People loves to bash Baby Boomers, but when they were our age, they forced through the most progressive legislative era in modern history. What has our generation actually built?
Every day there's a new front-page post blaming Baby Boomers for everything from the housing market to climate change. But if we are being intellectually honest and look at what Boomers accomplished when they were in their late teens, 20s, and early 30s (the 1960s and 1970s), their youth-led movements literally rewrote the rules of civilization.
Look at the baseline rights we take for granted today that young Boomers marched for and forced governments to pass:
Civil Rights & Anti-Discrimination: The Civil Rights Act (1964), the Voting Rights Act (1965), and Title IX (1972) which desegregated society and institutionalized gender equality in education.
Environmental Protection: Student Boomers practically invented modern environmentalism, forcing the creation of the EPA, the Clean Air Act (1970), the Clean Water Act (1972), and the Endangered Species Act.
Military Reform: They organized massive, disruptive protests that successfully ended conscription and shut down the military draft.
Subsidized Education: They flooded state university systems and pressured governments worldwide to heavily subsidize higher education, making college affordable or outright free for a generation.
They faced down a literal military draft, a deeply segregated society, and rivers that were physically catching fire from corporate pollution—and they used massive civic action to force the system to fix it.
Meanwhile, Millennials are well into their 40s and Gen Z is entering adulthood. Outside of creating the gig economy, hyper-monetized social media apps, and a culture of online slacktivism, what foundational, system-altering legislation have our generations actually united to force through? Have we lost the ability to execute real institutional change, or are we just too distracted?