The kids are all right. So am I.

October 24, 2025

Another birthday is in the books, a great dinner with friends setting me off on my next journey around the sun. I sure needed the lift, because it appears I’m supposed to be sorry for all the trips in my past.

According to the young people in this New York Times video (and probably loads of others), my generation, those diabolical boomers, should apologize for wrecking the kids’ future. The piece is full of charges like, “You’re the reason so many Americans sleep in their cars,” and “What’s your legacy? A world that’s getting hotter.”

The speakers have some legit complaints. We’ve fallen short of the ideals many of us once held and have acted slowly or not at all on the later generations’ problems. Among other things, the video notes that a house costs twice as much as in 1970, while a year at a public university runs four times as much.

However, these folks are acting as if they’re the first ones ever to inherit a mess. This bit really fries my circuits: “Americans born in the decades after World War II were handed the world on a silver platter. Cheap college, cheap housing, abundant opportunity…America was an escalator.”

If so, it was like the escalators in subways: slow, creaky, and always breaking down. Let’s catch an express back to 1970 and see what else was on the platter. That year, we lost more than six thousand of our sons to a hopeless war in Vietnam, which dragged on despite massive protests on campuses and in cities. And for the first time, college men couldn’t get a deferment (a temporary exemption) from the military draft.

Though women didn’t have to worry about being conscripted, they were expected to have babies instead of careers and weren’t welcome at some of the top schools. The prestigious all-male Ivies had just started to open their doors to “coeds” in 1968. Harvard and the service academies like West Point held out until 1975.

Title IX, the landmark ban on sex discrimination in federally-funded education, hadn’t happened yet. If you were female, you couldn’t get a credit card in your own name and weren’t entitled to birth control unless you were married. LGBTQ rights didn’t exist. The world was cooler but our air and water were heavily, dangerously polluted, like the creek full of milky white paper mill sludge that ran through my hometown. “Cheap housing” was often denied to BIPOC buyers and sometimes Jews.

The “abundant opportunity” the Gen Z’ers grouse about not having was no sure thing either. When I graduated in 1976, the market for people like me was pretty well summed up by the photo below. It took a couple of years to land a decent job in my field.

In short, what we were handed was a deeply troubled time. We share the blame for the one we’re in now, as do those who followed us. I’ll do all I can to help end this nightmare. I will never apologize for living my life the best way I knew how.

Originally published at http://daveswanauthor.wordpress.com on October 24, 2025.

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