Nostalgia Is A Mental Disease
For a scathing review of the "Me Generation" of Baby Boomers who are heading quickly towards retirement check out Varifrank. I am a Baby Boomer and I take no offense at what he has said because it is so right on. Here are some excerpts:

Thank you, baby boomers! Thanks for the sexual revolution, thanks for Chlamydia, herpes, oh and a very special thank you very much for the spread of AIDS. Thanks for a generation of kids raised in divorce. Thanks for rampant adolescent drug use. Thanks for crack cocaine and black tar heroin. Thanks for making a culture that makes the staggering hell of drug addiction something "cool". I guess it was just too much of stretch to make cancer cool so you went for the easy kill with the glamorization of the drug trade instead. Thanks to the generation of hedonists who produced a president who educated my kids on the phrase "oral sex", or the special nuance of phrase "no controlling legal authority". Thanks for turning baseball and football from the leadership and inspiration of Vince Lombardi to the stepping-stone to federal prison it has become. In 30 years we ha’ve gone from a culture that found the phrase "give em hell harry' vulgar to a president so vulgar as to defile the office of the White House by his personal acts. A generation who found the only vulgarity in their President was his being held accountable by the citizenry for those acts.

If that doesn't leave you gasping for breath, then read this:

I have to hand it to you, you did change the world in one accidental, don't get your actual hands dirty way. You gave us the internet so that we could do the work you could never get around to doing. With the internet, my generation will help free the oppressed. With the Cell Phone we will bring down dictatorship after dictatorship. With the palm sized video camera, we will put a stop to the suppression of freedom and human rights. The day of centralized control is over Mr. Trudeau, and if you were in my generation, you'd know that. The day of the subversive cartoonist has also passed, but I suspect you probably did know that.

"power to the people"? Absolutely friggin right. And At T1 Speeds no less!!

Oh, and we'll still be here after you and yours are gone. We'll remember you, but I don'’t think your gonna like what we tell our kids about what your generation did to the world.

And hey, thanks again for the internet.

I have often wondered about these same issues, even while I continue to read Mr. Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury cartoon. Though now that Varifrank has put it into words I don't feel so alone about thinking that something is out of whack.

In the Boomers defense, it's not too late for them. They have the Greatest Generation to look to for inspiration and I only hope they take the time to ask them for some advice. Any generation that had to deal with the Great Depression, the Nazis, and the Japanese must have some wisdom to pass along. Come to think of it, I think I'll touch base with my parents and send them this link. Though I know they will hardly give it a look, not out of any animosity or because they are not curious. No, this is just the normal sort of thing they have been dealing with all their lives. It will only confirm what they have known for a long time, and have been gently trying to tell me.