The Greatest Generation?

My sister, a while back, remarked how we're going to be looking down the barrel of an boomer Alzheimer's epidemic during the next two decades. She referred to it as if the health care system in Lagos will rival that here in the U.S.

We're on the leading edge of a decade of double digit health insurance premium increases. There's only a few prognosticators who think this won't continue. Add to these double digit increases a massive wave of aging baby boomers and all their afflictions that come with age. Furthermore, couple all this with their retirements -- i.e., the deprivation of their productivity and the loss of massive consumer spending...

It doesn't appear we have a whole lot going for us over the next few decades; those of us non-boomers. The boomers themselves; well, they'll have lived comfortably through fifty years of relative peace and economic prosperity, burned through 55% of our oil endowment, and will have enjoyed social security and medicare that will go insolvent just as they all die off.

I've never really explored the issue here on my Monologues, but I have hinted how the boomer generation will have left us with broken and bankrupt social and economic systems, possible global warming consequences, suburban living arrangements requiring heroic quantities of diminishing energy reserves they themselves burned indiscriminately, tens of trillions of dollars of public debts, destroyed natural habitats, unfishable fisheries, and superfund cleanups. They will have signed off this world with a collective "fuck you."

Today, boomers comprise the demographic least interested in our environment. I suppose once you reach a certain age, and having lived in relatively clean surroundings, you don't give a shit how you leave it to others to manage. They have the wealth and influences such that they don't have to give a shit. Fair enough. I'm certain my generation will do the same to the next, perhaps through other mechanisms. It might just be in our nature to trash what we have and pass on the consequences to others.