by Willem Meiners
I AM A Baby Boomer. As a generation, we have frankly quite often been in love with ourselves. Boys and girls who grew up in the second half of the century, in a Europe free of Nazis and invasions. Our main revolutions were the pill, men on the moon, and email. We made love, not war, and we took to the air, by plane, by rocket and digitally.
Hats off to Apollo 11’s Buzz Aldrin from Maastricht, for CD and Blu-ray’s Joop Sinjou from Eindhoven, Bluetooth’s Jaap Haartsen from Hardenberg, WiFi’s Cees Links from Maarssen and the cloud’s Werner Vogels from Ermelo. They will no doubt enter the history books. But that also applies to our generation in general, because we can’t seem to say goodbye: Mick Jagger is 80, Paul McCartney is 81, and once again this year, America will be choosing between two very elderly candidates for president.
That’s not those two oldies’ fault, by the way. They don’t elect themselves, everybody else does, to a large degree people much younger than them. America counts more people under forty than over, more women than men. But also more grandparents than grandchildren, and all those grandparents are traditionally more likely to go out and cast their vote than younger folks. They feel okay around people their own age, so maybe that’s part of the explanation.
ON THE OTHER hand, Charles de Gaulle retired when he was 64. Six years later, the French elected him president. Winston Churchill remained prime minister until he was 79, and Konrad Adenauer became German chancellor when he was 73, and stayed for 13 years. That was halfway the previous century. Today: Macron in France is 46, Trudeau in Canada is 52, Rutte is 57 and the new guy in New Zealand is 53. The prime minister of Norway is 63, Finland’s is 54, and in Spain he’s 52. That young man at number 10 in London is 43. So it can be done. Only in America does it not work, to date at least. I myself am three-quarters of a century old. All that time, Barack Obama has been the only president younger than me.
So, what is going on? Are we simply staying put? Resting on our laurels? Does our generation have any laurels at all?
Well, on reflection, maybe the answer is a more resounding yes than we Boomers keep telling ourselves. The internet, email, DVDs, iPhones, text messaging, flat TV screens, MRI scanners, Google, the International Space Station, hybrid cars, drones, Dolly the cloned sheep, GPS, Facebook, laptop computers, Nintendo, DNA tests, microprocessors, TikTok, digital cameras, bitcoin, electric cars, Whatsapp, LED light bulbs, Amazon.com, the birth control patch, PlayStation, self-driving cars, wifi, Netflix, online banking, Elmo, AI. Things that have become commonplace within a span of just three decades, since 1990. Oh, and the cell phone.
Our handheld is a radio, a TV, a camera, a computer, a calculator, a means of payment, a flashlight, a battery meter, a dictionary, a video and audio recorder, a text and email sender and receiver, a library, a bookcase, a shopping center, a typewriter, a GPS, a weather forecaster, a translator mastering 133 languages, a photo album, a telephone, a clock, a stopwatch, a magnifying glass, a mirror, an alarm clock and three million other applications that we can load for free or for pennies from the apps store.
ALL OF us consider this normal now, but it all came into the world when the Boomer generation was on top of their game. Thirty years ago, none of this existed. Nor did consultations with your doctor by computer exist back then, electric vehicles that recharge themselves by driving down a solar-paneled highway, robots that roll into the nursing home to check if Grandpa has taken his pills and alert the nurse if Grandma has a fever, takeout delivered to your doorstep by drone, or a shot against skin cancer. All of that is here now.
Too materialistic? Take a closer look, then. Sixty-five years ago, 16 million people died of starvation. That quickly declined from three million in the 1970s to less than 300,000 today. This is the result of a much more efficient food production, of women having more education and fewer children, and a broader access to clean drinking water. “One of the great unacknowledged triumphs of our lifetime,” says Professor Alex de Waal in Oxford.
Our generation has virtually eradicated polio, smallpox and malaria, curtailed the spread of AIDS in Africa, and suicide kills five times more people than war does. Violence on the street or at home has decreased far more than the media suggest: cardiovascular disease, often a result of a self-chosen lifestyle, makes 4500 pct more victims than what others do to us. And since 1950 we’ve added ten more years to our average life expectancy, 76 years now in America, 81 years in the Netherlands.
MOREOVER, perhaps the greatest achievement of all: in the last 30 years we have collectively reduced child mortality worldwide from 9 down to 3 percent. Since 1991, over 130 million children have stayed alive and become active, creative global citizens who a generation earlier would have died. Life expectancy and population growth in Africa are advancing so rapidly that there are more people living south of the Sahara than in China. The UN expects Africa to have a population of two billion by 2040.
Just before I was born, Holland was hit by the entire West’s worst famine of the century, the winter of 1944. Shortly after my birth, the worst flood of the century followed, the Watersnoodramp of 1953. Since then, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Dutch have built one of the seven world wonders, the Delta Works. And 75 years after the Hongerwinter, Holland, with a land area as tiny as less than one half of a percent of America’s, produces the most food of, and for, the entire world, immediately after America.
I admit, I am of the generation that chokes up at hearing the Wilhelmus or the Star Spangled Banner. Include a flyover, and I’m not keeping it dry. I swallow hard at watching videos of military men or women who surprise their children by coming home early from overseas service. I think it is high time for younger folks to take over, and I especially welcome women taking the reins. The Boomers have messed with the climate and worsened the pollution of soil, air and water, and the older they get the odder their priorities. But the Greatest Generation, before us? They were courageous liberators, they built the middle class, and of course: honor thy father and thy mother. But they clung to discrimination against women, blacks and gays far loo long. They weren’t the greatest in everything, and their parents before that were frankly even less so.
NEITHER are we, far from it. But we are leaving a much better world than we sometimes think.
* Willem Meiners is the Editor of De Daily Dutchman.
