[Closed] Retired people moaning how hard it is

checked your hand recently TT?

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😉

It's alright, no-one will be paying for the NHS within 10 years, so you'll be having your hip replaced in a shed.

checked your hand recently TT?

I'm a runner

It's alright, no-one will be paying for the NHS within 10 years, so you'll be having your hip replaced in a shed.

Do you think pensions are tax free then?

Not at all, but there's a lot more of you carefree long-lived buggers to fund, and a lot fewer younger people to pay the lion's share of a rising bill. Enjoy your retirement!

Ahem…

[b]IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT![/b]

😉

Thankfully, it sounds like you can still wipe your own butt. 😉

Not quite sure how i'm such a burden, eleven years before I receive a state pension.

Been fully employed for nigh on forty years, receive no benefits whatsoever and pay tax on pension payments.

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Now then, from your OP I thought this was going to be a lighthearted teasing thread, rather than:

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They do say retirement does that you pretty much straight away.

It was meant to be hence the irony and smiley, but so much bitterness

Don't recall feeling like that in my younger days and was really happy when my poor old now departed dad could retire

Back to the more light hearted theme, seem to have developed a liking for heritage steam railways. Most are in lovely scenic places and serve real ale too along with very nice grub.

Went to the Worth Valley railway last week and was indeed a most pleasant experience, Ecclesbourne railway next which looks equally nice

Quick photo to whet the appetite
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Young people today eh, so rude and inconsiderate.

I'm not bitter. Just mildly jealous, so don't worry. Sorry if it sounded like that, probably needed a smiley or two.

Basically we're all just jealous because we'll all be working until we outlive our usefulness, then humanely killed and turned into animal feed, because you lot spent all the money, then sold the rest of us down the river

Hence the bitterness 😛

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Went out and scraped ice off the wifes car, got the washing in and out on the line, emptied the bins and now waiting for the online shopping order to arrive.

that doesn't sounds quite right, shouldn't you be queuing in the post office, or riding round on the bus, or stopping randomly in the street to shout at the pavement?

shouldn't you be queuing in the post office, or riding round on the bus, or stopping randomly in the street to shout at the pavement?

PO too damp and smells of wee, no free bus pass until i'm 66 and been doing the latter for years so bored of that now. Did consider sitting in the library to save on heating bills (no heating allowance either) but full of noisy kids 🙂

Spent all my life earning money and paying taxes, only for you lot to vote in politicians who urinate it up a wall.

problem is slowoldgit you didnt pay enough now us younguns are suffering because you had it easy for too long

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Spent all my life earning money and paying taxes, only for you lot to vote in politicians who urinate it up a wall.

On that theme I went and picked up my beer last night, thanks again for bringing it down from Eggland.

Tap.

i think the generation above mine (i'm 31) are the golden generation....

never again will we be able to accumulate so much wealth/equity in the form of housing and never again will the pension pots be so full. i will be very suprised if when i reach retirement age that i will be offered the same amount of care FOC. i don't think that many from my generation will be able to retire at the same age retirees do now.

and with older people being the ones who go to vote the situation isn't going to change any time soon.

Alpin - I'd set the age much higher. I reckon if you're under 50 then 'retirement' as we see it now will not exist, and will be viewed as a quaint anachronism that a gilded generation enjoyed. I'm in my 40's and in all honesty, i don't think anyone but a tiny minority of people my age will be able to enjoy a retirement that bares even a passing resemblance to our parents generation

The 'retirement age' will be steadily raised until the state pension effectively no longer exists. Its at this point that everyone will realise that the pension schemes they've been paying into all their lives have been a massive con, and are effectively worthless

Sometihng to look forward to eh? 😥

Sick of hearing my parents moaning about the small increases in their pensions in recent years.

They get more than I earn. As the wife and I are public servants no pay rise for 4 years, whilst paying for the ever spiralling cost of their darling grand children

Good luck to you OP.
I hope a nice young person got your old job.

PS ,Can anyone smell cabbage ?

😉

pay tax on pension payments.

