debt. It turns out that your education really was about the miracle of compound interest, and you just didn’t know it. Consider yourselves educated.
Healthcare for only those with good jobs is one of the things we worked on the most. We even made it impossible to figure out what you’re actually paying for, if you do have to come up with cash. But you guys don’t use cash so hopefully you won’t mind.
Housing. OK, so we’ve monopolized the housing market. But here’s the bright side: there are two forces driving all waves in the sea of American society, 1) technology, and 2) 70 million boomers moving like a tsunami wherever we wash ashore. When we start cashing out these houses en masse, it might make the housing crisis of 2008 look like a day at the beach. But maybe I’ll be wrong and it will just make homes affordable again.
Finally there’s the overall phenomenon of computerization, and how companies can hide behind it (e.g., never answering job application inquiries), and make consumers do all the work, and spend all of our time, and so on and so on. Yeh, even we think this sucks. Guess we screwed ourselves there. Well you can’t win every grift of future generations!
Extra credit: for one last push into generational infamy, we’ve even revived the Arab-Israeli conflict. An oldie but goodie. Enjoy. By the way, if you do break the space-time continuum to achieve intergalactic travel, you’ll probably find Arabs and Israelis already fighting on most Goldilocks planets, so I wouldn’t waste too much time on this one.
So, on balance not too bad, right? After all, it’s not like we had a thermonuclear volleyball game on the surface of the planet. You’re welcome. And don’t forget to rate us in the app store (search for Greediest Generation) and fill out the satisfaction survey. Would you recommend us to other generations?
