Linda Grant: "We Had It So Good"
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-05-04/linda-grant-we-had-it-so-good
Judah Passow
In 1957, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan declared, “most of our people have never had it so good.” The postwar generation grew up protected by a new welfare system, enjoying freedoms and opportunities unknown to their parents. Plus, says recently-turned-sixty, British author Linda Grant, "we had fabulous music and clothes." In her latest novel, Grant traces the trajectories of four baby boomers who thought they could change the world: from their idealistic student days at Oxford through the realities of growing up and growing older. We discuss what happens when their rose-colored glasses come off in middle age and a new century.
Guests
Linda Grant
novelist and journalist
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Excerpted from We Had It So Good by Linda Grant. Copyright © 2011 by Linda Grant. Excerpted with permission by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.:
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Many of us have not abandoned the revolution, we continue to work for significant change. We are doing it as social workers, construction workers, musicians, nurses, foundation and not-for-profit workers, organizers, even lawyers, doctors and accountants. Our attitudes are not me first, they are us first. Wanting a comfortable life for yourself and your family does not preclude wanting a comfortable life for everyone else. It is a spirit of generosity, belief that everyone is worth something, that eveeryone has a gift to give to the community and is worthy of our support are the hallmarks of our revolution. We still have it good and we have made it better, despite the abuses, the materialism, the self-satisfied attitudes of many; but of course those attitudes have always existed.
The guest states that the jury is still out on the baby boom generation. As a person born just after the baby boom (1967) I believe there is no doubt that they have been the most destructive generation in the history of the US.
- They have practically ruined the country with financial bubbles and subsequent collapses as a result of their greed.
- They are currently continuing the destruction by demanding government support through social security and medicare which we simply cannot afford.
- They are focused only upon themselves, and don’t care much about the burden they are leaving to their children and grandchildren
- The leaders of our country who were baby boomers continually involved our country in wars of adventurism overseas that have bankrupted our country
I could go on, but to me, the baby boomers are the worst generation. Many of the laws and changes that many credit to the baby boomers (civil rights, women's rights, voting rights, etc...) were actually drafted and passed by their parents' generation, not the boomers.
The boomers have done nothing but hand the country over to the corporations.
I find this discussion absolutely fascinating. I'm a 22-year-old American -- a doe-eyed middle school student when the attacks on 9/11 occurred. I believe my generation is the cynical opposite of my parents' generation. While they believed they could change the world, we seem acutely aware that the world will inevitably change us.
I have never understood how those idealic anti-establishment hippies of the 60s and 70s evolved into the Reagan Republicans and political conservatives of the 80s onward. Once they wanted generally accepted practices changed and then became conservatives who were after position, power and material comforts.
Thanks
Chas Neill
I, and most of the people I knew, never abandoned our ideals, most of the people I knew never gave up and are still interested in far more than position, power and material comforts. Look beyond the propaganda.
Interesting that you ascribe the entire financial meltdown to a single generation, you must have demographic evidence not available to the rest of us;
Also interesting that you see a single generation demanding government support through Social Security and Medicare (both social insurance, both supported entirely through subscriber contributions, not from general revenues), none of whom were born when Social Security was enacted and were all children or teens when Medicare was passed. Certainly one of which, Social Security remains solvent in spite of borrowing by the Reagan, and both Bush administrations (and yes I did exclude the Clinton Administration from this list). Certainly no one else demands, let's see, mortgage deductions, or business tax write-offs, expenditures on, let's see, continuing tax deductions even in the face of continuing debt, they couldn't have anything to do with the economic meltdown.
Also curious how you point fingers at a single generation, which has put aside a disproportionate portion of their own incomes for the education of their children and grandchildren; and
Finally, very interesting how you excluded Reagan and Bush 1 as adventurers...Iraq 1, Grenada, Iran-Contra, Lebanon...any of those sound familiar?
And you are right some of the things credited to Boomers should be credited to our parents’ generation, but who voted against the ERA? Or who did pursue the war in Vietnam? And who did spit on children entering school in Birmingham and Oxford and a thousand other places, yeah some Boomers and some of their parents and grandparents.
Use facts not sweeping generalization. There is no such thing as a best or worst generation, there are heroes in each, and there are villains in each.
The problem is that once people are no longer afraid---of hunger, of cold, of dangerous work, of an officially or privately propagandised enemy---they start to become harder to control, they actually seem to act as if they had rights or something.
They generally also stop being as religious, making them even harder to control.
It was (I recall) a TRW report in 1973 or so that "blamed" the Sixties on American prosperity. Interesting that ever since then life has become harder and harder for normal people in America; this could be coincidence, or a natural consequence of the same factors that created our prosperity---but the conspiracy-sniffing gland in my brain is excited, reasonably or not, by the knowledge that since then incomes have declined, and our populace has become easier and easier to convince that the interests of the wealthy are our interests, and/or that Government and unions are utterly useless to help---leaving brute economic power the only real player.
(Yes, there have been social advances...but the malefactors of great wealth don't give a damn about them---they don't mind a well-spoken Black man who thinks exactly the way they do, as long as they still have general racism to use to control us, and what care they about more gay rights or none when they're more concerned about their right to screw everyone, all the time?)
My teaching career began with my desire to use literature to inspire children to "be better people". However, because there are so many children in my classes who can't read, or who go to bed hungry, who are homeless, who are drug/alcohol addicted, or who are young teen parents I can only "inspire" them to make it through the day.
If you believe your generation can "make a difference" please go to your local school and join those of us Boomers who are still on the "front line".
We may be slowing down a lttle now and may need some more help "saving the world".
I want to question the - apparently - unquestionable...(and it's almost everywhere, not just Diane's show).
The benefit of The Women's Movement? And actually more broadly; the benefit of all of our latter 20th century hyper-enhanced personal freedoms?
Of benefit to whom? And at what cost to whom or to what? I mean, look at us? Look at the state of THE fundamental building block of any society.
What of families? You know, that institution that used to have a husband, a wife and some kids (if they were fortunate).
Really!? I mean it...ARE WE - ON BALANCE/OVER ALL - better off? Not opinions, (you can no doubt guess that I'm dubious)...What do the historical social/census statistics tell us? Lay that over 2 or 3 sociological studies WITH RESPECTED/ACCEPTED methodologies.
Please, do some shows on that. Question EVERYTHING. Just because something has become "normal" or because powerful interests are "comfortable" with a particular status - does not mean that it is good or healthy or long term beneficial.
I suspect there's alot here, if you will look.