Ummm you do know that you shouldn't be paying tax on any contributions you make to a pension scheme. It might be coming off your net pay if it is a private pension but all basic rate tax should be claimed and be put into your pension fund. Any additional tax (if you pay tax at a higher rate that is) you should be reclaiming as part of your annual tax return.

Good luck to you OP.I hope a nice young person got your old job

So do I
Where I worked many people carried on even though they had finished paying in for a full pension, same ones moaned about how their offspring couldn't find a job.

Ummm you do know that you shouldn't be paying tax on any contributions you make to a pension scheme. It might be coming off your net pay if it is a private pension but all basic rate tax should be claimed and be put into your pension fund. Any additional tax (if you pay tax at a higher rate that is) you should be reclaiming as part of your annual tax return.

Perhaps I should have been clearer, they are payments to me from my pension which unfortunately are taxable over the standard allowance

@ kimbers - personally I did not have it easy. And on a lighter note, nearly half of that pie isn't going to older people, there's something wrong there, surely?

@TT - if you have time and energy, your nearest railway is almost certainly looking for volunteers. I find it fills a gap in my life, working outdoors in a team, that was left after I stopped working. You don't need camera, tripod, notebook and a top pocket full of biros to fit in.

@ TT... what was the job?

@ binners, agreed.

my old man retired at 62 and is 70 now. he recieves something like 14k /year. no mortage since ~15 years. his brother jacked it in at 53 and is now 72. he made 6k last month on the stock market. tbf, he gives most of it away. is more like his hobby.

i can't see that i'll be as comfortable as them when i'm their age.

niether of them went to university and each of them bought their first house when they were in their early twenties. the increase in house prices meant they could upgrade with each move.

@alpin- BT Engineer, started as an apprentice at 16 in 1975

@slowoldgit-My nearest one is the Nene Valley railway, but to be honest I am bit of a loner and not keen on teams or working anymore for that matter. Prefer a wander at new places with my camera (do have a tripod for landscapes, no notebook or biros though) and just doing my own thing.

Glad you enjoy it though and if you don't mind me asking where do you volunteer?

The way I see it there are two options for old age:

Option A, redistribution or wealth through the generations, no care homes needed

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Option B, try and survive on a state pension:
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E Som, and spent a few days at the Strathspey last month. That was good, the new bridge went in and opens up more route for them. I didn't get near the gert big crane, though.

In true stw style, one of the bonuses can be a boot full of firewood from trackside work.

I say we need a bedroom tax for the over 60s.

Would either be a nice way of getting some of the money back from the golden generation or would add in a load of supply to the housing market due to downsizing meaning young families could actually afford to live in a family home.

I say we need a bedroom tax for the over 60s.

We supposedly have this already in Council tax. Larger houses have a higher council tax.......

We supposedly have this already in Council tax. Larger houses have a higher council tax.......

Not really - because families living in appropriately sized houses have to pay that as well. Increase council tax on larger properties and young families would suffer but wealthy retirees with no mortgage would hardly notice.

I think we need something even more punative, more targeted at wealthy old people living in inapprorately large houses. A real incentive to move on when they are able. Before they are too infirm and kicking them out of their house would be cruel.

It's never going to happen though as it would be political suicide for anyone who tabled the idea.

I'm expecting to check out with a huge overdose of drugs in approximately 10 years - or less

It's never going to happen though as it would be political suicide for anyone who tabled the idea.

Not that I agree with your suggested policy, but whilst we have a higher percentage of pensioners who vote than 18-25 year olds, the whole political system will be pro-OAP at the expense of the younger generation, who obviously don't mind that much as they can't even be bothered to vote.

Sick of hearing my parents moaning about the small increases in their pensions in recent years.

This. 100 percent this.

"ZOMG we need teh 250 you borrowed so that you could move to your new job.... to do the new bathroom tiles" Followed by the inevitable bitching and moaning about being teachers and how they havn't got much of a pension.

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Sounds good TT. I'm in the same boat (train?) at the end of April and I've loads to keep me busy. Great Joy! Plus I'm freeing up my job for a younger person.

who obviously don't mind that much as they can't even be bothered to vote.

