What Did The Baby Boomers Ever Do For Us?

Why does my generation seem so spineless?

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2010/07/8217-generation-young-parents

The Baby Boomers could risk rebellion. Not so, Generation Y.

by Laurie Penny
12 July 2010

When I closed the final pages of Francis Beckett's new book, What Did
The Baby Boomers Ever Do For Us?, I found myself shaking with
indignation. The book, which lays out an incisive case for how my
parents' generation "squandered the good times" and betrayed the
courage of the Attlee settlement, is flawed and uneven in many ways,
but it makes at least one important observation.

"The sixties generation," says Beckett, "reinstalled the deference it
rejected." In other words, our mums and dads were free to get angry
with adults, dabble in revolutionary politics and demand respect and
attention, but heaven help Generation Y if we fail to comply with the
grown-ups' view of the world.

When I look at the defeated deference with which my generation treats
its elders, I want to take young people by their collective shoulders
and shake them.

The young are in the process of being screwed over in a variety of
cold and creative ways by an age group who are richer, freer and more
powerful than any generation this country has seen or is likely to
see again, and yet we have so far failed to come up with any sort of
collective response to indignities that the baby boomers simply would
not have stood for when they were young.

It's conceivable that our parents love us, in their own special way,
but that hasn't stopped them from mortgaging our futures and selling
off all the privileges that they took for granted -- the jobs, the
safe places to live, the affordable housing, the free education and
the security of a generous and supportive welfare state.

The fact that our parents had all of these things allowed them to
produce a sustained cultural rebellion that was, in many ways,
genuinely socially transformative. The fact that we have none of them
makes us timid, compliant and tragically quick to accept compromise.

I find myself dying a little inside, for example, whenever I hear a
bright young liberal telling me that they're supporting Ed Miliband
for Labour leader. I have nothing against Ed Miliband, but that's
just the problem: the most decisive thing I've heard said about him
by the next generation of the British left is that they've nothing against him.

When I ask them why, they generally look awkward, mumble something
about progressive ideas, and then say: "He's a nice guy, and he's
quite good on the environment, he's a good compromise for Labour
supporters from across the spectrum, and, hey, he wasn't around to
vote in favour of the Iraq war."

And then they do that awful little smile, that hard, tight little
smile forced up at the corners with those wide, willing eyes, the
smile of submission and desperation, the expression I've seen on
young people's faces so many times since the credit crisis crunched
down on our futures, the expression I've worn myself at countless job
interviews, and they say: "And at least he's not as bad as any of the others."

When our parents were young, Beckett reminds us, some of them not
only dared to imagine alternatives to militarism but demonstrated to
demand a politics that reflected their ideals rather than those of
the overculture. By contrast, I was there when this video, which
features prominently on Miliband Jr's campaign website, was being
shot. Wait for the final three seconds: the young volunteer does the
smile, and then delivers the line "Go, Ed" as mournfully as if he
were speaking at a memorial service for a spirit of generational
rebellion that crumpled at some point in the mid-1990s and
inoffensively, quietly died.

Why does my generation seem so spineless? Fear is the reason, rather
than lack of fervour. We all know what's going on, but we blanch at
asking for the rights and respect our parents enjoyed because we've
all seen what happened to those of our classmates and university
friends who didn't play the game, smile on cue, pass the exams every
year and give the grown-ups what they wanted.

For the Baby Boomers, as Beckett astutely observes, the risks of
rebellion were far lower than they are for us: rejecting your
parents' rules is far easier when you can rely on full employment, a
supportive welfare state, free higher education and a culture that
respects and nurtures young talent to catch you when you fall through the net.

Both of my parents were working-class kids who left school during
their A-levels, and both are now wealthy, property-owning
professionals, as are many of their friends who spent the 1970s doing
drugs, playing music and rearranging the world to suit their ideals.

How many of today's impoverished dropouts will be able to say the
same in forty years? "We were young in a kinder society," Beckett
pronounces of his generation. "If we really meant any of the things
we said in the Sixties, about peace, about education, about freedom,
we would have created a better world for our children to grow up in."

Today's young people decline to openly reject our parents, because
most of us have no other option, but we know perfectly well that
we've been had. Whether or not we continue to bite off our resentment
behind forced smiles is up to us.

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