This is the biggest generational transfer of wealth in the history of the world. If you're an 18-year-old middle-class hopeychanger, look at the way your parents and grandparents live: It's not going to be like that for you. You're going to have a smaller house, and a smaller car – if not a basement flat and a bus ticket. You didn't get us into this catastrophe. But you're going to be stuck with the tab...That much is true. We've bankrupted the country both morally and financially. But there's more to the story.
Every generation has its good and bad. While the Boomers managed to wreck the family and spend our children's money, we've also saved the environment, done away with racism to the extent possible, defeated the Soviet Union and delivered a cornucopia of technological innovations. Life isn't ever unalloyed good or evil.
Every generation of Americans seems to find a way to rise to the occasion at hand. How many of you remember the Love Canal?
Love Canal was a never-used, late 19th-century hydroelectric channel that was sold to the Hooker Chemical company in 1942. Between then and 1953, Hooker used the site to bury 22,000 tons of chemical wastes in barrels.
Hooker sold the site to the Niagara Falls School Board for $1, and the board built an elementary school there in 1955. A blue-collar suburban neighborhood flourished around the disused industrial site.
Flourished is probably the wrong word. Schroeder's parents found black sludge seeping through the walls of their basement starting in the late 1950s. A woman who ran a beauty parlor in her basement developed a debilitating weakness and had to give up working. Trees and shrubs died. Noxious chemical smells hung over the neighborhood.
Environmental destruction was a major problem and yet Americans were able to defeat moneyed industrial corporations and alter the way we saw the environment. We owe a great deal to the environmentalists from the Boomer generation.
You can make similar arguments about the Cold War. With Ronald Reagan's leadership, the Boomer generation defeated the Soviets. The election of Barack Obama, whether a good or bad decision, is an indication of how far the Boomers went in the healing of race relations.
So now the big issues are financial and moral. Yep, we're still wrecking the economy and we've yet to re-make the connection between traditional families and success. But previous generations of Americans faced equally daunting problems and managed to rise to the occasion. I'm betting that this one can, too.
5 comments:
What a wonderfully upbeat post.
Thanks, Don. It occurred to me as Terrie andI were driving around looking at houses we might buy after we got married. I'm concerned about a lot of financial issues, not the least of which is wild inflation. But as I thought about it, it occurred to me that we had been there before and to throw up your hands in defeat is to sneer at the amazing resiliency of Americans throughout history.
Yes, this is something I've been thinking, too. Between the Depression and WWII, a lot of money and lives were destroyed, a lot of bonehead moves were made, and it was pretty awful at the time, but eventually everybody got past it and ended up with a world that was arguably better. And if they could do it *then*, we can certainly do it *now*.
It's analogous to a forest fire. The fuel is there, and it has to burn before you can get new growth. And the resulting new growth may be more vigorous than what was burned.
America as a country isn't bankrupt, though: Net foreign claims on American assets are roughly 20 % of GDP, which isn't dramatic. The rest of the debt is owed by Americans to other Americans. Taxing the rich harder is always an option to get the money back - just ask European politicians...
KT, great post. Just to be sporting though, how do you see it that "boomers" won the Cold War?
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