Ep 446 ｜ Blaming Boomers for Millennials' Problems ｜ Guest： Helen Andrews
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Summary
Helen andrews is a senior editor at The American Conservative and the author of the book, "Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promoted Freedom and Delivered Disaster." She argues that Baby Boomers were much more successful than their parents were, and that their failure was their own fault.
Transcript
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hey guys welcome to relatable hope everyone's having a wonderful day today i am talking
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to helen andrews she wrote a book called boomers and she has a scathing critique of the baby boomer
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generation and the problems that they pass down to us millennials and even generation z
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and um how we can look at some of their flaws and foibles and failures and learn from them as the
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younger generations and hopefully uh leave a better legacy in in her argument for our kids
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and our grandkids so without further ado here is helen andrews
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helen thank you so much for joining us for those who don't know can you tell everyone who you are
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what you do i'm helen andrews i'm a senior editor at the american conservative and i've just written
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a book called boomers the men and women who promised freedom and deliver disaster i love it i was just
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telling you before this interview that i have laughed several times reading your book your
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description of boomers and kind of what ailed their generation and then the ails they pass down
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to millennials um it's very you know it's a little biting there might be some baby boomers who are
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offended by this book do you think so i worry about that i my parents are baby boomers and i didn't want
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to write anything that they would take personal offense at but i'm glad that you thought the book
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was funny and i think that it's the humor comes from a combination of on the one hand being pretty
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angry with the world that the boomers have left us but on the other hand being fond of them as well
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i don't think you can ever be truly funny about something you just hate yeah there's got to be a
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little bit of element of fondness in there as well and there certainly is for me with this subject
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that's true and let's talk about that tell us about the world that we have inherited from baby
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boomers and uh where they went wrong i always had a feeling that the millennial generation my generation
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was a disinherited generation in some spiritual sense that is that the patrimony of our great american
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civilization just didn't get handed on to us the way it got handed on the previous generation
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functioning families functioning churches functioning schools all of these seem like
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basic bare minimums that we just didn't get those were not handed off to us and then i graduated
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in from college in 2008 into the teeth of the great recession and that sense of dispossession
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became more literal i realized that millennials are materially disinherited we are materially
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well behind what the baby boomers had accomplished economically by the time they were our age and so
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i started investigating that sense that the millennials were not very well off and i discovered that the
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statistics backed me up that in terms of wealth accumulation millennials have accumulated a quarter
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of what the boomers had when they were our age not that we're 75 where the boomers are right now
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we're 75 behind where they were when they were in their 20s and 30s so i tried to trace back
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where all of these fears of society had gone wrong what happened to destroy our churches what happened to
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destroy our families and our schools and our economy and every single thread that i pulled on led me back
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to the same place the generation that came of age in the 1960s and was shaped by the 1960s
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and then attained the summits of power in the 1990s the baby boomers they were behind all of the
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declines that i investigated and let's talk about the how just a little bit i don't want to give
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away too much um of what your book talks about and argues but i do want you to reveal for us how how did
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they do that because i think that you know my parents are baby boomers i'm also a millennial and i think
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about my parents personal stories coming from um you know relative uh poverty i mean they weren't
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raised with anything extra their parents did kind of help set them up for success by working harder
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and providing a better life for their kids than than they had and so my parents probably feel like they
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just kind of got the torch passed to them and they said okay i'm gonna make sure that i have a life that
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is better for my kids um than the one i had so yeah my parents they you know started their own
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business and they were much more successful than their parents were and they were able to provide
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us with opportunities that they did not have i would say a lot of millennials would say that that is true
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for them too so in my parents own estimation and probably in the estimation of a lot of baby boomers
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they would say you know what are you talking about we created such a better life for you than the ones
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we had you guys have it so easy and you're just lazy and that's why you don't have all the wealth
