By Denis Campbell
At 47-years and six months, by dint of birth, Barack Obama officially falls one year outside of the Baby Boomer classification. Many view this as a ‘good’ thing. Those of us born and residing in the post WWII Boomer birth cache had 15-years; 1946 – 1960 to get it right and look at the messy set of footprints we now leave across this earth.
We stressed school systems to the breaking point in the 60s causing massive over-construction of buildings that now house apartments or community centres. We protested and dropped out of Universities in the late 60s an 70s creating the Summer of Love, anti-war movement and never listening to ‘The Man’ or anyone over 30. We then sold out ourselves in the 80s when we hit 30 ourselves and focused on chasing the almighty dollar and worked our way across a white collar job treadmill. We lived for today and spent money on credit like there was no tomorrow, fuelled a housing bubble by buying more and bigger homes for our ‘stuff’ whilst leveraging ourselves to our eyeballs. Achieved a stunning savings rate of 0% in this decade and now having the bubble burst and our retirement funds collapse will need to work into our 80s (because medical advances mean longer lives with less) just to survive.
Our Presidential legacy – Bill Clinton and George W. Bush looks dodgy when compared to the greatest generation’s Carter, Reagan, Johnson, Ford, Nixon, Eisenhower, Roosevelt and Truman. So much for our best and brightest leading moments, we sold out, fiddled whilst Rome burnt, chose a narcissistic and obsessive lifestyle, spent like drunken sailors on shore leave and now complain.
Barack Obama is right in between Boomers and Generation X. He grew up in a single family household, his mother was on food stamps, he took advantage of the benefits he could and worked his tail off to get ahead. If there is anyone out there who begrudges his success, they are well hidden. So the future looks better as the nation returns to adult supervision.
Our generation’s behaviour reminds one of the Chinese proverb: slippers to slippers in three generations. The 1st generation seeks to lift their family out of poverty by hard work and determination. Out of poverty they can then afford shoes for their feet vs. slippers or sandals. The 2nd generation sees how hard the 1st worked and keeps the tradition going. The 3rd, having known no strife or suffering fritters it away by playing, everything fails and are back to wearing slippers.
We globally lived until last year in the 3rd generation. Now we are headed to slippers and who better to lead us then someone from modest roots who has seen and know struggle firsthand?
Anyone know where I can stash this tie-dye T-shirt and bong?
