Dennis Prager, Baby Boomers, and the Signpost to Hell
Dennis Prager on JWR offers a group apology from the Baby Boomers to the younger generations:
We live in the age of group apologies. I would like to add one. The baby boomer generation needs to apologize to America, especially its young generation, for many sins. Here is a partial list:
. . .
Our generation came up with two truly foolish slogans that also ended up robbing you of childhood.
One was, “Never trust anyone over 30.” Our infantile attitude toward adult authority has inflicted great harm on you. Because of it, many baby boomers decided not to become adults, and this has had disastrous consequences in your lives. It deprived you of one of the greatest needs in your life — adults. . . .
The other slogan whose awful consequences we baby boomers bequeathed to you was, “Make love, not war.” Our parents had liberated the world from immeasurably cruel and murderous regimes in Germany and Japan — solely thanks to waging war. But instead of concluding that war could do great moral good, we sang ourselves silly with such inane lyrics as “Give peace a chance,” as if that deals in any way with the world’s most monstrous evils. So we taught you to make love and not war. And we succeeded.
He goes on to list many other areas in which the Baby Boomers left our country much worse than the country that they inherited. But I noticed one peculiar omission, so I decided to write to him:
Dear Mr. Prager,
Congratulations on your recent (12-4-07) column about many of the ways in which the Baby Boomers injured younger generations. I want to add one item to your list: divorce.
I was born in 1970. When I was in grade school, we assumed that a child’s last name was the same as the parents’ last names. As I recall, most sign-up forms for sports, school activities, etc. didn’t even provide a separate space in which to indicate that different members of the family had different last names.
It’s a small detail, but perhaps a telling one. Today’s children can’t give basic family information without laying out the whole family situation. You can’t assume anything about the people with whom a child lives. They might be mom and step-dad, dad and step-mom, mom and mom’s lesbian lover, or dad and dad’s gay partner. The child might not live with either of his parents; he might live with grandparents, an aunt or uncle.
I was fortunate enough to have older parents who considered divorce to be extreme and shameful, so I didn’t really understand the extent of the problem until I met the whom I was to marry. She had three last names under the same roof: Her mother had retaken he maiden name, the older children had the first husband’s last name, and the younger children had the second husband’s last name. And the family’s history was as disorganized and frightening as their last names suggested.
The other stuff you mention was bad, but (aside from abortion) I don’t think that any of it compares to divorce. Children can thrive—and have thrived—in all sorts of terrible circumstances. Starve them, beat them, threaten their very lives, and they can survive it all without too much harm—but only when they can fall back on a stable family that will comfort them and protect them from a cruel world. But take that family from them, throw it into chaos, urge the parents to pursue their own pleasure at the expense of the children—and no amount of luxury can compensate them for the injury. If there was a definite point at which our country turned onto the road to Hell, the signpost surely read: No-Fault Divorce.
[…] A TIME OF PONDERING - A TIME OF RECKONING Posted on December 27, 2007 by boomerlife Dennis Prager, one of America’s most respected thinkers, wrote wrote an article in Jewish World Review titled Baby Boomers owe America’s young people an apology. This article is a group apology for what we Baby Boomers have put the younger generation(s) - our children - through. In his blog, Dennis Prager, Baby Boomers, and the Signpost to Hell, Ben Bateman adds divorce to the list of things that we should apologize for. To be sure, both articles make for interesting reading and gives much food for thought. I admit that I am fairly new to blogging and when I surf the web for ideas to blog about, I am amazed at the amount of resentment I see towards the baby boomers by the younger generations. […]
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