Baby Boomer Redemption

OK. The American Baby Boomers dropped the anti- establishment ball. So certain in the late sixties and seventies that corporate money grubbing was at the root of nearly every social evil, many bought the myth that things could better be changed from within the system. Many immersed themselves in the system and were swallowed up in busy-ness. New technology, opportunities for economic advancement and security, put questions of right and wrong on the back burner for twenty five years - a sad marker of maturity.

Now they are reaching retirement age and current events are conspiring to remind them of unfinished business. If they can possibly recover the health and energy they lost on their detour, they are going back to the right and wrong of the status quo, they have been supporting.

The naked idealism of their youth created a generation gap with their parents and will likely create the same gap with their children; a generation that largely sees the future as next year and global events as mysteries somehow connected to money. The Baby Boomers will have to find allies among the grandchildren, if they hope to change the future in the next twenty years. I think they will pull it off.

Rejecting their parental role models, the Boomers were truly without any at all. Heroes were scarce. They became a social experiment with very mixed results. They have been pummeled with idealism backlash. They have submitted to pragmatism. It has not fit them or worn well. They are about to shed their pragmatic skins and return to their idealistic roots. They have a hindsight that reinvigorates the possibilities for the future beyond that which was conceivable twenty five years ago. And they have economic power far beyond that of their youth. They can now change trade policies simply by agreeing with each other they need to be changed. They can now see the abject failure of two party politics. Beginning in another five years, the oldest of them will be free to return to political activism. Some aren