Vicious circle though innit.

Young people don't think they have any representation so they don't vote.
So because young people don't vote, nobody sees it as beneficial to represent them.
So young people don't have any representation so they don't vote.

and so on...

There are also a lot more old people and turkeys don't vote for xmas. So basically we are screwed and we aren't going to stop ourselves, no matter which polictical party is in power.

So it's everyone for them selves, ride the bubble and make what you can while you can so you aren't the one getting ****ed when then next crash comes.

(but don't worry, I'm not suggesting the bedroom tax should be extended to sheds!)

One for the OP (OAP?):

Shouts while being dragged away-

'Soylent Green is made from people...!'

@jfletch

I've been saying this for awhile now. Not just OAPs but all housing should be targeted on a bedroom tax. 1 person, one bedroom - anything else gets a sliding scale of taxation starting reasonably high and getting stratospheric. If you are a couple or a family, you'll still have one spare room free of tax for visitors but will stop people like my last next door neighbour who lived on her own in a 5 bed house

In addition private ownership should be restricted to 2 houses at any one time and all multi landlord outfits should be non-profit trusts
Ex BT 'Engineers' should be charged double

1 person, one bedroom - anything else gets a sliding scale of taxation starting reasonably high and getting stratospheric. If you are a couple or a family, you'll still have one spare room free of tax for visitors but will stop people like my last next door neighbour who lived on her own in a 5 bed house

Not really workable, eg I could just remove the adjoining walls between rooms and hey presto, same size house, but less tax.....

In addition private ownership should be restricted to 2 houses at any one time and all multi landlord outfits should be non-profit trusts

yeah thatll happen!

http://www.newstatesman.com/economics/2014/02/what-hope-there-generation-rent-when-third-mps-are-buy-let-landlords

I'm find it really hard (retirement)
Lovely sunny day yesterday and as I have no free bus pass till 2021 or a state pension, I had to go to the cafe on my bike 50 miles later I was knackered. However I did manage a couple of sneaky Wharfedale Blondes last night as recovery drinks.
Today I'm having to do the garden, its sunny again and cant find the sun cream.
Tomorrow I'm having another pitiful day riding the route of Le Tour with a pro, hoping he is knackered after the 2 clssics he rode at the weekend.
Life is tough on a pension 🙁

@highlandman-That would be the Omega Man

Clouded right up here so spent ages filling in the crazy intricate form to get a tree felled in a conservation area.

@BillMC, enjoy and bet you will wonder how you found time to go to work

Footflaps...really? I doubt many people would bother to do that as it would reduce value of the house and cost to remove and to put back. Also just like rates/council tax tec, houses could be assessed and assigned a number of bedrooms one could reasonably expect for that property. i,e to stop someone building a mansion with 5000sqft, 2 acres of grounds and just one bedroom - square footage calculations can also be used

Lovely worldview you've got there jfletch - really positive.
Please don't follow through your own logic and go and see those nice people in Switzerland on a one-way ticket...........

So what about COLLECTIVE ACTION? Joining together rather than blaming each other? Pointing the angry collective finger at THEM UP THERE rather than at him and her and them who're actually just like us? But older (or younger). CHANGING SOMETHING?

Ooh no, too risky.

I'm in a bigger house than I need. Maybe I want to keep posession for a while for personal reasons. I could move out and rent out my house privately, but I've seen the bad experience others related on here and couldn't deal with those problem tenants.

BT Engineer, started as an apprentice at 16 in 1975

Ah, the old BT civil service pension. Not so much gold-plated as solid gold....

My godfather also retired at 50 on his. OTOH, I work with a few ex-BT people (inevitable in telecoms), and I think almost all of them regret giving up the fabulous pensions they didn't realise they had when they went into the real world....

My FIL is now 65 and has been retired for 10 years on a private sector occupational pension. He's still a higher rate taxpayer. He too bleats the line "I paid in all my life" and - without any trace of irony - at the same time complains his son can't find a job and will never be able to afford to buy a house.

