Moral Passivity of Baby Boomers

In struggling to entitle this essay, I labored long and hard over the word "passivity." In earlier mental drafts I replaced it with the following: "ineptitude, incompetence, debility, weakness, blindness, myopia, bankruptcy," but, in the end, "passivity" won out. I suppose I used the word because as I was looking at some of the troubled issues of our time, from the War in Iraq to the continuing strife between Israelite and Palestinian, to the genocide that may be occurring in Darfur, Sudan to the global AIDS crisis that now, finally, is getting some world attention, I was struck by how much my generation has been willing to "delegate" care for these issues to governments, NGO's, the United Nations or, really, anyone who will just take our attention off the problem for a while. It is as if we are not only in the middle of humanitarian crises galore but that we have lost our ability to respond spiritually or ethically to these challenges.

Little fervor is generated at work, home, or church/community to understand and help mollify conflict in the world. It just seems that the "heads" of baby-boomers are just "elsewhere." This essay probes why my generation has abandoned a kind of moral engagement with the world's trouble spots in our day. My thesis is that baby-boomers, defined as those born between 1946-64 in the United States, are consumed by fears, fears that keep them/us from responding to patent human need right before us.

Before continuing, however, I recognize that some of you both in the US and internationally may be of a different mind on this issue. Let me know if you have an alternative perspective.

Fear # 1--The Kids

When I speak of fear and kids, I don't mean to suggest that we boomers are afraid of our children. Not at all. It means that we are afraid for our children and spend inordinate amount of time worrying about them and their lives, time that could more profitably be spent on dealing with the world's needs. We are the first generation who has become aware, probably obsessively aware, of how dangerous it is for our children to live. We worry that they will be abducted (and worse) by someone, that they will "fall behind" their peers in the multiple competitions we think they should enter, that they might not get into the right schools, might not have the proper or right experiences in their schools, and might not get a good-paying job with sufficient pension and health benefits after it is all over. We worry for them that the resources of the world are limited and that these resources will somehow "run out" before our children get to share in them.

A friend of mine told me the story of one of her friends, whom she meets to talk about life fairly often. This 'friend of a friend' is around 50, with two healthy and beautiful children, but who nevertheless spends about 90% of her time, according to my friend, just worrying about every conceivable little detail of her children's lives. I think that people in my generation wanted to establish a much more close relationship to their children than they had with their parents. But the flip side of this is that we worry all the time about kids. We leave the worrying about the really big issues of the world to others.

Fear # 2-- Dying Penniless

If there is one theme that seems to run through the daily life of my peers, it is that they/we feel that we need to have "enough" money salted away before we are very comfortable reaching out generously. But, what is enough? It isn't unusual for men my age, who have been working 25-30 years, to have pensions in excess of $1,000,000 salted away. Yet, most will continue to work because the feel, strangely, poor. Or, if not poor, they feel that they don't quite have "enough" to cover the eventualities of retirement. After all, the "shadow" side of the reality of longevity, brought to us courtesy of improved health care, drugs and better awareness of the importance of exercise and diet, is that you have to have money to pay for your long life. And, my friends are worried about it. The most important thing each day, or over the long run, is that the stock market continue to climb, that the general business climate remain strong and that whatever gets in the way of that should be eliminated.

So important is this point to my peers that, in my judgment, George Bush tried either to manipulate it or "manage" it, though unsuccessfully, in the recently-past midterm elections. That is, he engineered a precipitous reduction in gasoline prices, felt by everyone, in the month before the election. He also managed to do something (what was it?) that led to the longest sustained stock market rally since the late 1990s. All of this was supposed to get right to the heart of us baby boomers and help us "forget" Iraq. Maybe the fact that we still turned the Republicans out of power in Congress means that our moral compass is still working; in any case, however, it doesn't undercut my major point--that we are more concerned with making sure our pension accounts have "enough" in them, whatever that means, than in hearing the cries of distant suffering voices.

Fear # 3-- Work

The final fear is that we don't think we can leave or take time off from work in order to be able to respond to the needs in other parts of the world. Here the point is different for different people, but I think it is fair to say that work in America is not designed for people who see themselves as having a commitment both to work and to help others beyond work. Work is something that is supposed to take all of your time, and if you have lots of time in which you cultivate other interest, it must mean that work itself isn't your priority. If this is perceived around the office, your life at the company becomes more precarious.

Conclusion

This is getting to be "legacy" time for many baby boomers. What will I, or we, leave to the world after us? So many problems call for our engagement and expertise. What will your (and my) response be?

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