Believe me, I very much value what you are doing for domestic violence. Many years ago, my sister-in-law was being beaten and chained to the refrigerator by her live in boyfriend - a member of our generation I must add - and my wife and I were in California and she in Buffalo NY. I called the Buffalo hotline, and the women there really, really went out of their way to help. (It had all the features, the excuses being made for his behavior, the promises of "it won't happen again," - you know the drill, because you're involved.
Bless you.
All this said, I wish you were the avatar of our generation, but you are not, in my opinion. Trump is.
A feature that Trump has that I ask you to consider in judging our generation is the reprehensible practice of taking credit for other people's efforts. Trump had nothing to do with this economy, for example, yet he takes credit for it.
The Civil Rights Act was enacted in 1964. The oldest baby boomer, born in 1946, was 18, and at that time ineligible to vote.
We did that, or was the generation who saw in direct experience of liberating camps, the logical consequences of racism?
The murdered Civil Rights workers were not baby boomers: James Cheney was born in 1943; Andrew Goodman in the same year; Michael Schwerner in 1939. They gave their lives for Civil Rights. I was an adolescent.
Lyndon Johnson (born 1908) did the most political work to push through Civil Rights laws. If I recall, we hated him.
Our response to the events of the 1960's was to riot at the Democratic convention - this explains Bernie Sanders to me, since he seems to be running on the Peace and Freedom party in 1968 and has little to do with 2020 - helping smooth the way for, um, Richard Nixon.
Now, it happens - as much as we rightly despise the guy - the President who put in place the organization now being gutted (by an orange Baby boomer) called the "EPA." This was in response to the work of Rachel Carson, (born 1907), which was gaining political traction, particularly in light of Lady Bird Johnson's "Make America Beautiful."
When we were in our early twenties - true environmentalism was far more respectable than it became when we took power.
We bought SUV's and elected George H.W. Bush who promptly announced that the "American Lifestyle is not negotiable."
Then we elected his trivial son, cheering for his blood lust as we cheered for his father's blood lust in Kuwait - who blew families and children to pieces, egged on by the Boomer draft evader Cheney - to act out his Oedipal nightmares.
This was after we elected Ronald Reagan, doddering old war monger. I understood where my generation was going in the early 80's when, playing softball with some old friends who at one time would have thought Bernie Sanders was a right wing hack, all started glorying in how they were going to spend their Reagan tax cut.
I nearly shit myself.
When I was born; the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide was less than 310 ppm. Yesterday it was 414 ppm at Mauna Loa.
My generation went crazy for SUV's, McMansions, Vacations all around the world.
Seven million people die each year from air pollution. Enslaved children dig cobalt in Africa so we can have "green" electric cars, children in China have huge physiological levels of flame retardants, lead and cadmium in their blood because we are green and "recycle" our electronic waste in their neighborhoods
There is not a single organism in our rapidly acidifying oceans that is free of microplastics; macroplastics litter all the beaches of the world; the coral reefs are dying; we set rain forest habitats of orangutans afire to make "renewable" biofuels for our cars.
We destroyed forests, tore up valuable farm land to build McMansions.
Now we want to tear up pristine wildernesses to make industrial parks for wind turbines, built huge chemical plants in third world countries to make semiconductors - where we ask impoverished people to "recycle" our garbage - and oh yes, this always gets a rise out of the people - we demonized the only technology that had even a remote hope of producing sustainable energy and environmental justice, that would be nuclear energy.
You, again, are clearly a lovely person, and I thank people like you for helping get my sister-in-law out of there, quite possibly saving her lives.
But when it comes to women's rights: Our generation demonized a bright woman with a penchant for human decency in order to install a misogynist racist in the White House; the worst Racist President since Woodrow Wilson, hell, the worst racist President on this planet since Jefferson Davis. We failed to give one woman power in this country.
The Demographic that most strongly supports the racist pig in this White House? That would be people over 65, that is, people born before 1955.
I hear the members of my generation congratulating themselves for what they did all the time here; because I often express my guilt for what my contemporaries did - and I was a participant - because at the end of my life, I finally see it; it took forever, but I finally see it.
One of my hobbies is reading history, and I used to snicker at the stupidity of some generations, but no more. I've taken to looking in the mirror, painful as it is.
I say this all the time because I'm quite sure it's true: History will not forgive us, nor should it.
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