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and success that we baby boomers have had what's your response to that that's absolutely something
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that i hear a lot so many baby boomers say you kids today you have iphones you don't know how good
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you have it i never could have had an iphone even if they had existed when i was in my early 20s
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and so it's important to clarify exactly what i mean when i say that millennials are economically
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not very well off one complaint that a lot of millennials have is that it is no longer possible
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to attain a middle-class lifestyle on one income so if you're in a millennial couple and you're married
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maybe you have a kid uh both parents now need to go into the workforce in order to attain just a
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basic standard of living and that was just not the case in the 1950s in the 1950s you could have
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a house big enough for a family and all of the middle-class amenities on one income and you'd have
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a husband working and the wife could stay home if she chose to the baby boomers are responsible
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for the difficulty that millennials have in making ends meet as a middle-class couple
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because they were the generation that sent women into the workforce on mass just as a statistical
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reality very few families were dual earner families in 1960 and nowadays most of them are and so that
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switch happened over the course of the baby boom generation but elizabeth morin coined the term the
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two-income trap for what happened when women flooded into the workforce in the 70s and 80s which is that
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they simply bid up the price of a middle-class living so nobody was actually economically better
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off because all the women entered the workforce at the same time and so the two-income trap means that
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the cost of a middle-class lifestyle now requires two incomes where it didn't before and so in terms
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of consumer spending if you're a millennial yeah you may have you know pocket money to spend on
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things like an iphone you may be materially well off in that sense but if you can't afford a middle
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class living on one income and your grandparents could i think it's perfectly fair to say that you
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are poorer than they were in a deep and fundamental sense and moving beyond just the economics of it do you
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also think there was a failure to pass down the values that a lot of greatest generation and silent
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generation parents had and maybe passed down to baby boomers it almost seems like there was this
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growth of hyper individualism that happened sometime when baby boomers were coming of age that they then
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passed down to their kids that the kind of disintegration of the family unit the de-emphasis of
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mom staying at home and being the primary influence over their kids that does seem to have at least become
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more and more popular in the 80s and 90s and less of an influence on family togetherness and family values
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and more of an emphasis on um on okay you just follow your dreams and climb the corporate ladder and make
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a lot of money and that's all that life's about do you think that that shift in values had any effect
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on on what millennials are experiencing right now i think a shift in values is exactly the right way to
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describe it because it's a running theme that you see across the board from the baby boomers they
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believe that individual choice is the highest value which has led them to be institution destroyers
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because that's the thing about institutions there's something bigger than the individual which means that
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an institution constrains individual choices you know you sign up to be part of a family you make certain
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commitments suddenly your individual choices are not as free as they were anymore that's kind of the whole point
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of an institution and the boomers knocked down the family churches anything uh traditional
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because they held individual choice to be the highest value the irony of that is that their success
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in destroying institutions has now resulted in a world where millennials have fewer choices
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the whole point of elizabeth warren's calling the two-income trap a trap is that nowadays there are
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actually lots of millennial women who say it's great that women are able to enter the workforce if
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they want to go feminism but i would like to stay home the problem is that i can't because the shape of
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the economy has changed so now it's an economic requirement my house can't make ends meet if i
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don't go into the workforce so even millennials who want to choose to stay at home now discover that
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they can't so in maximizing individual choice and destroying institutions the boomers ended up
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actually constraining the choices of their children that's that those kinds of ironies
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pop up all over the place once you start studying the boomer
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and it's a little bit of a vicious cycle i think with millennials because i think that in some ways
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we have been taught that it's not a good choice or not a successful choice to stay home as women that
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we are betraying our gender we're betraying feminism and all the people who fought for us to be
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liberated from the shackles of just being this miserable housewife um and so there is also this
