A Vote in Defense of the Baby Boomers

It has been a long, long time since I have been prompted to write a letter to any editor on any subject, but the article on baby busters put me right over the edge (“Beyond the Bulge” June 17).

It seems unbelievable that a “generation,” some of them just now 15, could be whining about not yet having gotten “their moment in the sun.”

And if they think it’s a drag having grown up behind the boomers, perhaps they should reflect that when the boomers were their age, having to put up with a society firmly in the hands of the likes of J. Edgar Hoover, William Westmoreland, Richard Nixon, George Wallace and the like wasn’t exactly a picnic in the park. Not to mention earlier 20th Century generations who had to put up with minor inconveniences such as robber barons, sweatshops, Flanders Field and Gallipoli, 12 years of the Depression, the Dust Bowl, Nazism and the feat of nuclear weapons.

It seems to me that the baby boomers did their job. They fought hard to change the things about society they perceived as being wrong; as a group, they made their voices heard where those before them had been silent; they tried valiantly to establish a new national moral high ground, and succeeded as often as not; they remained a diverse and vibrant group--and it should be remembered that Yuppiedom is no more characteristic of their legacy than is Hippiedom--and when they had finally won the battles but lost the war, the vast majority reintegrated themselves into the mainstream fabric of the American society and have become hard-working contributors to it. The American Dream, with their imprint firmly implanted as one of its parts, is definitely alive and being passed on to the next generation.

JIM BUTLER

San Diego