Dear fellow Boomers,

Might we have a word or two? I have been hearing some grumbling over there on YouTube. Something about how it’s not our fault? Or maybe a few choruses of we had it rough too? What I am not hearing however are any offers of help. There’s really no excuse for that. Since we had it hard too wouldn’t that mean that we could empathize with the difficulties the younger generations are facing? Now of course there’s got to be a disclaimer here. It’s not ALL Boomers but it’s way too many acting this way. So if you’re not the target, feel free to step aside.

I remember my silent generation elders making quite a bit of noise about the Boomer generation. About how they, Boomers, didn’t want to work. The previous generations weren’t big fans of hippies, yippies, draft dodgers, that whole Woodstock thing, LSD, and marijuana. They didn’t like seeing their city streets populated with long-haired, pot smoking rebels that didn’t respect the law, their country, or their flag. They were talking about the Baby Boomer generation like we talk about the Millennials, Gen Z, or Gen Alpha. Of course Gen X isn’t listed because they were generally never referred to by anyone. Sorry y’all.

While I didn’t have much in common with the stereotypical Boomer, I’m still a Boomer. I’m a late Boomer you see. I never really liked the Beatles. Folk music, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young, were on the AM dial. None of us ever chose to listen to AM versus FM. Hippies were so last year to us. I listened to Joy Division, Killing Joke, The B-52’s and UFO. The Vietnam War ended when I was in middle school. Watergate was already history. I didn’t check in to check out. Most of the people my age resented the heck out of the Boomers, even though we were labeled the same.

So how about this ‘not my fault thing’? Why would it matter one bit if it was our fault? If we have the means, the opportunity and the power to fix it, isn’t doing anything less than that wrong? How many millions of dollars sit in our combined retirement accounts? How many millions can we take with us when we die? How much free time do we have now that we’re retired? How much could we help others with those hoarded resources?

I’m seeing and hearing so many of our children and grandchildren having to accept that they don’t have a family that has their back. They have to pull back from the judgement and cruelty of their own families because it is that bad. It doesn’t matter if our families were cruel, negligent, bigoted, greedy, cold-hearted with substance abuse issues. Or maybe that was just my family. Anyway, none of that gives us an excuse to not be better people for our own children, even after they’re adults. Just because my father’s only response to my tears was ‘do you want me to give you something to really cry about?’ does not mean that that was to be emulated. He would laugh at my pain, acting no differently than the Boomers who call other people ‘snowflakes’.

Is it the Boomers’ fault? Did we have it rough? Did our parents walk to school in the snow barefoot uphill both ways? Did they lie about that? Yes to all. Why did they lie? Probably because they felt exactly like we do when we are called out on the things that we know we can do better. It appears that it doesn’t matter if it’s our fault because it’s our responsibility. Is that unfair? Of course it is. What did all of us hear when we were growing up about fair? We were told life is unfair and to get over it. How many of us told our children the exact same thing? It’s on us. We need to stop trying to avoid standing up and putting in the work. Yes we’re tired. Yes our feet hurt. Yes we should be done with the fight by now. Yes we worked really hard for decades. But society lied to us.

Life isn’t a relay race where we get to hand off some baton and head out to a forever Pizza place. Amassing millions of dollars in stocks and bonds will not guarantee a happy retirement if it requires letting our children live in desperation. We don’t really get to go on vacay for decades because it’s irresponsible to think we get to walk away from life. Why would they make up such lies? They just wanted to sell us a timeshare. They wanted more investors in the market so they can charge them fees without having to guarantee returns. They wanted us to pay for insurance for decades that we never used so they could charge us more as we age and keep as much of it as they can. Our children see this and see the lies. Meanwhile, we vote against the future to save a few pennies today.

We’re each sitting on a hoard and telling our children to keep their paws off of our hoard. We have all the money tied up in fear of the future and we refuse to share it, hire people with it, or create opportunities with it. How is that anyone’s fault but ours? Yet we complain about inflation and want each and every senior citizen discount. Our children can’t find jobs. We will tell them to hustle harder instead of giving them parts of our hoards as gifts to invest in their future. When they can’t find a house they can afford, we tell them to do something that we made impossible – buy a fixer-upper. They can’t buy a fixer-upper because we, Boomers, flipped them all already.That’s a new thing. That’s a Boomer thing. When land was wealth, the family would build new houses for the children or they would divide up the land long before the eldest generation passed. That was the meaning of generational wealth and the inheritors didn’t have to wait until someone died.

If our children are mad at us, we deserve it. It’s our job to fix ourselves and stop making excuses because we fell for the retirement brochures.