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uh i think these competing desires in a lot of millennial moms that yes i maybe i want to stay home like
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like my mom did for example my baby boomer mom did stay home at the same time i was certainly taught
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the importance of a career and the importance of being educated and following your dreams and all
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of that which you know i'm thankful for but there's a competition of desires i would say even in me and in
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a lot of young christian conservative millennial women that okay if i stay home am i giving up all
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the opportunities and everything that my baby boomer parents gave me should i be outside of the home am i
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wasting my life um and i don't really worry about this but a lot of people do am i wasting my life
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by just being at home that wasn't a concern that wasn't really a thought it seems like 50 years ago
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so that's what i'm talking about with this vicious cycle that yes there are you know a lot of
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millennials say that they want the economy to change so that one parent can stay at home at the same time
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they don't really want to stay home because they're afraid that they are betraying you know
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feminism the opportunities they've been given or their self you're absolutely right i grew up also in
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a cultural world where i was taught that to stay home was a waste of a college education and that a
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woman is somehow giving up her chances of self-actualization if she chooses to stay home and raise children
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and in the research for this book i decided to investigate the origins of that concept because
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it's really astonishing anyone who's ever met a stay-at-home mom would not immediately come to
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the conclusion that she was not self-actualized they're wonderful people right my favorite people
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in the world are stay-at-home moms and i discovered that it was the feminists of the 1960s who really had
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an active campaign against women staying home and i also discovered that a lot of them in pursuit of
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that propaganda lied betty friedan is famous as the author of the feminine mystique and she supposedly
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based that book which is a tirade against staying at home on the results of an alumnae questionnaire
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that was sent to her graduating class of smith college and all of the women who had graduated
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with her the survey asked how they were feeling you know a decade after they graduated or 15 years
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she wrote in her book that the results of that survey showed that so many of these women were
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squandering their gifts at home and they felt stifled and oppressed and you know all the women who
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graduated from smith and then became stay-at-home moms were miserable well uh after that book came out
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scholars then went into the archives to find the actual results of that survey and they discovered
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that the respondents of that survey most of them who stayed at home and didn't have jobs said they
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had never been happier they said i love staying at home i feel like i could go out and get a job if i
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wanted to the reason i haven't is that i don't want to the betty friedan misrepresented the whole basis of
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her book and you see that again and again with the boomers they they have a propaganda point they want to
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push and they won't let the truth get in the way of the point they want to make do you think both
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conservative and liberal boomers alike are responsible for these problems um or do you think
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it's more of the kind of hyper individualist liberal activist boomers who are to blame for a lot of these
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not every baby boomer is a progressive that's absolutely true but the baby boomer legacy
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is a progressive one and i think that the reason why that is the case is that the baby boomers who
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were more conservative chose to focus on economic freedom that's true and that's true kind of kind of
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let the social stuff slide they figured you know we we got to fight our battles where we can win them
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and we think economic freedom is more winnable and i love economic freedom and i think it's extremely
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important i think capitalism is great i'm glad the ussr is gone but completely ignoring social issues
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for so many decades has now resulted in a world where those battles are so completely lost
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that the liberals have seized the entire field so yeah the the boomer not every boomer is a progressive
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but the boomer legacy is a progressive one you know i think i'm thinking about how the
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conservative boomer is represented and i think about ronald reagan who certainly himself i would
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say was a social cultural conservative obviously he was against abortion he would say that he was
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very profoundly but when you look at his legislative priorities or the policies that he proposed
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not just nationally but abroad he was very focused on economic freedom i mean one of the things
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that he writes about that he really believed that the more we exported capitalism to somewhere like
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china the freer they would become the happier they would become well we exported capitalism and imported
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some communism into america so that didn't necessarily work i think we a lot of baby boomers
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and ronald reagan who is not a baby boomer but he kind of represents a lot of the political views of
