Baby Boomers wreck everything

Conservative Baby Boomers are self-indulgent, unaware, anti-social and ugly: Baby Boomers in the highest political and business offices are wrecking everything
 
 
by kevin potvin
 
It’s a convenient political deception that tax relief for individuals looks like good old-fashioned power-to-the-people populism. But tax cuts are seldom in the public interest. That smarmy comment made by the Liberal campaign organizer, the one who said Stephen Harper’s plan to cancel government-sponsored day care and replace it with cheques sent directly to families would instead be spent on beer and popcorn, was right. (Although, while the beer part makes sense, I don’t know how popcorn came to be regarded in his mind as some expensive, self-indulgent treat.)
The beauty about tax cuts (from the point of view of those espousing them) is that they aren’t meant to generate spending in any particular sector, so that while it would be a shame (and a real risk) that money meant for day care would be spent on beer and popcorn, it would be perfectly fine if money from tax cuts were.
But putting public resources in the hands of individuals is hardly a society-building plan. Society is more than the sum of the individuals in it; and societal priorities, and the government-spending policies responding to them, are also more than the accumulation of millions of individuals making millions of individual spending-decisions. Everyone in a family knows this: family priorities are not determined by the pooled self-interested wishes of all the individual members of the family. We are an animal capable of thinking and acting on higher levels than just the immediate self-interest of lone animals in the wild. We think and act as individuals for sure, but we also act on a family level, on a level that includes friends and close social circles, on other levels that include work relationships and wider contacts, and, ultimately, on societal levels, a global-species level, and finally, on the level of all living things.
Thinking and acting on one level often contradicts our interests on a different level. I may wish as an individual to sleep longer, but on the family level, I get up at five in the morning to take my kid to hockey practice. I may want my family to keep all our money, but on a societal level, we willingly pay taxes to see hospitals, schools, roads, and sewers built and kept up.
This is why the conservative parties in power nationally and provincially in this country, including ours in British Columbia, obsess with individual tax-cuts to the detriment of the very conservatism whose traditions they claim to inherit and whose mantle they presume to carry. Conservatism in Canada has always expressed concern for the preservation of the goals of those higher levels of human thinking and acting—the family, the broader social circles of the associations, and the bigger projects of society itself. Conservatives have always railed against individual wish-fulfillment, instead insisting we must subsume those base desires to family needs and societal requirements.
But this is all foreign territory for those conservatives who were children of the ’60s, who, through excessive Spock-inspired indulgence, know nothing beyond their own self-interests, yet feel unequivocally justified in subsuming all other levels of thinking and activity to themselves, even now that they are at the pinnacle of power and influence in politics and business.
Everything the demographic tsunami called the Baby Boom has rolled over on its path through history, it has debased and destroyed. And now, having arrived by dint of age at the heights of senior power, it is power itself that conservative Baby Boomers debase and destroy. By diverting hard-won and long-built-up government resources into individually gratifying tax-cuts, conservative Baby Boomers—Stephen Harper, Gordon Campbell, Sam Sullivan included—debase and corrode the higher levels of family, friendships, and society we also operate on. These self-described conservatives use their access to power to degenerate conservatism itself.
But don’t look to the so-called conservative mainstream media to remind them of conservatism’s roots, or to chide them for pandering to self-indulgence with populist demagoguery. The two daily papers in this city actually found the new BC budget too short on tax cuts and too long on the kind of social spending that weaves a stronger social fabric. Both Wayne Moriarty at The Province and Patricia Graham at The Vancouver Sun found fit the day after the release of the new provincial budget for 2006-2007 to print editorials chastising the government for not debasing conservatism’s principles enough. They represent the view that we all ought to have more gratification of self-indulgent urges, and all of it more immediately, too. Their call is echoed now in the halls of political power, where conservative regimes in Victoria and Ottawa cry out with the same baby-like booming demands: more for me, now! It’s become the same familiar screech heard in all our business boardrooms too: More, me, now; more, me, now.
When conservative Baby Boomers were children or university students, they could only make noise. Over the years, as rising middle managers and business- and NGO-builders, as well as young family parents, their noses were too hard to the grindstone to work on any concerted level. But now that conservative Baby Boomers are at the top in political parties, have found the executive suites in businesses, and are free of the fetters of young children and onerous mortgages, they are in a position to remake society in their image. And, just like the spoilt child, the pampered university student, the wealth-inheriting young person, and the catered-to middle class they have always been, the now power-infested conservative Baby Boom class is, in a word, ugly.
The worst news is, having been so pampered and catered-to all their lives, ugly conservative Baby Boomers will also live the longest, and will enjoy their undeserved and thoroughly destructive stint at the top of power for an inordinately long time—long enough, no doubt, to do irreparable damage to all those human endeavours that self-centered Baby Boomers have never been aware of, have seldom contributed to, and find no reason to support now.  Retirement age should be lowered, not raised—the sooner to get rid of the lot of them.