Golis: Say hello to the millennials

At NewYorker.com, Editor David Remnick recently declared Bob Dylan to be 'the greatest song writer who ever lived' and Dylan's 'Highway 61 Revisited' to be 'the greatest rock album ever made.'

As you might imagine, I wasted no time sharing the news with my children, if only to irritate them. Whether it's music or movies or politics, their generation has adopted the subversive view that people who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s — people like me — need to get over themselves.

This is no doubt true, but please don't tell my children I said so.

The year now coming to a close marked a milestone for baby boomers. For the first time, they are no longer the largest generation.

'There are an estimated 75.3 million Millennials (ages 18 to 34) compared with 74.9 million Baby Boomers,' the Pew Research Center reported last week. 'This racially diverse, economically stressed and politically liberal group is also taking over American jobs: Millennial workers this year grew to outnumber Gen X workers, making them the largest share of the U.S. labor force.' (Gen X-ers , sometimes called America's 'middle child,' belong to the smaller generation sandwiched between the boomers and millennials.)

Dylan wrote a song about change — you could look it up — but I'm reluctant to mention it now, having read what Heather Havrilesky, a columnist for New York magazine, said recently about baby boomers.

In a commentary published in the Washington Post, she wrote: 'Perhaps the most self-mythologizing generation of all, those feisty postwar babies have demonstrated a singular talent for foisting their remembrances on the rest of us, like a neighbor freshly returned from a painstakingly documented African safari.'

She didn't stop there. Havrilesky went on to warn of a new round of '60s nostalgia as the 50th anniversaries of various milestones start turning up on the calendar.

'For the remainder of the decade,' she said, 'we can expect a brand-new wave of melodramatic retrospectives, each designed to remind us of a magical time when boomer heads were packed full of idealistic notions and covered in lustrous, free-flowing hair. But just as what goes up must come down, what frolics in the mud of Woodstock must eventually sulk in the fluorescent chill of the cardiology office.' Ooof!

Beating up on the baby boomers is nothing new, of course. It's been a popular sport for a long time.

If they aren't being blamed for their nostalgic embrace of the music of Dylan or the Beatles, the movies of the 1970s or the Summer of Love, they're branded the me-generation or the selfish generation.

So how are we to judge the baby boomers?

Well, they made progress in some areas — gay rights, for example, and environmental protection. Despite recent setbacks, America has made progress in race relations, too.

But the Gen X-ers and millennials also will inherit a country mired in debt, a public school system that suffers from neglect, questions about the future of Social Security and Medicare, a crumbling infrastructure and a shrinking middle class.

Boomers alone can't be blamed. The rush of technology and globalization changed the rules of the game in a very short time. But the boomers weren't innocent bystanders either. This has been their time and place.

Once upon a time, this was not the legacy baby boomers imagined for themselves.

Writing in the Atlantic magazine in 2010, Michael Kinsley suggested that boomers could make up for past sins by paying off the country's debt. He called it 'the least we can do.'

'Boomers may not have the opportunity to save the world, as their predecessors did,' he wrote, 'but they can still redeem themselves by saving the American economy from the fiscal mess that they, and their fathers and mothers, are leaving behind.'

As Kinsley knew, this won't happen. As they grow older, boomers haven't shown themselves to be more eager to embrace new taxes.

But Kinsley's bold idea shines a spotlight on a simple reality: Thanks to the economic explosion that followed World War II, the baby boomers have had it easier than the generations that came after them.

As the influence of the boomers begins to dwindle, you can expect the pace of change to continue to accelerate.

Unlike their elders, millennials grew up with new technologies. They seldom watch television, for example, and they seldom read old-fashioned magazines and newspapers. Their lives are guided by social media, streaming video and the information that comes to them on their smartphones. From entertainment to journalism to governance to commerce, these new habits will change our world in ways we're only beginning to imagine.

Will we wish for different outcomes? Sometimes. The breakdown of political institutions, in part, reflects how technology has changed our public conversations. It is easier now to settle into isolation chambers that echo the opinions of people just like us.

For a while longer, the boomers will cast their shadow across the cultural landscape. But, soon enough, it will become the millennials' turn to put their own imprint on American life.

Pete Golis is a columnist for The Press Democrat. Email him at golispd@gmail.com.