In his wonderful play, The Importance of being Earnest, Oscar Wilde writes:

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.

Is he suggesting that the boys turn into their dads? Is that the tragedy? Because I can’t be the only one thinking that for boys, turning onto their dad’s clone (even though they swore to themselves and others that they’d never) is something that has been happening with unrelenting regularity for eons… (me, I’m practically indistinguishable from my mum, and Oscar was wrong because my mum is awesome).

Our parents: first we blame them for everything, then we become them! And then we blame the kids. The next generation. Just like our parents did. It was ever thus…

I’m Gen X (caught between blaming the parents and the kids) so my parents are Boomers .

The Boomers get blamed for pretty much everything these days… when they were young, they probably (not unreasonably) blamed their parents and grandparents for the first and second World Wars. In protest, they became the original hippies proclaiming peace, love and brotherhood. Also, to give them their due, they haven’t (yet) caused a world war…

According to Wikipedia:

“At 18 to 22 years old, early (American) Boomers faced the mandatory draft (because of the Vietnam war). The anti-war movement swept through university campuses in 1968, with thousands actively protesting. Following the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, many young Boomers radicalized, participating in campus sit-ins, the Black Power movement, and early environmental and feminist actions.”

So basically they were woke as hell and you’d be forgiven for saying they were the original snowflakes who wore flowers in their hair and protested by staying in bed chanting about giving peace a chance… and for the younger Boomers, or those that hadn’t got their sh!t together by the 70s, it wasn’t exactly plain sailing:

“In 1973, following the Yom Kippur War, Arab members of OPEC proclaimed an oil embargo against the U.S. and other nations supporting Israel. Crude oil prices quadrupled almost overnight, leading to severe fuel rationing and widespread panic. And then in 1979 the Iranian Revolution sparked a second major supply disruption, sending oil prices soaring yet again and heavily limiting global output. Before the oil shocks, loose monetary policies such as the U.S. funding the Vietnam War without raising taxes had already started driving up demand, causing painful inflation.” Thank you Wikipedia.

Around the same time, in 1968, Enoch Powell delivered his infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech, which strongly criticized mass immigration and existing race relations legislation. He argued for an immediate end to further immigration and advocated for government-funded repatriation of immigrants back to their countries of origin. This was despite him recruiting thousands of health care professionals from the Caribbean to help with staff shortages between 1960 and 1963.

Does any of this sound familiar today?

As we say in French,

“Plus ça change…”

Which is a weird way of saying nothing changes.

I remember way back when I was a naive nursing student in the 90s, being introduced to the Black Report (published in 1980 after a long and probably very expensive enquiry) about health inequalities among less affluent people. Apparently some bigwigs were shocked and surprised by these findings. Even then, I remember being troubled by their astonishment, I mean, how was this news?? Since you ask, I was informed that this inequality had long been suspected but had never been quantified.  We all know that expensive and time-consuming enquiries must always be had to provide the evidence of bad stuff that we already know but plan to ignore. And now, nearly 50 years after the report, I’m still troubled by the fact that the stats haven’t changed.

I guess we all start out with hope and optimism. Every generation believes it will do better than the one that bred, fed, clothed, housed, and educated them. And you know, it must be true; every generation builds on the knowledge gleaned by the one before, otherwise we’d still be living in caves. But every youthful, optimistic, dreamer generation grows up, realises nothing’s that simple and optimism alone doesn’t pay the rent. And somewhere along the line we invariably forget how lucky we actually are, even if things aren’t perfect. They never were.

We have the NHS, free schools, free and fair elections, reproductive rights, comparatively low corruption levels, a modicum of social benefits, access to justice… all of these benefits are under serious strain due to some bad actors and chronic underfunding but they still exist because many good people put their hearts and souls into preserving them.

Look, just a week ago I delivered a teeny weeny little 28 weeker. I did so surrounded by a top team of neonatal nurses and paediatricians who, I am pretty confident, will nurture that baby til she goes home with her parents. Parents who won’t be crippled by debt from weeks of intensive care costs. The NHS may not be perfect, but for that baby, it’s the sodding bee’s knees. That baby will take up her free school place, maybe even go to university. Despite being a girl. No pressure to get married off at a young age. Hey, if she decides to try before she buys, she can do that knowing she won’t end up in an institution doing laundry because she got pregnant out of wedlock. Instead, she’ll be financially independent and can enter into matrimony on her own terms. If, for the sake of argument, future hubby needs to be cut loose, she’ll have legal recourse to get out of that contract without facing destitution. This is frigging awesome, long may it last. And it was put in place by the Boomers.

All these rights have to be defended. And paid for. But the Boomers, who understood this instinctively when they were chanting for peace while paying minimal taxes (because sit-ins and flower-wearing don’t renumerate all that well) ended up doing just fine. Like every generation before them, they grew up, got proper jobs, paid increasing taxes based on higher earnings, even saved some dough, and now (like every generation of older, high-tax-bracket people before them who have earned power and influence through decades of hard graft) they aren’t terribly keen to share the mullah. It was ever thus. Instead, they go down the unoriginal path of blaming the young ones. They may not have started world wars (yet) but they have extracted (and burned) a f*ckton of fossil fuel, getting pretty rich in the process (having learned from the various middle-eastern oil crises that the best way to keep petrol suitably expensive is to spark regular wars thus causing regular shortages), and then they accuse their frightened grandchildren of being over-anxious, chronically depressed, unable to cope with the stress of seeing the world burn… They started off chanting for peace and justice and equality, but they ended up saying things like “I’m not racist,  but.. ” And “In my day, things were better…” Judging by the  Boomers currently charge of the world right now (and those that aren’t but whom we pander to as if they were, the likes of Nigel in many European countries) I’d say yes you are; and maybe, but your actions didn’t help.

Look, the Boomers have worked hard, but they have also been very lucky. Both things can be true. But they’ve been giving themselves mega tax breaks for decades, and now, just as they need care, they are realising that the NHS that their parents set up and funded by paying higher taxes has been eroded. Now they are experiencing corridor care, which is a bit pants. And (after Brexit) their carers are coming from further afield. Huge shout out to those carers, by the way, they do the most amazing work for little money and zero gratitude. It has ever been thus.

Look, my boomer parents are immigrants from back when Europeans could move freely (the EU was a Boomer invention, they seem to have convenienly forgotten that!) They, like so many immigrants, contributed enormously to the economy. And honestly, the desperate people who arrive in small boats hoping to contribute meaningfully are rather less terrifying than, say, the Nazis (mostly small planes, to be fair), the Armada, the Normans, the Vikings and the Romans. Those guys came armed to the teeth, openly intending to conquer, plunder and steal.

Boomers, you cannot slash taxes, vote Brexit, invent social media while resisting all calls to make it safer for kids, tank the economy during covid for your own safety at the expense of the young ones, then blame all our problems on the mostly legal immigration (a reasonable response to your short-sightedness) and the anxious kids. That’s a classic “look over there” technique which has always been surprisingly effective.

Gen X: we’ve been pretty lucky too. We learned to navigate the world with minimal tech, while benefitting enormously from it. We went to Uni for free. It wasn’t perfect but we enjoyed peace, freedom and good health. If we want our kids and grand children to have this too, and I really do, we’re gonna have to suck up some hefty tax bills when we inherit our parents’ stashed cash. Otherwise we’d just be falling into the age-old trap of turning into our parents.  Nobody wants that.