Feb. 3, 2021 - Dennis Prager Show
05:59
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| So, I asked you a challenging question, which I have thought of a lot. | |
| I fully acknowledge the damage my generation has done to this country and continues to do. | |
| Joe Biden is a boomer. | |
| And the question arises, did the generation that raised them, or does the generation that raised them, which is called the greatest generation, do they bear any responsibility? | |
| This is a question that I get a lot, and I suppose it's only fair. | |
| I've written a book where the millennials blame the boomers for their problems, so it's only fair to ask whether we can put a little bit of the blame for the boomers on the people who raised them. | |
| But my answer is that really, you can't. | |
| The blame stops with the boomers, and I'll tell you why. | |
| The reason why the boomers are the way they are... | |
| It's not so much how they were raised, but a product of the demographic fact that the boomers are an exceptionally large generation. | |
| I mean, it's right there in the name, the baby boomers. | |
| It was a birth boom, which meant that from the moment they came of age in the 1960s, the boomers have been the most numerous consumers, music listeners, voters. | |
| Anybody who wanted their project to be a success would target it to the boomers and their desires. | |
| If you were a politician and wanted to win, you would court the baby boomers simply because there were so many of them. | |
| The consequence of that was that it gave the baby boomers the idea that the world revolved around them. | |
| So much of the boomer legacy is a product of their narcissism. | |
| Spoiled them when they were coming up. | |
| It was because of this demographic fact, which has had just a lot of follow-on consequences. | |
| Is there a repeat of this? | |
| I just vaguely recall reading that there's a, I don't know if it's a baby boom, since a lot of people are not having babies, but Is there some sort of repeat in the staggering number of either Millennials or Generation X or Z or whatever? | |
| Or is that wrong? | |
| Very recently, we crossed the threshold point where Millennials now outnumber. | |
| Baby boomers, mainly because so many baby boomers have, you know, driven themselves into an early grave through misdeeds of one kind or another. | |
| And it is true that the millennials are also a pretty big generation demographically because they are the baby boomers' children. | |
| And so the main consequence of that, unfortunately, has been that the generation between them, Gen X, So often gets sidelined, because there just are not so many of them. | |
| So you'll talk to a lot of Gen Xers who feel kind of left behind and left out, and that's the reason behind that, that there were a lot of baby boomers, and their kids are the millennials, and so there are a lot of them too, but the Gen Xers just get caught in the middle. | |
| So you chose a number of people. | |
| Oh, by the way, I think I should answer, give you my theory as a baby boomer, because I was... | |
| Already speaking when I was in my 20s, so I recall audience reactions, and I recall what I said publicly. | |
| And I used to say to audiences, obviously these were the, this was the greatest generation, as they say, audience, the people who went through the Depression in World War II. And I say, you know what? | |
| You say you're going to give us everything you didn't have, meaning... | |
| Material wealth, security, and so on. | |
| And that's great, but you didn't give us what you did have. | |
| And that was religion and love of this country. | |
| So I do hold them unintentionally responsible. | |
| They were so preoccupied with giving my generation security and wealth. | |
| I don't mean large sums of money, but material items that they forgot to give us what made America great for all its years. | |
| How does that strike you? | |
| That sounds absolutely correct. | |
| One of the great resentments that I have as a millennial is that it's against boomer hypocrisy. | |
| They were the ones who taught us that America was a terrible country. | |
| And, you know, had been racist from its very founding. | |
| And I think older people sometimes don't appreciate that for millennials, that line that America is terrible isn't something that we heard from the occasional dissident faculty radical. | |
| That was orthodoxy. | |
| That was what we were taught in our mainstream public school history classes. | |
| And, of course, the natural response from the millennials is, okay, if America is so terrible, what is good about our country? | |
| And the people who were teaching us said, well, America started being good around the time of the 1960s. | |
| But if you think about it, what that means is that the baby boomers took love of America and replaced it with love of themselves. | |
| So once again, the baby boomers' narcissism put themselves at the center of, according to them, the only good story to be told about the United States. | |
| And it's certainly my hope that millennials can be the generation of backlash against that. | |
| God willing. | |
| I've got to take a break. | |
| Helen Andrews. |
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