Some Thoughts on Baby Boomers
Psychologist and Baby Boomer Vivian Diller, Ph.D. is looking for an identity tag for her generation and has come up with a label of her own, the “ABV generation – Aging But Vital — so everyone can see us for who we are” (from her article “The Challenge of Aging in a Narcissistic World,” The Huffington Post, Mar. 11, 2011). Everyone is invited to chip in a label.
I don’t recall how I stumbled upon her article on the Internet; I’ve never read anything on the Huffington news website before. From time to time, I’ve seen Arianna Huffington, the Post’s co-founder, on one or another TV news program as a political commentator. I did read one of her books, when she was still Arianna Stassinopoulos, Maria Callas — The Woman Behind the Legend (1981), at about the time I was writing Journey of Faith (in which I mentioned how the chubby Callas finally succeeded in losing weight). Huffington, incidentally, is a Baby Boomer.
It was Landon Y. Jones, longtime managing editor of Money and People magazines, who coined the term “Baby Boomer” in his book Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation. Jones defined Baby Boomers as those having been born between the years 1946 and 1964, a 19-year period. Most demographers go along with this definition, but not all. For instance, William Strauss and Neil Howe, in Generations, have Baby Boomers being born between 1943 and 1960.
Cultural historian Jonathan Pontell then identified a “lost generation” — between the Boomers and Generation X, which he called “Generation Jones” for those born betwen 1954 and 1965. President Barack Obama, born in 1961, would fit into this generational cohort.
January 1, 2011 became a red-letter day for Baby Boomers: the oldest crop was beginning to reach the retirement age of 65, when they would become Golden Boomers. So here come the Golden Boomers, still very much part of the scene, that is, vital [from L. vitalis, "of or belonging to life"], or as Dr. Diller phrases it, “aging but vital.”
There were 76 million births recorded in the United States from 1946 to 1964. Of these, 4 million had died by April 1, 2000, leaving about 72 million Baby Boomers, which is nearly 1/4 of our population.
Baby Boomers have an established identity, and I see no reason for them to seek another, as Diller has it in mind to do. Golden Boomers are just beginning to emerge as a new group, and they, too, already have an identity — they are the Golden Boomers. Soon enough, they will number in the millions and will be a force to contend with.
Recall that Diller entitled her article “The Challenge of Aging in a Narcissistic World.” The key word in the title for me is “narcissistic.” In its general usage, narcissism implies an extreme degree of self-centeredness, characterized by such features as selfishness, vanity, egotism, conceit, egomania, self-absorption, et cetera. Freud described the condition in a 1914 essay, On Narcissism, deriving the term from Narcissus, in Greek mythology a handsome young man who saw his own reflection in a pool of water and fell in love with it.
Narcissism is etched into the Baby Boom generation. What’s also disconcerting, its incidence has been steadily increasing in today’s youth population, as Jean Twenge, Ph.D., psychology professor at San Diego State University, confirms in The Narcissistic Epidemic. ( Also, see chapter 20, “Narcissism in Our Time,” in my book, Faith in a Hurting World.)
Baby Boomers are the forever-young generation, burdened by a fear of growing old (gerascophobia). You might also call theirs the Peter Pan generation. “Once upon a time there was a boy named Peter Pan, who decided not to grow up,” Wendy Darling explains to the pirate Captain Hook, in J.M. Barie’s play Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. Earlier, Peter said to Wendy, “I want always to be a boy, and have fun.”
There is a bitter and harsh truth here: the price of eternal youth is a world without adulthood. Indeed, where are the adults in today’s youth-dominated America?
The Boomers have become, in a way, a metaphor for the young in general. America is a youth culture, in reality an adolescent culture, and today’s America displays the characteristics of such a culture: psycho-social (and psycho-sexual) arrested development. Adolescence thrives on energy, but energy is not enough.
I remember a line from Stephen Vincent Binet’s 1935 poem Litany for Dictatorships, his condemnation for our support of dictators: “We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.”
We struggle for peace, understanding, and justice, but we do so without wisdom. The young have their youth, but there is no wisdom with them. There is depth in the old saying: “No wise man ever wished to be younger.”
The biblical Job, in his response to Zophar the Naamathite, has the final word: “With the ancient [the aged] is wisdom; and in length of days understanding” (Job 12:12, KJV).