Lystra: Watch post-Boomers burst out of the blocks
Sunday, November 9, 2008 9:46 AM PST
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E-mail this articleColumn by Tony Lystra
Daily News reporter
You couldn’t escape the idea Tuesday night that the country had reached a tipping point.
Not only had we elected our first black president and energized the world about the idea of America again, we sent our first post-boomer to the White House.
Post-boomers, basically anyone born between 1961 and 1990, have had a lot on their minds as they’ve waited for this moment.
For years, they’ve been weighing the ideas of their grandparents, who were shaped by discipline and sacrifice during the Depression and World War II, against the newer ideas of their parents, who were cast in the social upheaval of the 60s.
Post-boomers, who are not part of either era but heavily influenced by both, have been picking through this soup of social, economic and geopolitical ideas — race, guns, hippies, capitalism, socialism, subdivisions, divorce, imperialism, feminism, drugs, nuclear arms, Vietnam — and trying to figure out how to do it better.
Call them a little arrogant or even naive, but they think they’ve sort of got it figured out and they’re ready to take a whack at it. That’s what Obama’s victory — and McCain’s defeat — represented. These “kids” finally get to set the agenda.
So if you were watching all those young people celebrating in the street Tuesday and wondering, “What just happened?” here’s a short explanation of what might be coming.
The American Way — Post-boomers have been watching as a simple economic principle — the one that says resources are finite — has gone ignored for decades. So they’re going to rethink the way we consume goods, enjoy our weekends, get around town. Subdivisions will be within walking distance of shopping centers. Downtowns will be revitalized.
I hope we’ll invest in trains — a new system of subways, light rail and bullet trains that will have commuters racing up and down the West Coast and points beyond.
Cars, by the way, are for pansies. And I don’t have to tell you the ones we do own are going to be smaller. The era of the Cadillac status symbol is coming to a close. The next big thing? The Mini.
Which leads us to energy. Wind, solar, wave and, let’s face it, nuclear, are coming. The post-boomers will be the ones to make them more than talk. They’re going to starve petro-dictators until it hurts.
Terrorism hasn’t gone away — The old state-against-state Cold War model, which the Bush administration ridiculously clung to, is over. It’s not about rolling tanks across borders en masse anymore. It’s all about spies and small military teams crossing borders in the night. (Cue “Bourne Identity” soundtrack.)
The Bush administration’s torture policy is going down, too. It’s immoral. The younger set understood this from the beginning. In this sense, the post-boomers are traditionally conservative. They’re not about to walk away from the wonder that is the American experiment in government. And, no, they won’t wet themselves and squander their civil liberties should they, once again, come under attack.
Economics 101 — These guys are going to scale back. They’ll shy away from debt more than their parents did. One home is plenty, thank you. They’re returning to the way their grandparents did it.
Will post-boomers embrace capitalism? Yes — aggressive, cuthroat. (I shouldn’t even have to say it.) Yet, they also know the market isn’t suited to achieve everything. Universal health care is coming.
Scopes Monkey who? The old social battles are over. They should have been buried a long time ago.
The post-boomers are going to embrace gay marriage. For them, it’s a conservative issue: Families are important.
The Second Amendment? It stands.
Abortion? They’ll accept the Roe v. Wade status quo — it’s all they’ve known — while looking to family planning and emphasizing adoption.
And what are the new fights? They’re about gene technology, cloning, stem cell research and designer drugs. Those battles are going to be absolutely surreal.
This column was first published Nov. 9, 2008.
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