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baby boomers believed that economic freedom and economic prosperity and the capitalist dream of
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owning your own business and being an entrepreneur and just making a lot of money would kind of solve
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all of the other problems too now i grew i did grow up in the church i grew up in the southern baptist
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church and so we were culturally socially theologically conservative and there was a reckoning in the 1980s in the
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southern baptist convention to get away from kind of this hyper individualism and and liberalism uh that
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was happening inside the church and so that certainly happened they helped reagan get elected they helped
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george hw bush get elected they kind of helped go after bill clinton because of you know his moral
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improprieties and so there is also a large segment of baby boomers who were culturally conservative who did
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in their own minds try to pass down conservative good you know so-called family values down to
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millennials like do you put those people off to the side as a caveat in your book or do you think that
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they also are part of the problem no i think those people valiantly fought against the way the tide was
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turning as the baby boomers kind of achieved their ascendancy and it is a pity that the people that
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you're talking about happened to lose but i think it is a matter of history that they did lose that
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the moral majority turned out not to be much of a majority at all or even in the cases where they
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were in the majority being in the majority didn't matter because the left was playing dirty and
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accomplishing its goals not through the democratic process but through the court that's another side of
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the boomer story that one reason the progressives within the boomer generation were so all-conquering
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and triumphant was not that they were especially persuasive or that they convinced everybody to agree
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with them it's that they learned to operate uh and impose their views by long march through the
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institutions by conquering the courts and using them to override democratic outcomes so yeah they played
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dirty and that's why they won can you talk about why you chose to dedicate chapters to the people
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to the baby boomers that you did you talk about steve jobs aaron sorkin jeffrey sacks camille pig uh
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paglia al sharpton and sonia sotomayor um why did you pick these people and how did they kind of prove
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the point that you're making that baby boomers did not set millennials up for success
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i read a lot of books about baby boomers in the preparation for writing this one
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and i was consistently frustrated by books that talked about the whole generation
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in in broad generalization because i thought it was just too vague and abstract i really wanted when
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it came to writing my book to ground it in the concrete so i thought the best way to do that
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would be to take individuals and tell their personal stories and i chose one baby boomers
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not just who were really influential although they clearly were somebody like steve jobs has changed
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the the face of the world i mean you might even make an argument that no one has influenced the way
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the world looks today more than steve jobs has but i more than that wanted people whose individual
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stories represented something about the baby boomer tragedy these are all people who have elements of
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greatness and who embarked on their lives with very good intentions and so they were people who were
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undone by the flaws of their generation and in that sense tragic rather than simply villainous i'm interested
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in particular to hear you talk about camille paglia and al sharpton and the ways that you think that
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they represent and their lives and their mission um represent some of the flaws with the baby boomer
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generation so if you can start with camille paglia and um just some of in in your view some of the
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erroneous ideas that she has pushed to the detriment of the current younger generations
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camille paglia is someone who a lot of conservatives actually really like yeah because it's got
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interesting things to say oh i and i love her she's definitely of of all the people that i profile i
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think i probably like her the best yeah i really enjoy her writing and i i admire her a lot but in the
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1990s when she was you know a valiant warrior in the original pc wars and she was standing up against
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the school marmish second wave feminists and against the politically correct relativists who said that
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the western canon was dumb and oppressive you know a lot of people asked her back then camille paglia
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aren't does that make you a conservative and she would always say that she's not a conservative
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because her favorite things in the world are prostitution and pornography she she calls herself
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a sex positive feminist and that was what differentiated her from the school marmish feminists
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who were complaining about date rape and whatnot the trouble is that i genuinely think that historians
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of the 24th century when they talk about our current era if they only have a paragraph to give to what
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the world was like circa 2020 they will mention ubiquitous pornography it's just completely different than it was