Hey plumber, I'm with you, although giving myself about 20 - 25years 🙂

One word: Vet. 🙂

Lovely worldview you've got there jfletch - really positive.
Please don't follow through your own logic and go and see those nice people in Switzerland on a one-way ticket...........

It's not my world view, its the one being handed down to us from our elders. Their retoric is "I was promised it, therefore I'm having it" no matter what is costs everyone else. They (as a generation, as defined by their actions as whole, not by that of individuals) have said "I'm alright Jack" and the brunt of the current financial issues have been borne by the young. This may have always been the case but the difference is the golden generation has pulled up the rope ladder behind them with their house price bubble.

So I have a choice, I can either sit arround whinging about it, hoping someone will come along with a hand out or I can ride the bubble, ensure I am well postioned in the event of another crash so that I can give me and my family the highest chance of being one of the lucky ones.

But as for a "lovely worldview" I think suggesting I might want to commit suicide is possibly one of the least pleasant interactions I have had on here. Perhaps you need to re-arparise your own attitude?

Footflaps...really?

Do you not notice all the old building with bricked up windows and wonder why? Window tax.....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax

Flippin heck, I'd never thought of the similarity.....

Despite the bricking up of a few windows, window tax was one of the most successful tax systems for working out property size and lasted 150 years!

The funniest article I've ever read on the Boomers was published in Esquire back in 2000.

AT A PRESS GATHERING just after the 1992 election, David Broder, the dean of Washington reporters, commented to me that my Clintonista colleagues and I seemed so, well, so young to him. "I guess you Baby Boomers are really taking over," he said.

That's when it happened. I'd never been called a Boomer before. Poor Broder. My eyes got squinty and my face got red. The veins in my temples throbbed. The look on his face was horrible. He must have thought I was about to rip off his head and spit down his neck. Which I was.

"I am not a Baby Boomer," I snapped. "I am so tired of hearing about the goddamn Baby Boomers! I've spent my whole life swimming behind that garbage barge of a generation. They ruined everything they've passed through and left me in their wake."

Broder shook his head and walked away.

But the garbage barge just chugs on. As they enter late middle age, the Boomers still can't grow up. Guys who once dropped acid are now downing Viagra; women who once eschewed lipstick are now getting liposuction. At the risk of feeding their narcissism, I believe it's time someone stated the simple truth: The Baby Boomers are the most self-centered, self-seeking, self-interested, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing generation in American history.

I hate the Boomers.

I KNOW IT'S A SIN to hate, so let me put it this way: If they were animals, they'd be a plague of locusts, devouring everything in their path and leaving but a wasteland. If they were plants, they'd be kudzu, choking off every other living thing with their sheer mass. If they were artists, they'd be abstract expressionists, interested only in the emotions of that moment--not in the lasting result of the creative process. If they were a baseball club, they'd be the Florida Marlins: prefab prima donnas who bought their way to prominence, then disbanded--a temporary association but not a team.

Of course, it is as unfair to demonize an entire generation as it is to characterize an entire gender or race or religion. And I don't literally mean that everyone born between 1946 and 1964 is a selfish pig. But generations can have a unique character that defines them, especially the elites of a generation--those lucky few who are blessed with the money or brains or looks or skills or education that typifies an era. Whether it was Fitzgerald and Hemingway defining the Lost Generation of World War I and the Roaring Twenties, or JFK and the other heroes of the World War II generation, or the high-tech whiz kids of the post-Boomer generation, certain archetypes define certain times.

You know who you are. If you grew your hair and burned your draft card on campus during the sixties; if you toked, screwed, and boogied your way through the seventies; if you voted for Reagan and believed "Greed is good" in the eighties; and if you're trying to make up for it now by nesting as you cluck about the collapse of "family values," you're it. If not, even if demographers call you a Boomer, you probably hate our generation's elite as much as I do.

