[Mb-civic] Boomers: The Real Greatest Generation - Leonard Steinhorn - Washington Post Sunday Outlook

[William Swiggard]

Boomers: The Real Greatest Generation
Who contributed more -- the heroes of World War II or the revelers at 
Woodstock?

By Leonard Steinhorn
Washington Post Sunday Outlook
Sunday, February 19, 2006; B03

It makes the headlines nearly every day, and the tone is usually 
resentful: Beware of those soon-to-retire baby boomers, all 80 million 
of them, who are about to place a huge burden on the rest of us. The 
first of this whiny, entitled generation are turning 60 this year, and 
they'll be demanding even more special treatment in old age than they've 
gotten the rest of their lives.

But imagine if the generation getting ready to retire wasn't the baby 
boomers, but the World War II generation -- or the Greatest Generation, 
as it's popularly lionized. No one would be calling those Americans a 
burden or a drag. If they were retiring today, we'd be writing columns 
full of praise for their sacrifice and discussing what our nation owes 
them and how it's our moral duty to support them.

Why the different attitudes toward these two generations? Why is one 
idealized as heroic and giving, while the other is disdained as 
self-indulgent and taking? It's time to reassess. The true test of a 
generation should be what it's done to make America better. And in that 
regard, boomers have an important story to tell. It's a story about a 
more inclusive and tolerant America, about women's equality and men's 
growing respect for it, about an appreciation for cultural diversity too 
long denied, about a society that no longer turns a blind eye to 
prejudice or pollution.

The boomers' problem is not that they haven't accomplished a great deal; 
it's that we take their accomplishments for granted and don't give them 
any credit. But if we look more closely at the legacies of both the 
boomers and their parents, we might see that the boomers are a far more 
consequential group than many admit. We might see, in fact, that they 
have advanced American values in ways the Greatest Generation refused to do.

Today, no one questions what the World War II generation gave to 
America, and that's as it should be. Its members sacrificed their lives 
and futures to defend our country. They were heroes then, and they 
deserve our continuing gratitude. But the reality few acknowledge is 
that, mission accomplished, they returned home to preside, by and large 
without complaint, over an American society vastly inferior to the one 
we know today.

Our view of the 1950s is clouded by nostalgia. We have a Norman Rockwell 
image of that era, one of tightknit neighborhoods and white picket 
fences. But for too many Americans, this was no golden age. In the 
storied years of the 1950s, we told women to stay home, blacks to stay 
separate, gays to stay closeted, Jews to stay inconspicuous, and those 
who didn't conform or prayed to a different God to feel ashamed and stay 
silent.

Greatest Generation blacks who fought Hitler were forced to sit behind 
German POWs at USO concerts, and when they returned home the new 
suburban neighborhoods -- emblems of the American Dream -- were closed 
to them. Even baseball great Willie Mays couldn't find a house to buy 
when the Giants moved from New York to San Francisco in 1957 -- until 
the mayor intervened. Just as Jews anglicized names and decorated 
Christmas trees to fit in, blacks tried to straighten their hair and 
bleach their skin by using fiery, painful chemical products with names 
such as Black-No-More. For them there was nothing warm or nurturing 
about that era.

It was a time when men with beards seemed subversive and women in pants 
were questioned by police, and when the Organization Man ruled the 
workplace. Children thought to be gay were sent off for psychiatric 
treatment and even electroshock therapy. As for those who spoke up for 
the environment, they were irritants in a nation that was on the march 
and viewed smog alerts and clouds of soot as simply the price of progress.

Women of that era found themselves trapped in an apron. Want ads were 
segregated by sex -- a practice The Washington Post didn't end until 
1971 -- and it wasn't unusual for a description of the perfect "girl" to 
be "5-foot-5 to 5-foot-7 in heels." Judges ridiculed female attorneys as 
"lawyerettes" in court. A woman's job didn't count for much, as credit 
bureaus typically denied women their economic independence.

The Greatest Generation largely accepted and defended this status quo. 
Even in the 1990s, polls showed Greatest Generation majorities 
continuing to resist racial intermarriage, working mothers and laws to 
protect gays from discrimination. Through the late 1980s, a majority of 
white respondents in national polls even said they would vote for a law 
allowing a homeowner to refuse to sell his home to a black buyer.

In other words, if most Greatest Generation Americans had their way, 
American life would have remained frozen in the '50s. They were not the 
agents of change that built the far more inclusive, tolerant, free and 
equal America we have today.

That task fell to the boomers, who almost immediately started breaking 
down the restrictive codes and repressive convictions of the Greatest 
Generation's era. From the moment pollsters began recording their 
attitudes in the 1960s, boomers stood diametrically opposed to their 
elders on the core issues of race, women, religious pluralism, 
homosexuality and environmental protection. They saw an America that was 
not living up to its ideals, and they set about to change it.

But this is a story that rarely gets told. In part that's because the 
media prefer the dramatic or the epic, which leaves out a great deal of 
social change. In part it's because we remain fixated on the '60s, as if 
boomer history ended there. Yet nearly four decades have passed since 
the '60s ended, and the ways in which America has changed are so 
far-reaching and fundamental that they have transformed how we live as 
profoundly as any war or New Deal.

Today, we see minorities and women contributing to society in ways that 
would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago. Diversity and 
pluralism are now moral values, bigotry and sexual harassment no longer 
get a free pass, and ethnic boundaries once considered impermeable are 
breaking down in media, society and personal relationships. Half of all 
teens now report dating across racial and ethnic lines -- and 90 percent 
say their parents have no problem with it.

Discrimination against gays? Increasingly prohibited. Domestic partner 
benefits? Increasingly accepted. Men sharing housework and child care 
duties? No more raised eyebrows. Toxic runoffs and belching smokestacks? 
No longer tolerated. The command and control workplace? On its way out.

So natural and comfortable are these new norms that most of us take them 
for granted, as if it's always been this way. Because we live in a 
changed America, we tend to forget what it was like before boomers 
agitated for change.

Boomer-bashing has become a virtual cottage industry. They're labeled 
"the worst generation." They're accused of infantilism and 
self-promotion. One Web site described them as "a plague of 
self-centered locusts."

Part of what drives this vitriol is an implied criticism that boomers 
are soft and overindulged because they never sacrificed in a Great War 
or Depression. But millions of boomers fought bravely in a war their 
parents handed them, and millions more risked arrest, uncertainty and 
ostracism for protesting what they believed to be the pointlessness and 
duplicity of that war. There's no reason to believe that boomers 
wouldn't have fought Hitler as nobly as their parents did, and boomer 
antiwar protesters said as much at the time, distinguishing between what 
they saw as the just and necessary war against fascism and the 
misguided, deceptive and morally ambiguous war in Vietnam.

As for the well-worn condemnation of boomer materialism, the truth is 
that materialism is nothing new in America, and boomers are far from the 
first and only generation to face this charge: It was conspicuous 
consumption in the 1920s and keeping up with the Joneses in the '50s.

Boomers certainly haven't solved all of society's problems, and they've 
created a few as well. But if we held the World War II generation to the 
same standard, the word "greatest" would never come to mind. Even if 
we're not a perfect America today, in so many ways we're a better 
America. And for that, we owe the baby boomers our thanks.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/17/AR2006021702491.html
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