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even 20 or 30 years ago i think millennials know better than anyone else what streaming video has done
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to the pornography landscape and so for camille paglia to be so blithe you know as as if pornography were
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still a matter of you know playboy centerfold as they were in the 1970s for her to say that pornography
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is a thing to be celebrated because she's so sex positive i find that deeply naive and in a very boomerish
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way because the baby boomers were the ones who were the architects of the sexual revolution and who thought
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that just unleashing individual sexual desire would lead to a paradise would lead to sexual fulfillment
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and they learned or should have learned very very quickly that that is not what happens when you
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unleash everybody's sexual desires in fact what you get is a glimpse of the dark side so camille paglia
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failed to learn some important lessons right so she represents kind of taking some of the ideas of the
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sexual revolution that were fanned into flame in the 1960s and then passing that flaming baton on to
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the next generation through ideas that sound very liberating sex positive i mean no one wants to say
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that they're sex negative um being liberated well no one wants to say that they're trapped and oppressed
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um it makes it sound very good without actually understanding like you said the repercussions of the
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objectification of something like prostitution and pornography and what it actually means to human beings
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and that really goes back to a much larger conversation about the world view of a lot of
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these people how they view human nature where they believe we come from what they believe humans are
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and are here for where does morality come from all these questions that i would argue that baby boomers
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in some ways obviously not all of them didn't do a good job of answering in the midst of so much
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postmodern confusion in the 1960s and then helping baby boomer or helping millennials understand those
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questions would you say that's part of why millennials are so stuck in this postmodern chaos that we find
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ourselves in today and that's one of the great frustrations that i've had in debating this book
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with baby boomers they say you know materially the millennials are quite well off as a generation
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and i say well you know i have my quibbles with whether or not that's true but even granting
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that that were true that the millennials were materially very well off and very prosperous from
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the perspective of history none of that really matters considering that we are the least married
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generation in american history just we're not something's not coming together and we're not forming
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partnerships we're not forming families uh religion used to be a fundamental part of american
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society and today the protestant mainline churches i mean the episcopalian church i would not lay money
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on it still existing in 100 years right it is moribund it's dying these churches are dying so if you live
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in a world where nothing matters except the pursuit of pleasure it really doesn't matter how economically
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well off you are so the boomers themselves came of age at a time when religion was still functioning civil
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society was still functioning and they were the ones who threw off religion and said i don't care about
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churches i don't care about marriage so they got the best of both worlds yeah they got the grounding
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in that stability that was still existing when they were growing up and then they failed to pass it on to
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their children so they had the stability and then the liberation whereas millennials did not inherit
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that stability we just inherited chaos and i think it's hard for boomers who grew up at a time when
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things were more stable to really appreciate what that chaos has been like
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and this really helps us understand why there are so many millennials that have taken to socialism
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um it might be that lack of stability that was given to a lot of people uh from the family from churches
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from institutions and now people are looking to the states people are looking for someone to tell them
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what's right and wrong that they're going to be taken care of that all of their needs are going to be met
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these kind of safety nets and sense of security that we used to be able to find in institutions
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outside of the state i think for millennials they felt like they were unstable like they disintegrated
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that all you were encouraged to do was to get rich and to follow the capitalist dream and i think what a lot of
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young people are finding is that well that's not completely satisfying that's not completely secure
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what about these other needs that i have like and of course you and i as conservatives we both know
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that socialism promises to meet those needs and never actually does it always just ends in misery
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but you can kind of understand for people who say who look back and they say okay well yeah maybe my
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parents gave me better economic opportunity but uh the failures of capitalism has actually ended us or
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brought us to this place of misery and despair and i need to look a different direction for my security
