America's hopes for the future rest mostly with the 9/11 generation. Despite their unfortunate propensity so far to vote Democratic, these young men and women will, I believe, turn out to be far more impressive than we boomers who begat them. It would of course be a fitting fate, after all the soaring rhetoric about the boomers, if they turned out to be basically a parenthesis. They may go down in history as occupying space between the generation that won World War II and presided over a relatively successful second-half of the twentieth century, and the 9/11 generation that will deal with the threats the boomers neglected during that quintessential boomer decade, the '90s. It is the 9/11 generation that will have to construct and maintain a new American century. The best we boomers can do now is help them get started on the job. Meanwhile, the experience of the boomers should hearten us: America is such a great country that it will end up surviving even a not-so-great generation.
Bookmarks