Boomers to This Year's Grads: We Are Really, Really Sorry

When I graduated college many years ago the economy was in the dumps, unemployment was up as was inflation, pollution was out of control and in the past few years we had 2 major oil crises. Oh, yeah, we were locked in a cold war with an enemy that could kill us 100 times over. I don't remember anyone apologizing to us or our generation demanding or expecting one either. Fast forward to today however and everyone wants to point the finger at the baby boomer generation. Worse, many boomers seem to agree with the sentiment and are using college graduation speeches to apologize for the lousy jobs that boomers did with the world as evidenced by these recent commencement addresses.

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, 60 years old, told the graduating class of Butler University last month that boomers have been "self-absorbed, self-indulgent and all too often just plain selfish."

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, 55, told Grinnell College graduates in Iowa that his was "the grasshopper generation, eating through just about everything like hungry locusts."

And Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, at 44 barely a boomer himself, told seniors at Colorado College that the national creed of one generation standing on the shoulders of the next was at risk "because our generation has not been faithful enough to our grandparents' example."

Source: WSJ