The baby boom generation

My dear father passed away recently. He belonged to what, in 1951, Time magazine termed as “the silent generation”. And my father was silent. Like his generation, my father sought solace in traditional values and strove for order and stability. This is what my father’s cohorts lacked in their childhood. They were born in the shadow of the Great Depression and their youth was blemished by World War II. Then, they worked hard to re-build their world and to ensure that their children lived comfortably. Now, my father rests in peace.

In contrast, like many of my generation, I have always been a nonconformist. Why we, “the baby boomers”, have protest in our blood I do not know. We wanted to change the world that our parents had re-built in the image of the past. To manifest our dissent we grew our hair long and fixed Mao Tse-Tung posters in our bedrooms. In the US (everything in my life seems to start there), those my age rebelled against the Vietnam War, raved for Jimi Hendrix, smoked marijuana and, somehow, belonged to the hippie movement. They idolised John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King and sought a new meaning to life in exotic, oriental religions. It was a time to reach out for the future, for the moon. But the spectre of nuclear fallout was ever-present.

Commentators claim that we baby boomers are self-conscious but not self-centred. We have great faith in humanity, in borderless social movements. We used to dream of utopia. In the process, everything became relative; there remained no absolute right or wrong. Our identity was moulded by nationalism. Malta l-ewwel u qabel kollox (Malta first and foremost). Even the Catholic Church sought to adapt to the changing times as was reflected in Vatican Council II. Our rebellion was conditioned by a profound sense of respect for authority and spirituality.

The fall of the Berlin Wall bought down with it the idealism of the baby boomers. Our perspectives changed and we became increasingly cynical. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan sealed the victory of neo-liberalism. The left suffered a black-out and lost its way. It was the end of history. A new promise emerged: globalisation. The consumers of the world (all of us) will be united by the free market. And we will live happily ever after.

The baby boomers discovered the pleasure of consumerism. Easy borrowing and plastic money made it possible for us to buy homes and SUVs, which we could hardly afford. Our mission was no longer to reform the world but to get rich quickly. Now, each one of us wants his, or her, 15 minutes of fame. Nurturing image and keeping up with the Joneses is critical. We crave for more goods and services to make us feel good and for “emotional gratification”. Until recently, this was freely available through the sheer joy of belonging to a community.

In the meantime, corruption spread like wildfire. Discipline has become a dirty word. We no longer respect authority. This is partly due to the fact that familiarity breeds contempt. In the meantime, authority keeps shooting itself in the foot. We no longer know who to trust. We trusted the state, the judiciary, the police, public officers and they all let us down. Even the Church, perhaps the ultimate bulwark of local authority, seems to be running off in all directions.

We, the baby boomers, no longer know what it means to be Maltese. The red and white have been fused with blue and many stars. We aspire to become European but we are not sure what that means either. Incredibly, it seems that nobody really cares. We wanted change and we got change. But we also got increased uncertainty, higher risks and more stress. We have lost all of our anchors and sense of mission. Life has mellowed us. In less than a lifetime, we have passed from an age of anxiety (independence and demilitarisation) to one of false security (everything for free from the cradle to the grave) to one of opportunism (carpe diem).

What sort of upbringing did we give our children? What legacy will we be leaving behind us? Unlike our parents, we opted for fewer children. We passed on all our aspirations, frustrations and doubts onto them. We gave them colour television, laptops and cellular phones. We sought to befriend them in the only way we knew how, by buying things for them. We induced them to develop an inflated sense of entitlement. They protested by pretending that they do not care. For us every coin has two sides; for them the two sides are but one. Yin and yang. The virtual and the real. The private and the public. Now they live for the “here and now”. Their nightmare is environmental disasters, especially global warming.

Baby boomers were born in a world where we did not feel we belonged. We managed to change a lot. Gone are the days of rampant superstition, dogmatism and prejudice. Today, we possess more but much of our joie de vivre is gone. If only the silent generation was not so silent.

fms18@onvol.net