I Am a Recovering Baby Boomer

I Am a Recovering Baby Boomer

I am a recovering Baby Boomer, a man whose adult life is spent convalescing over my generation's excesses, betrayals, misconceptions, and failures. We are a gullible generation that got duped by the self-proclaimed psychic Uri Geller, who could alter the shape of spoons and coins to a rapt audience on The Merv Griffin Show, and the author Peter Tompkins who in the best-selling The Secret Life of Plants claimed flowers and other plants had “feelings” so we had better nourish their self-esteem by showering them not only with water but with love ballades. We read comics promoting worthless Charles Atlas bodybuilding programs, X-Ray-Vision glasses, and Sea Monkeys. We were titillated by TV ads showing Farrah Fawcett and other eager-to-please blondes rubbing shaving cream on football star Joe Namath’s dimpled cheeks. We were inculcated with consumer morality lessons by witnessing exhausted housewives shamed for failing to remove “ring around the collar” from their husbands’ work shirts and watching with horror and disgust as members of the educated class compromised their perfectly-curated lives by coming home from a long day of work to greet their spouses with nasty cases of halitosis. We witnessed the chaos at Woodstock and ogled at Hugh Hefner’s Pleasure Cave, sardine-packed with drunken satyrs and nymphs. I can personally attest to the fact that the popularity of the musical Hair and its soundtrack had a transforming effect on my squeaky-clean suburban neighborhood in San Jose, California. One day our backyards were full of wholesome gatherings of neighbors getting together to make peach and apricot preserves while drinking Florence Henderson-approved Tang. Then in the blink of an eye, those backyards were furnished with hot tubs and mini-bars, and they became attractions for nudists and swingers. “The Age of Aquarius” was an era when divorces in my neighborhood multiplied like toadstools. 

The net sum of these experiences is that Boomers like myself became afflicted with juvenile notions of freedom as a consumer lifestyle offering unlimited pleasure-seeking resulting in a multitude of disturbing behaviors, which included relentless tanning without sunscreen, the need to fortify all of our meals with organic wheat germ, the unbridled veneration of Peter Max, and an inexplicable longing to go on tour with The Partridge Family. 

To this day, not only are Boomers saddled with a Hydra Head of addictions and bizarre behaviors, but we are a selfish lot. Taking advantage of an affordable college education, a generous job market, and housing, we are overcome by a sense of entitlement to an easy life of materialistic success, yet we are too narcissistic and self-absorbed to give a damn about the fact that we didn’t pave the way for subsequent generations to enjoy the same affordable education and housing. 

Speaking of narcissism, we are navel-gazers repelled by any kind of life purpose that would cause us to transcend the limitations of our self-centeredness. When we retire, rather than do volunteer work to make a difference in our community, we will indulge our nostalgia and delusions of grandeur by enrolling in summer baseball camps where Hall of Fame baseball players will coach us on the finer points of bunting and throwing a curveball; we will venture on African safaris and then bore to death anyone within ear-range by regaling friends and family of our adventures by channeling the voice of our childhood cartoon hero Commander McBragg; and we will attend Rolling Stones concerts so that the frenzied hip gyrations of an octogenarian will encourage us to believe that we will never die. 

Much has been written about how loathsome, repugnant, and irredeemable my generation is. Gen-X author Bruce Cannon Gibney castigates us as morally bankrupt and empathy-deprived in his book A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America. The Atlantic writer Lyman Stone has equal loathing of my generation as he observes we enjoy a stranglehold on public policies that benefit our interests but no other generation’s in his essay “The Boomers Ruined Everything.” Washington Post writer Jim Tankersley excoriates us as miscreants and pariahs in his article “Baby Boomers are what’s wrong with America’s economy.” He writes that “They chewed up resources, ran up the debt, and escaped responsibility.” In Joe Queenan’s Balsamic Dreams: A Short but Self-Important History of the Baby Boomer Generation, the irascible author accuses us of being so vainglorious that we have to hype up the most ordinary events to affirm our significance in this world: “By turning spectacularly humdrum occurrences into formal rites, Baby Boomers have transmuted even the most banal activities into ‘events’ requiring reflection, planning, research, underwriting and staggering masses of data.” Clearly, these writers would have us believe that Boomers are, in their worst form, the world’s pestilence and on good days a reliable irritant, having infected the culture with such annoyances as The Seqway, the Chia Pet, and the Starland Vocal Band. 

But I would like to offer a rebuttal to these scathing judgments. While it is true that the “Me Generation” has much to account for, it is also true that our self-indulgence and moral lapses have forced many of us into a state of lifelong recovery, and with that recovery, we have gleaned life lessons that can bear fruit to others. 

So please let me present a Baby Boomer’s autobiography that chronicles some of those life lessons, not just to redeem myself but to blunt the sharp edge of judgment against my generation. Please let me offer these tidbits of wisdom, not just so that you might not repeat my mistakes but to afford me relief from a guilty conscience. 

I am in recovery, after all, and it has been said that confession is good for the soul.