Boomers vs. Xers

A common debate during holidays, baptisms, or any other family gatherings is how the Baby Boomers (my parent's generation) royally screwed up this country for my generation (Generation X) and the others to come...(and just so we are all playing on the same field, Gen Xers are typically born between 1965 and 1980 and Baby Boomers are typically born between 1946 and 1964, depending on who you read).

It took this country 174 years to become the most productive, most powerful, most free country in the history of the world. The bastion of liberty, capitalism, freedom, equity, and intellectualism, and it took this rag-tag group of pot-smoking, bra-burning, bad-dressing, free-loving, abortion-or-latch-key-kid-having, self-loathing, hippies less than 50 years to bring us to the brink of utter collapse. They took the keys to this country and drove it into the ground faster than Ted Kennedy drove his '67 Oldsmobile into Poucha Pond! So Generation Xers are the ones that have unenviable job to clean-up after the baby-boomers crapped all over everything. It's like showing up for a party at the end and having to clean up after the parties over because everyone else is too wasted or in jail to do it...Oh yeah, and sorry, you have to buy all the cleaning products too...

Dubya and Slick Willie were both born in '46...And what did the two baby-boomer presidents do? Create economic bubbles, get embroiled in scandal, allow the worst foreign and domestic terrorist attacks to happen in the history of the country, and get us into not one, but two war fronts. Want more proof? Let's quickly review cast of characters in the news lately, shall we?

• Robert Willumstad, Former AIG CEO - Born 1946
• Stanley O'Neal, Former Merrill Lynch CEO - Born 1951
• Richard Fuld, CEO of bankrupt Lehman Brothers - Born 1946
• James A. Johnson and Franklin Raines former heads of Fannie/Freddie - Born 1943 and 1949 respectively
• Jeffrey Skilling of Enron infamy and serving 24 years in prison - Born 1953
• Alan Schwartz, Former CEO of Bear Sterns - Born 1950

How can one generation of people can destroy what took almost nine generations to build is beyond me...