Showing posts with label boomer bashing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label boomer bashing. Show all posts

Saturday, October 13, 2012

In defense of the boomers, who don't exist

Going away for the weekend, freaked out by recent polls, holding my breath until Tuesday night...and so reposting one that got a little lost in the sauce, below.
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In an article pinging across the internets just now, 34 year-old reporter Jim Tankersley calls his 63 year-old lawyer father to the bar to defend the boomer generation against a broad indictment:
This is the charge I’ve leveled against him on a summer day in our Pacific Northwest vision of paradise. I have asked my favorite attorney to represent a very troublesome client, the entire baby-boom generation, in what should be a slam-dunk trial—for me. On behalf of future generations, I am accusing him and all the other parasites his age of breaking the sacred bargain that every American generation will pass a better country on to its children than the one it inherited.
Dad makes some very good points in defense, but he accepts the general terms of the trial: that it makes sense to indict a so-called "generation" for the course of human events, national and global.  I reject that premise. Generalizations about generations always send me around the bend.  Being admittedly predisposed to dismiss the case on conceptual grounds, I believe that the particular charges don't stand up to scrutiny.

Monday, October 08, 2012

Tankersley's case against the boomers: summarily dismissed

In an article pinging across the internets just now, 34 year-old reporter Jim Tankersley calls his 63 year-old lawyer father to the bar to defend the boomer generation against a broad indictment:
This is the charge I’ve leveled against him on a summer day in our Pacific Northwest vision of paradise. I have asked my favorite attorney to represent a very troublesome client, the entire baby-boom generation, in what should be a slam-dunk trial—for me. On behalf of future generations, I am accusing him and all the other parasites his age of breaking the sacred bargain that every American generation will pass a better country on to its children than the one it inherited.
Dad makes some very good points in defense, but he accepts the general terms of the trial: that it makes sense to indict a so-called "generation" for the course of human events, national and global.  I reject that premise. Generalizations about generations always send me around the bend.  Being admittedly predisposed to dismiss the case on conceptual grounds, I believe that the particular charges don't stand up to scrutiny.