It is my contention that the single greatest sin a generation can commit is the sin of selfishness. And it's from this standard that I draw my harsh conclusion. I'm not alone in this view, of course. The Boomer in Chief, my former boss, Bill Clinton, used to tell me about an influential professor he'd had at Georgetown. His name was Carroll Quigley, and he taught young Bill Clinton and hundreds of other Hoyas about something called the Future Preference.

I can still see Clinton doing his Quigley impression, eyes full of mischief, his voice an Arkansas version of a bad Boston accent, as we bounced around in a bus or flew through a thunderstorm on Air Elvis, our campaign plane back in 1992. "Mistah Begahhla," he'd intone as he looked at me through the bifocals perched on the end of his nose. "Why is America the greatest sociiiiiiety in human hist'ree? The Few-chah Pref'rence. At every critical junk-chaah, we have prefuhhed the few-chah to the present. That is why immigrants left the old waaahld for the new. That is why paahrents such as yours sacrifice to send their children to univehhsities like this wan. The American ideal is that the few-chah can be bettah than the paahst, and that each of us has a personal, moral obligation to make it so."

I'll get back to President Clinton in a minute. But first, let us conclude that by his old professor's test, the Boomers have been a miserable failure. At nearly every critical juncture, they have preferred the present to the future; they've put themselves ahead of their parents, ahead of their country, ahead of their children--ahead of our future.

LET'S START WITH THE SIXTIES, the Boomers' dilettante ball. While a few courageous young people like John Lewis and the Freedom Riders risked their lives--and others like Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner gave theirs--the civil-rights movement was led by pre-Boomers like Martin Luther King Jr. (who would be seventy-one if he were alive today) and continued without strong support from the Boomers on college campuses.

Still, I must say this: If you were one of those young people who did risk their lives to fight racism in the sixties, who put their bodies on the line to register voters, who marched and sang and taught and preached against segregation, you stand as the best refutation of my anti-Boomer tirade. In that one moment of conscience and courage, you did more with your life than I've done in all the moments of mine. In a generation of selfish pigs, you were saints.

But the reality is that most campuses did not become hotbeds of unrest until the Boomers' precious butts were at risk as the Vietnam War escalated. They didn't want to end the war because they were bothered by working-class kids being blown apart; if they had been, they wouldn't have spat on those working-class kids when they came home from Vietnam, or tried to make heroes out of the Communists who were trying to kill them.

Yet as troubling as that may be, the sixties were in many ways the Boomers' finest moment. It was at least a fad then to pretend to care about racial justice at home and war abroad, to speak out against pollution and prejudice. But it was mostly just talk. As they came of age, and as idealism might have required some real sacrifice, idealism suddenly became unfashionable.

And so the Boomers careened into the seventies without a thought to picking up where King and the Kennedys left off. Without a war to threaten them, their selfishness came into full bloom. You know the results: Drug abuse, once a boutique curse of hip musicians, became more common than the clap. And speaking of sexually transmitted diseases, the Boomers began to fornicate with such abandon that rabbits were asking them to cool their jets. They didn't invent sex or drugs or rock 'n' roll, but they damned near ruined them all.

And don't give me this crap about Boomer music. The Beatles were all born before the end of the war. So was Janis. So while the Boomers can claim they had the good taste to listen to gifted pre-Boomers, when it came their turn to make music, the truest expression of their generation, what did they give us?

Disco.

The generation that came before the Boomers gave them Dylan. The Boomers gave us KC and the Sunshine Band. Thanks a lot.

Unfair? Perhaps it is a bit of an overstatement. Some friends of mine have suggested it's an outrage to ignore Baby Boomer Bruce Springsteen, for one. True enough.

But even more than music, our remarkable economy is what drives and defines the times we live in today. And as the generation in the economic driver's seat, the Boomers should get the credit for building this remarkable prosperity, right?

Well, not quite. Nothing can detract from the breathtaking entrepreneurship of Boomers like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. But what's interesting is that much of today's prosperity owes its origins more to the high-tech young nerds of the post-Boom generation than to the Boomers themselves. The most vital role the Boomers have in the current economy is to sit on their brains and invest in post-Boomer high-tech start-ups. The same folks who sponged off their parents when they were young are now, as they age, getting rich off the industry of their younger brothers and sisters.

