Saving the Boomers

Good news; Barbara Nicolosi Harrington is back to blogging after a nearly two year hiatus. If there is a short list of women to whom I would grant the title Honorary Bearded Lady, she is on it.

She writes in this article at Patheos about the slow-motion train wreck that is the aging of the Baby Boomers, the really only half-interested response of their children, and the way this is reflected in the art of the modern cinema.

Thanks to the unrestrained narcissism of the Boomers, the Gen-Xers (or whatever they would like to be called) find themselves honestly assessing the worth of all the things the Boomers discarded - self-sacrifice, tradition, family, hard work, authenticity.

Her position is that part of the job of the Church may be to help the X-ers to forgive the Boomers and bear their old age with patience, rather than, you know... euthanizing them. The generation that aborted a fourth of its young now hopes for better treatment from their surviving children.

Another task of the Church is to get the Boomers to repent of their misdeeds for the sake of their own souls.

I remarked on Facebook that many Boomers have so much of themselves invested in their colossal mistakes that it will take a special kind of grace for them to be able to repent. I thought of an illustration; think of how hard it would be, having covered your body in tattoos and other "body modifications" to ever even begin to consider that it might have been a mistake. Psychologically, emotionally, and in every other way, one has a vested interest in keeping up the game face and insisting you have "no regrets", because the alternative is too upsetting to think about.

Comments

[Patrick]

"Thanks to the unrestrained narcissism of the Boomers, the Gen-Xers (or whatever they would like to be called) find themselves honestly assessing the worth of all the things the Boomers discarded - self-sacrifice, tradition, family, hard work, authenticity."

I've observed this same thing: while there is plenty of narcissism in the 20-something crowd (of which I'm a member), you don't find as much crass materialism, and you find much more interest in those things: self-sacrifice and family. Further, you find more anti-feminist "3rd Wave Feminism" of the sort that embraces "traditional" womens' roles among the 20-something crowd than the 50-and-above crowd.

Oh, there is plenty room for improvement here: a lot of the 20-somethings' ideas of non-materialist lives involve eastern mysticism or Earth worship, generic "spirituality", and whatnot - but the idea of salvation-through-material-consumption has at least failed, and I suspect that many of this crowd can be led back into the Old Faith of Western civilization.

[Alter Polus]

So true. Looking at the world our "free-thinking" parents have handed us makes forgiveness difficult. Where is my generation? Where are my younger brothers? What have you done?

But forgiveness has to happen before there can be changes.

[Jeff Hendrix]

From the get-go, we boomers were quite literally "distracted to death" beginning with the left-over cartoons from Warner Bros. to "Top Cat," etc.

Mortality is a heady draught; boomers somehow thought they - we - were exempt:

http://alittleguide.blogspot.com/2010/07/health-update-new-review-of-little_02.html