BABY BOOMERS SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF THEMSELVES

I would think there has never been a generation quite like the baby boomers who preached such high ideals and fell so short of fulfilling them.

Our generation promised peace, love and understanding. Instead we delivered bombs - even "smart" ones and plenty of them. In our self-righteousness we attacked Grenada, Lebanon, Libya, Panama, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq twice; not to mention all the other places where we meddle clandestinely. Civilian casualties, including children, are considered tolerable "collateral damage." Our military/industrial complex continues to provide the vast majority of the weapons in the world, many of which are used against our own citizens or allies.

Our generation demonized our parents for not even questioning the Vietnam War and allowing it to escalate. Now that we hold power in government, media, business, and the military, we do exactly the same thing with Afghanistan and Iraq. We don't even escalate, we unleash unimaginable firepower from the onset. We condone the present Administration's self-declared right to preemptive attack against perceived threats from other nations or alleged terrorists.

When the baby boomers were the ones doing the fighting we vehemently opposed the Vietnam War. Now that we are too old to fight we patriotically support our naive children who go off to war as our surrogate warriors and like our parents we watch it all on TV from the coziness of our living rooms.

The 1971 Coca-Cola commercial said that we would "like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony" and yet we have managed to alienate just about everyone in the global community.

As young people we passionately expounded the importance of cleaning up the environment. Now we allow much of the legislation we were instrumental in creating to be repealed or its restrictions reduced. We even oppose the global community's efforts to address global warming by rejecting the Kyoto Protocol.

Our generation has produced some of the biggest corporate scandals in American history; tortured, humiliated and murdered prisoners of war; and incarcerated people indefinitely without due process or the right to an attorney. Our politicians misappropriate money and obstruct justice, and our clergy molest children while church leaders stand idly by. The gap between rich and poor is far greater than when we grew up and continues to widen. The divorce rate is soaring. We have had an unprecedented rise in our incarceration rate which is six times higher than it was in 1972 and the highest of any industrialized nation in the world.

Media executives of our generation develop "reality shows" and other forms of crude, mindless entertainment that create an atmosphere of fear, violence, intolerance, and disrespect for one another.

Our generation has produced few if any role models for our young people - unless you consider greed to be an attribute. The only political leader of our lot who lived up to part of our youthful philosophy was Bill Clinton who actively condoned "free love" while in office.

We can only hope the children of the baby boomers do not try to emulate us.