Early Baby Boomers have been called a lot of names in the generation's nearly six decades of existence—the insolent teenagers of the 1950s; the self-centered Yuppies of the 1980s; now the aging spendthrifts who will bust the federal budget and bankrupt their children with unreasonable demands for creature comfort in old age.
Most who were born in the early years after World War II grew up in a world of stability and order: lasting marriages, moms at home, fathers with permanent employment, local merchants who knew and watched them, neighborhoods where the people next door were ever-present and predictable. The three television networks ran essentially the same programs; the bread and soup and cereal all tasted alike. It was snug; it was also widely perceived as monotonous and a little claustrophobic, as well as unfair to many members of society.
As the boomers became adults, the most fortunate soon found themselves tasting new treats: the erosion of sexual restraint, the ability to travel virtually anywhere, magic electronic devices that brought instant knowledge and entertainment, and most of all, ever-expanding choice—the freedom to make important life decisions and then unmake them at will: new locations, new spouses, new careers, all subject to endless re-evaluation out of a concern that something more exciting might lie around the corner.
Needless to say, this doesn't depict the life course of all the boomers who came to maturity in the 1960s. Beneath the hype and the rhetoric, millions of them managed to do things the old-fashioned way right up to the end of the 20th century: one spouse, one house, one neighborhood, one career. But for large segments of the elite, the ones who went to the best schools and found their way into prestigious professions—the Bill Clintons of the world, if you like—life really did open up in the 1960s.
By the late 1980s and early 1990s, a fair number of these early baby boomers began expressing a sort of Faustian bewilderment at the excesses of temptation and the erosion of rules and standards. "I want to live in a place again where I can walk down any street without being afraid," Hillary Clinton lamented in her mid-40s, when she was First Lady. "I want to remember what I used to be able to do when I was a little kid."
It was a common enough sentiment among some boomers as they passed through the trials of middle age, unsupported by any clear set of values or moral compass. Work, marriage and community had lost their permanence; schools that instructed pupils in the minutiae of personal behavior in the 1950s no longer felt comfortable offering guidance on the most fundamental questions of moral conduct. And so, remarkable as it might seem, quite a few of these baby boomers began to feel nostalgic for the limited life they had resisted so vehemently when they were young.
Source: Alan Ehrenhalt commentary, Newsweek, July 24, 2006