Boomer political and economic values reached their most perfect expression under pre-Boomer president Ronald Reagan in the eighties: Screw your neighbor, lay off the factory workers, shuffle a lot of paper, build an economy in which a few people get the gold mine and most people get the shaft.

The same Boomer elites who hid in classrooms to avoid Vietnam while poor and minority kids got shot at used their elite education in the eighties to lay off the folks who got shot at and survived. The Reverend Jesse Jackson used to say that the eighties economy was based on three things: merge, purge, and submerge. Merge companies, purge workers, submerge communities. No more of this hippie, sixties, share-the-wealth crap now, fellow Boomers, it's every man for himself!

The orgy of greed, fed by a mountain of debt, ran the economy into the ground. The massive, selfish tax cuts produced even more massive deficits and debt, which the Boomers passed on to those who followed. Having grown up using their parents' credit cards, the Boomers found it just as easy to pass on their bills to their children. Boomers like Rush Limbaugh like to say we owe Ronald Reagan a debt we can never repay. Yeah, Slim, about $3 trillion.

It is telling that when he ran for reelection, Ronald Reagan got higher support among Boomers than he did from his fellow older Americans. Perhaps some of the Greatest Generation saw the selfishness in Reaganism, saw the shortsightedness, the mean-spiritedness in cutting school lunches and telling children ketchup was a vegetable, and turned away from it. And perhaps the Boomers saw those same qualities, that savage selfishness, and embraced it.

WHICH BRINGS ME BACK TO THE BOOMER IN CHIEF. It's not for nothing that Pulitzer-prize-winning author David Maraniss called his biography of Bill Clinton First in His Class. (It is interesting to note that the same Boomers who supported Reagan were less likely to vote for Clinton than the World War II generation was.)

But is the first Boomer president typical of his generation? That, pardon me, depends on what the meaning of is is.

Clinton's right-wing critics seize on his personal failings to paint a caricature of the ultimate sixties hippie: pot-smoking, draft-dodging womanizer; the Muhammad Ali of selfishness--the kind of guy Newt Gingrich called a "countercultural McGovernik." But Clinton's public agenda has, I believe, generally kept faith with old Professor Quigley. His basic political philosophy is to prefer the future to the present and to stress communitarian values over selfish individualism. His most profound emotion is empathy. To this day, he's widely mocked for declaring to a man who was dying of AIDS, "I feel your pain." But feeling someone's pain is true compassion, which literally means "to suffer with." A most un-Boomer sentiment, indeed.

In a classic example of preferring the future to the present, Clinton took a terrible political hit for raising taxes to pay down the deficit. His party lost the House and Senate, but over time the economic policies worked, and because he was willing to pay the short-term price, we enjoy the long-term economic benefits.

But if in his public policy Clinton has been anti-Boomer, in his personal failings he has given ample fodder to his critics and much heartbreak to those of us who love him. Having an affair with a young woman and lying about it is a stupid and selfish act. And Bill Clinton lives with the knowledge that he has caused his family immeasurable pain. But it was ultimately a sin against his family, not yours. You think he got away with it? Got away with it? Imagine how you'd feel if your daughter read a Starr report on the Internet, chronicling your worst, most shameful moment.

He didn't get away with shit.

And if I had to choose, I'd rather have a leader who was rotten to his family but good to the country than the other way around.

Still, I cannot deny that Clinton's personal sin--selfishness--is the very one I rail against his generation for. Perhaps the classically, tragically Boomer nature of his faults explains the sanctimonious outrage from some of his Boomer brethren in the media. It's as if they're saying, How dare he behave like one of us!

IT IS MY VIEW THAT THE TRULY CLASSIC Boomer politician is not Bill Clinton but the man who despises him: George W. Bush. A charming and disarming guy, Bush has coasted through life on his family's money and his daddy's name. He went to the best schools. And while at those elite schools, he served as the model for Otter in Animal House. He went into business (backed by family wealth) and failed. Tried again. Failed. And again--well, you get it. He finally struck it rich when his father's wealthy supporters made him the figurehead managing partner of the Texas Rangers. Bush used his Boomer charm to con the good people of Arlington, Texas, into raising their taxes to build his Rangers a new stadium. When the team was sold in 1998, Bush made a profit of more than $14 million.

