Boomers: The Real Greatest Generation

But this is a story that rarely gets told. In part that's because the media prefer the dramatic or the epic, which leaves out a great deal of social change. In part it's because we remain fixated on the '60s, as if boomer history ended there. Yet nearly four decades have passed since the '60s ended, and the ways in which America has changed are so far-reaching and fundamental that they have transformed how we live as profoundly as any war or New Deal.

Today, we see minorities and women contributing to society in ways that would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago. Diversity and pluralism are now moral values, bigotry and sexual harassment no longer get a free pass, and ethnic boundaries once considered impermeable are breaking down in media, society and personal relationships. Half of all teens now report dating across racial and ethnic lines -- and 90 percent say their parents have no problem with it.

Discrimination against gays? Increasingly prohibited. Domestic partner benefits? Increasingly accepted. Men sharing housework and child care duties? No more raised eyebrows. Toxic runoffs and belching smokestacks? No longer tolerated. The command and control workplace? On its way out.

So natural and comfortable are these new norms that most of us take them for granted, as if it's always been this way. Because we live in a changed America, we tend to forget what it was like before boomers agitated for change.

Boomer-bashing has become a virtual cottage industry. They're labeled "the worst generation." They're accused of infantilism and self-promotion. One Web site described them as "a plague of self-centered locusts."

Part of what drives this vitriol is an implied criticism that boomers are soft and overindulged because they never sacrificed in a Great War or Depression. But millions of boomers fought bravely in a war their parents handed them, and millions more risked arrest, uncertainty and ostracism for protesting what they believed to be the pointlessness and duplicity of that war. There's no reason to believe that boomers wouldn't have fought Hitler as nobly as their parents did, and boomer antiwar protesters said as much at the time, distinguishing between what they saw as the just and necessary war against fascism and the misguided, deceptive and morally ambiguous war in Vietnam.

As for the well-worn condemnation of boomer materialism, the truth is that materialism is nothing new in America, and boomers are far from the first and only generation to face this charge: It was conspicuous consumption in the 1920s and keeping up with the Joneses in the '50s.

Boomers certainly haven't solved all of society's problems, and they've created a few as well. But if we held the World War II generation to the same standard, the word "greatest" would never come to mind. Even if we're not a perfect America today, in so many ways we're a better America. And for that, we owe the baby boomers our thanks.

lsteinh@american.edu

Leonard Steinhorn, a professor of communications at American University, is the author of "The Greater Generation: In Defense of the Baby Boom Legacy" (Thomas Dunne Books).