Philly Mag's Beef with Baby Boomers

A recent Philadelphia Magazine cover calls out to Baby Boomers, asking them to drop dead. With one article, Janine White has managed to transform a decent regional magazine into the opinionated afterbirth of the hipster's Bibles. I can't even imagine Philadelphia Weekly or Philadelphia City Paper publishing something so socially irresponsible, certainly not on a cover.


This is the kind of hypocritical selfishness that stains my generation. White accuses Baby Boomers of selling out their mid-century idealism for Volvos and suburbs, but whether you're an X or a Y, the Baby Boomers sacrificed the LSD and free love to raise us. Many worked full time at K-Mart to make sure that art school drop outs were entitled enough to demand high paying jobs that don't exist.

If Baby Boomers are guilty of anything it's for raising us under the delusion that we can do anything we put our minds to.


Baby Boomers took the flaws of their parents and in spite, conceived a cultural Renaissance.


What did we do with the indiscriminate acceptance we inherited? Invented Gentrification and then bitched when the real estate market collapsed. And well into our 30s or 40s, we're still stomping our feet and blaming our parents when the world doesn't go our way.


In her rant, Write blames her parents' generation for everything from the Global Recession to illiteracy. Anyone who's taken Anthropology 101 can tell you a single generation can't be blamed for evolution. Baby Boomer, Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire explained that 22 years ago, and at the time we got it.


Our parents fostered a cultural tapestry that transformed the world forever, and somehow found time to raise us. We licked the icing off the cake of diversity like the fat, greedy sociopaths we are, then accused the most influential generation in modern history of not doing enough for us.


We've been voting since the late 80s. Generations X and Y are as accountable for any current crisis as our parents, or their parents. In fact, had we the foresight and ambition of the generations that preceded us, perhaps we could have been carrying on their legacy instead of tuning into The Jersey Shore.


I don't know why Philadelphia Magazine is calling for Baby Boomers to drop dead. Without them, who will its editors blame for their mistakes?