Hope You Die Before You Get Old
by David Michael Green

As a Baby Boomer, I'm sure not encouraging generational warfare in America. I have everything to lose from such a battle.

On the other hand, though, as a political analyst, I can hardly believe we're not seeing it.

Never has it been so manifestly logical. Never would it be so thoroughly deserved. And yet, never has it been so astonishingly absent from the playing field of American politics.

I grew up in a period of generational conflict. "Never trust anyone over thirty", "Hope I die before I get old", etc. But I have to say that my generation got a way better deal from our parents than we're leaving for our kids.

Sure, our parents bequeathed us Vietnam and Nixon. But I think those politics were a matter more of naivete, really, rather than malice or greed. I remember how my own parents reacted to the war and to Watergate. Having struggled collectively through the Depression, and having fought the good fight of World War II, I think they were wholly unprepared for the levels of deceit and callous indifference to harm they came inescapably to find that their government was capable of. This was an existential challenge of the kind we jaded Boomers can probably never appreciate. They were true believers, and they were rattled to the core when Toto pulled back the curtain. Their children, on the other hand, were raised to become cynics, for whom no such political crime can ever quite surprise us.

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