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it kind of helps us understand why people like aoc and bernie sanders are so appealing to the millennial
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generation that lack that sense of security that you're talking about
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i look at people my age who join movements like antifa or who get super into woke politics
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and at some level i sympathize with them my heart goes out to them because it seems to me like in a
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lot of cases what they're looking for is community they are growing up atomized and alienated and they
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don't have anywhere to go to find i mean it used to be that you would go on sunday to church and you would
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have a community there a community would be ready made for you in the church that you attended and
00:28:17.040
that's just no longer even on their radar so they're clearly looking for something that institutions
00:28:23.940
like churches used to provide which they can now only find in crazy left-wing politics but i think the
00:28:30.640
conservatives really need to take a lesson from that they need to say well if you want young people
00:28:36.380
to be conservative you need to give them something to conserve you need to have them feel like they
00:28:42.580
have a stake in their society so i think that's the number one lesson that we need to have just
00:28:46.520
tattooed on our foreheads going forward give people something to conserve and then maybe fewer of them
00:28:52.960
will be crazy woke socialists and you know as you're talking i'm realizing that i'm not really sure that
00:28:58.840
right now um young conservatism if you could call it a movement is really doing that i actually see
00:29:06.080
a heavy emphasis on what baby boomers emphasized which is only economic freedom which of course you
00:29:13.100
and i agree is very important and should be emphasized the differences in capitalism and socialism and why
00:29:20.240
capitalism is fundamentally better and more compassionate and fairer than socialism is however it's clearly not
00:29:28.160
enough because that's what the baby boomers only tried to conserve too in a lot of ways there has to
00:29:33.960
be something more and i and i think that a long a lot of young conservatives are scared to say hey we need
00:29:39.780
to conserve the family or we need to conserve faith because they're afraid that they're going to make the
00:29:45.620
tent too small they're not going to be able to get you know questioning or politically agnostic people
00:29:52.640
onto our side if we hammer on the social issues i just i think that we've already seen though that we
00:30:00.840
can't separate economic freedom or economic conservatism from social and cultural conservatism
00:30:07.600
because economic conservatism is fundamentally it doesn't work and it's unsatisfying outside of the
00:30:15.940
institutions and the value centers of family of church of other forms of community that we used to
00:30:25.120
hold dear and now we don't do you agree with that there's a reason why social liberalism's greatest
00:30:32.780
victories in the last three decades have all been in the supreme court and that's because when you
00:30:40.320
fight it out in the democratic arena social conservatism wins because social conservatism
00:30:46.780
is popular because people care about their families and traditions that's what really matters to them
00:30:52.700
that's what hits them where they live that's what gets them motivated to go out to a ballot box in the
00:30:57.060
campaign for a candidate the things that they're passionate about so one of the greatest faults of the
00:31:03.960
baby boomers is their refusal to relinquish power a lot of baby boomer flaws are things that you know
00:31:12.200
weren't necessarily their fault and they were mistakes that they made when they were too young to know
00:31:16.380
better but this one is really on them this is really i i've i've faulted them for not moving on and
00:31:24.360
letting younger generations move on and one of the consequences of that is that the things that were
00:31:29.680
important to them in the 1980s are still important to them now because it's really hard for an old dog to
00:31:35.100
learn new tricks and so any political movement needs to respond to current circumstances that's the
00:31:41.620
whole point of being relevant you know that's the essence you respond to changing circumstances
00:31:45.920
that's what shows that your ideas are flexible that you're responding to reality rather than just
00:31:51.240
ideology and it's really difficult for boomers to do that individually and the movement would be able to do
00:31:57.240
that better if they created space for younger leaders to start coming up and i think it's really
00:32:03.640
really a flaw of the boomers that they have not done that can you talk to me i have two more questions
00:32:09.320
for you can you talk to me about al sharpton why you chose to write about him and uh how he represents
00:32:17.160
well al sharpton he's just a compelling character isn't he he's been he's got a longer career than just about
00:32:26.600
anybody in the civil rights arena his first big case was in the 1980s so he's just been going on
00:32:32.900
and going on and going on he's got longevity so there's clearly something to him whether you agree
00:32:39.340
with him or disagree with him the reason why i chose him is as a rebuttal to the baby boomers primary
00:32:47.180
defense most baby boomers if you start reciting to them their flaws and the terrible things that the
00:32:54.040
boomers did will say yeah yeah maybe that's true but don't forget we did civil rights and doesn't
00:33:00.200
that just trump all other circumstances and of course that is the biggest con that the baby boomers
00:33:07.420
have ever pulled because no baby boomer was responsible for the golden age achievements of
00:33:14.400
civil rights in the 1960s yeah they wasn't pretty young right yeah unless unless you were freedom
00:33:20.260
writing at the age of three and a half you baby boomers were not there at selma you were not voting
00:33:25.980
for the civil rights act in 1964 the era of civil rights that the baby boomers were responsible for
00:33:32.520
was the darker more violent more manipulative era that's represented by al sharpton uh he's a
00:33:40.200
hope sure he's a fomenter of riot there's a very good argument to be made that al sharpton has blood on
00:33:46.980
his hands is directly responsible for individual death so that's the when we think of boomers and
00:33:54.120
civil rights we should think of that we shouldn't think of marching at selma and 1964 and dr king
00:33:59.500
we should think of tawana brawley and the crown heights riot and the other things that are
00:34:06.740
yeah and obviously baby boomers are not um they're they weren't created in a vacuum obviously their
00:34:23.480
parents had an effect on them whose parents had an effect on them the parents so baby boomers according
00:34:29.460
to pew research they start in 1946 and the last baby boomers were born in 1965 a lot of their parents
00:34:37.320
were part of the silent generation which were my grandparents born in the 1930s but some of their
00:34:42.400
parents were the greatest generation we know them as the greatest generation they fought in world war ii
00:34:47.820
