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Can Boomers Lead an Elder Revolution?

U.S. News and World Report, 10/29/09

Abstract:

The implications of an aging world are widely viewed with alarm. When 10,000 people a day begin reaching retirement age in a few years, how will society support them? And when these people are turning 65, thousands more will be turning 80 or 85. Who will take care of them? And how will we afford the bills? This enormous price tag is the elephant in the room during debates about healthcare reform.

These are fair points. But what if, instead, an aging world turned out to be a good thing? Is this even possible? Well, nearly 80 million baby boomers are here to say that they've had a great run so far and they expect, no, they demand, that it will continue. AARP and other powerful advocates for seniors' interests are working toward positive outcomes as well. Are we moving toward a seniors-dominated world? And if that's so, what might this world look like?

Forty years ago, Theodore Roszak wrote The Making of a Counter Culture, which captured the late-1960s disaffection by young people across the country. They had been raised in material comfort following World War II, but they rejected the world created by those comforts. They opposed the Vietnam War and the industrial-military complex they blamed for the war. Of course, the protesters of the 1960s and 1970s did eventually join the rat race they had earlier condemned. They were the leading edge of the baby boomer generation, and they became more materialistic and prosperous by far than the corporate "sell outs" they had criticized in their youth.

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