Not Okay, Boomers!

Our generation shoulda known better.

Here’s a demographic oddity: We’ve had three Presidents who were born in 1946, the first year of the Baby Boom: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump, all of whom have now been elected to two terms. There were 3.4 million babies born that year.

However, there were more than 40 million born in the 1950s, and it seems almost certain that we will never have a President born in that decade, and maybe not any more from the 1960s.

Barack Obama (remember him?) was born in 1961, and the voters three months ago rejected Kamala Harris, born in 1964, in the last year of the Baby Boom. JD Vance, probably the odds-on most likely to be next, was born in the 80s, as was Pete Buttigieg.

There are theories, but no clear reason for why this has happened. However, one thing is clear. When we boomers were young, the nation would never have elected a pathological liar who said admiring things about Nazi sympathizers. Too many of us had daddies who served in the war, and uncles who never came back.

Nobody wanted to be the Germans when we staged World War II battles on the playground. James Arness, the actor who played Marshal Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke for twenty years, was often in pain from having his leg blown apart at Anzio.

Nazis were the bad guys.

We were inspired, most of us old enough to remember it, by President Kennedy’s inaugural address. We wanted to make the world better. So how did we get from that to electing a nasty,openly racist monster leader of our country?

How anyone could have voted for this defies understanding. But we who grew up in the shadow of the war and the Holocaust, certainly should have known better.