whether they were at home or whether they were abroad everyone was contributing to the effort we think
00:34:52.980
of that as the height of patriotism and really you know a lot of people are nostalgic for that time in
00:35:00.180
our history where it seems like our institutions were intact and things mattered the way that they
00:35:04.980
were supposed to not perfect of course as far as equality and civil rights and things like that
00:35:08.880
but in a lot of ways that we see that as america's glory days how do we go from the greatest generation
00:35:17.540
to the baby boomers and some of the chaos that you're talking about so quickly like what happened
00:35:26.060
in some ways it was the greatest generation's fault they were one of the you know as the name says one
00:35:35.840
of the greatest generations in american history their achievements are unquestionable but going through
00:35:42.700
the great depression and then world war ii caused these men and women to want to give their children
00:35:50.840
the easy life that they hadn't had they thought i suffered through those great national traumas and
00:35:57.860
made those sacrifices so that my children could grow up in peace and prosperity and they succeeded in
00:36:06.840
doing that america was enjoyed unparalleled prosperity and unparalleled social cohesion
00:36:12.280
in the 1950s when the baby boomers were growing up the problem is that that then gave the baby boomers the idea
00:36:20.360
that peace and prosperity was the natural order of things and that america would always be that way
00:36:26.960
and even if they rebelled against the institutions that they inherited and acted out and were selfish and
00:36:33.380
narcissistic and didn't put in any sacrifices of their own to match the sacrifices that their parents had made
00:36:40.460
that things would still always be basically okay that's a common mistake in in human history people
00:36:47.640
assuming that prosperity and peace is the natural order when really it takes generation after generation
00:36:54.380
of maintenance and sacrifice to uphold it so in some ways the greatest generation is responsible
00:37:02.780
for the baby boomers having the mentality that they do because so many of the baby boomers mistakes
00:37:08.100
were from this misconception that no matter how badly they acted out everything would always be okay
00:37:14.720
yeah every generation obviously is going to have its imperfections and its flaws i mean we're finite
00:37:20.920
people so we have this inability to see how the choices that we're making today are going to have a long-term
00:37:27.460
effect on generations to come maybe we can understand how it'll affect our children directly
00:37:32.220
but most people when they're taking a job or choosing a career path they are thinking about themselves
00:37:38.060
they're thinking about maybe their spouse and the people and directly in their circle but they're not
00:37:42.140
thinking about the the larger sociological long-term impacts that their impact that their choices
00:37:50.900
may be making so eventually though everyone has to kind of take responsibility for their own
00:38:01.560
generation's foibles and failures yes we can look back to the uh baby boomers and the silent generation and and the
00:38:09.960
greatest generation but we also i think you would agree have to give some grace to realize that a lot of them
00:38:15.180
were doing exactly what they thought was best at the time even though now we see in hindsight that okay you could
00:38:21.740
have done a better job millennials are the same way yes we have inherited some bad things from baby boomers but
00:38:28.500
we've also got some stupidity and some bad choices that we've got to own on on our on our own by
00:38:35.140
ourselves and so what are some tips that you can give to us as millennials to make sure that we don't repeat
00:38:43.560
some of our parents generations mistakes um and also to start thinking in a way of okay what kind of legacy what
00:38:51.780
kind of world do i want to leave the future generations so someone isn't writing um a scathing
00:38:59.460
a scathing review of me and my generation which i think probably will already happen to millennials but
00:39:05.140
you know hopefully i won't be the subject of a chapter in a book about how terrible millennials are
00:39:10.740
yeah oh i'm sure it'll happen i'm sure it will um i think in many ways the tragedy of the millennial
00:39:20.100
generation is that on the one hand nobody knows better than us that we need to make better choices
00:39:26.980
than the boomers did we are in a lot of ways the victims of their mistakes so we are well positioned
00:39:33.140
to see those mistakes and to learn from them and i think a lot of millennials have the tragedy lies in
00:39:39.300
the fact that because the boomers damage has been so systemic a lot of times those better choices that
00:39:48.100
we know we should make are not available to us religion is a good example uh if you are a millennial
00:39:56.020
you are very likely to have come to the conclusion that the indifference to religion that the boomers
00:40:01.540
propagated was a wrong turn and that america needs to maybe make its way back to having a little bit more
00:40:08.580
respect for pay for faith especially in the public square the problem is that the churches especially the
00:40:16.180
protestant mainline churches have been run by boomers for a couple of generations now so if you go down
00:40:21.860
the street to your local episcopalian church it's not going to be the same church that existed there
00:40:26.660
in 1960 and it's maybe not going to be something that's worth giving your life to so the institution of
00:40:32.500
the family is in disarray um the two-income trap that's another example of millennials not having
00:40:39.460
choices available to them even when they know they should make it so the mission that millennials
00:40:43.620
need to set ourselves is not just to learn from the boomers mistakes but to repair the damage that
00:40:51.860
they did to institutions there's some rebuilding that's going to need to happen first before we can
00:40:59.140
start making those better choices and we need to do that for ourselves and and now for our own kids
00:41:04.180
yep absolutely millennials are no longer college students i think some people maybe baby boomers
00:41:10.260
boomers they think that all young people are millennials the oldest millennials are turning
00:41:15.060
40 this year i believe the youngest millennials were born in 1996 and so all of us are adults we're
00:41:23.300
out of college we got mortgages we got kids and maybe it's time for also millennials to to realize that
00:41:30.100
that we are in a place of responsibility and we do have the ability to rebuild and to lead in a
00:41:35.380
different way than maybe we were led um and so i hope that your book encourages people to do that
00:41:41.060
and kind of gives us some context and understanding of why we are where we are but not wallow in self
00:41:46.740
loathing and victimhood but take those lessons and change them while we have the ability to do so can you
00:41:55.700
tell everyone where they can buy your book and how else they can support and follow you
00:42:01.380
you can find me and a lot of other great writers at the american conservative.com
00:42:07.060
on social media i'm mostly on twitter at her andrews the book is boomers the men and women who
00:42:13.940
promised freedom and delivered disaster and it's available at amazon barnes and noble and wherever else
00:42:19.140
the books are sold awesome that is great thank you so much i really appreciate you taking the time