And what does Bush offer us, after this life of wretched Boomer selfishness? Lectures about personal responsibility. We have a word for that in Texas: chutzpah.

The specter of Bush the Son striving to avenge Bush the Father brings us to the Question: How could the World War II generation--the Greatest Generation--have raised the Worst Generation?

I put that question to Tom Brokaw, chronicler of the Greatest Generation. Brokaw was born in 1940, so he's not a Boomer chronologically. Nor is he one attitudinally. "I have one foot on each side of the ice floe," he says. Raised with World War II values in the Midwest, Brokaw was busy having children and wearing a tie to work in the sixties. And yet he is charitable to the Boomers.

One reason the Boomers were so spoiled, Brokaw theorizes, was their parents' understandable desire to compensate for their own deprivation. "Even those who had not really known poverty in the Depression still had a harder life than most of us can imagine today," he says. "Think about it: Most men worked in manual labor. Most women did manual labor in the home as well. So many parents from that generation have said to me, 'We had so little, we wanted our children to have so much--and we spoiled them.'"

The transformation of America from the forties to the sixties was perhaps the most rapid and radical in our history. "Parenthood itself became very different," says Brokaw. "Especially fatherhood. Many men of the World War II generation had been facing death in their teens." They'd known strict military discipline and knew their lives or their buddies' lives might depend on following orders from authority. They looked at their own children at seventeen, who didn't have any life-or-death reason to obey authority, who in fact had the luxury of challenging everything they were told, and the World War II generation didn't know what to make of it.

Brokaw makes a good point. But let's not blame the parents. Good Lord, I said to him, we're talking about men and women who have reached middle age! You live a half century, your faults can't be blamed on Daddy anymore. Besides, every parent in history has wanted to give his child more than he had. And every adolescent wants to get laid. And since the first caveman spun around till his head got dizzy, every human being has experimented with methods of altering consciousness. But only in the Boomers did parental indulgence and human craving trigger such a tsunami of selfishness.

IN THE LONG RUN, will it matter that one generation was so spectacularly selfish? Maybe not. In a great karmic irony, the Worst Generation may in turn be raising another great one. Having taught the children of the Baby Boomers off and on for five years now, at the University of Texas and at Georgetown, I find them to be the opposite of everything I despise about their parents--they are engaged in their communities, spending endless hours volunteering to build housing for the poor or to feed the homeless. They are concerned about their classmates, having calmed down the PC mania and replaced it with a sensible sensitivity to the feelings of others. They care about the future and are concerned about their grandparents. They are more responsible in their private lives and more engaged in our public life. I have no idea whether it's because of the Boomers or in spite of them.

And unlike me, who spews vitriol and venom at the Boomers, their kids roll their eyes and let out an ironic laugh. That's another thing: These kids are ironic but not cynical. They're Letterman's children. And they seem to understand that their parents are growing older but not growing up.

Brokaw has the difference pegged: "The World War II generation did what was expected of them. But they never talked about it. It was part of the Code. There's no more telling metaphor than a guy in a football game who does what's expected of him--makes an open-field tackle--then gets up and dances around. When Jerry Kramer threw the block that won the Ice Bowl in '67, he just got up and walked off the field."

That kind of self-effacing dignity is wholly alien to the Boomer elite. But when that day comes, when they finally walk off the field--or what's left of the field--a few of us who've been trailing behind them will be doing a little dance of our own.

Read more: The Worst Generation - April 2000 - Esquire
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I've once again found myself doing a few days in a bike shop. It's not so much for the money (mortgage paid off, zero debts, decent savings an investments) more to keep myself busy... And, of course, the trade discount.

Oh - and in another 10 years I'll also get my state pension.

I struggle with long sentences