“For indeed the days are coming when people will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed.’ At that time they will say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us,’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us!'” (Lk 23:29-30)

My generation, colloquially known as the ‘Boomers,’ is arguably the first generation in history to largely embrace the notion of reproductive sterility as a positive good. This fulfills a prophesy made by our Lord, Jesus Christ, to the women of Jerusalem even as He was bearing the cross to his place of execution on Golgotha. Only a nihilistic culture which has no vision or hope for the future would celebrate barrenness as a desirable outcome. Only a generation steeped in this negative neo-Malthusian mindset would view its own offspring as a threat to its greater enjoyment and happiness. Only diseased minds and frozen hearts could ever conceive of human life not as a promising asset but as a dangerous liability which threatens their world, yet such is the mystifying conclusion which a great many of the Boomer generation came to accept as gospel.

Children, who had historically been considered hallmarks of family success and assets to society were, after 1965, increasingly dismissed as disposable liabilities. We lost any sense of shame about killing our unborn children, and in fact ostracized and shamed those few who were still willing to defend pre-natal life. Such attitudes inevitably create a jaded and cynical disposition regarding all human life, thus the terrible slaughters we now see in Ukraine and Gaza are either defended or casually dismissed by the very same crowd which was so greatly incensed by killings during the Vietnam War. I watched incredulously throughout the 1960s and 70s as my generation, virtually all raised with a Christian outlook, glibly swallowed the ‘Chicken Little’ overpopulation hoax of alarmists like Paul Ehrlich (author of “The Population Bomb” 1968) and sugar coated with a massive dose of Margaret Sanger’s contraception propaganda. And in fact, within a decade, that pervasive sexual revolution had blinded a whole generation to the true meaning of love and responsibility, and dispelled any concern for the good of future generations.

Ideas such as these have real world consequences. For if one generation is allowed to simply kill off its progeny for convenience sake, then what logically follows is a right to institute generational malpractice and pilferage. For if it’s okay to kill off your descendants for any reason, then what is to prevent one from robbing them blind? Whether consciously intended or not, this attitude insures that succeeding generations will be poorer, smaller, and saddled with the debts and problems bequeathed to them by their self-indulgent predecessors, the Boomers. Today’s demographics clearly bear out this phenomenon.

Already, virtually every developed country in the world today has entered a demographic death spiral. Fertility rates are now well below replacement level (at 1.64 children per woman in the U.S. versus the 2.1 needed for equilibrium) which translates into a rapidly aging population, particularly in countries like Japan. Future generations, in other words, will not be large enough to provide the goods and services needed to sustain current economies and lifestyles. But Boomers have embraced other trends, besides championing unsustainably low birth rates, which are proving even more damaging to posterity, while bringing about the collapse of entire societies.

The current poster child for this type of collapse is Ukraine, a cause cellebrae for progressive Boomer neo-cons. At the time of the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, this fertile breadbasket for Europe and the Levant boasted a population of 52 million souls. After achieving its independence, Ukraine became a pawn to the geopolitical ambitions of a CIA backed Western globalist world order which in 2014 toppled the legitimate government in order to install a NATO friendly puppet government. By that time Ukraine’s population had already fallen by 8 million but its real dismemberment was only beginning. An eight year dirty war targeting Russians living in Ukraine followed while the CIA/MI6 sponsored puppet government relentlessly antagonized and poked the Russian bear until open warfare inevitably erupted in 2022. Ironically, it was Russia which had rapidly re-Christianized post Communism, and this fact apparently offended the Western powers who were embracing ever more secular and anti-Christian values.

Of course, with the outbreak of war it was the Ukrainians themselves, not their Western overlords, who suffered staggering casualties. Those who were able to exit fled in an ever increasing exodus, even as well over a million of their compatriots died on the battlefields, many with less than a week’s training before being dropped into the meat grinder. Today it is estimated that fewer than 25 million Ukrainians still inhabit their native soil, down from 52 million just 35 years ago! Again, it has been globalist Boomer neo-cons in Washington, Paris, and London along with their defense contractor partners who have both vociferously promoted and profited immensely from this tragic debacle ~ the literal destruction an entire nation.

Not satisfied with such carnage, these same globalist neo-con elites insist on recklessly attacking the world’s most heavily nuclear armed power, Russia, not only through punitive sanctions and shrill threats but by employing actual drone and missile strikes deep within Russian territory, even targeting Russia’s head of state. This demonstrates the alarming levels if hubris, if not actual insanity, to which these Boomer oligarchs now subscribe. They imagine themselves to be true statesmen yet are willing to put the entire human race at risk in order to play their power games because in the depth of their souls they are Godless nihilists whose only concern is for the present moment and whose only desire is to increase their power, at whatever cost to those beneath them (amply demonstrated by their ‘management’ of the Covid crisis only five years prior). Posterity means nothing to this class because their souls are utterly sterile.

The tragedy of Ukraine illustrates the preferred business model of the Boomer generation oligarchs, which is basically plantation capitalism. In their eyes a proxy state like Ukraine is simply another plantation to be harvested and exploited for personal gain. But in truth these same Boomers have long been skimming and plundering much more lucrative plantations than Ukraine. The richest source of mining has turned out to be their own children and yes grandchildren, particularly those post-Boomer generations labelled Gen Y (Millennials) and Gen Z. The device they have cleverly used to cultivate and exploit this new inter-generational plantation is the smart phone, introduced just about the time the early Millennials were reaching adolescence. Bolstered by countless Apps, this tool quickly addicted countless impressionable young minds even as it altered the entire teen social structure. In the process Boomer owned companies like META (Facebook), Apple, and Google morphed into trillion dollar enterprises. But this financial success comes at what a cost to those up and coming generations!

By design, smart phones became substitutes for family and friends among millions of youthful users. AI driven chatbots then accelerated this psychological dependency to the next level even as the mental health of teens began to nosedive after 2010 due to widespread cyber-bullying, pornography, and predators who flooded this digital world, a world which had essentially become the real world for countless hundreds of millions of young people across the globe. Meanwhile Boomer generation Big Tech oligarchs were busy monetizing and shamelessly exploiting two generations and counting. This represents nothing less than generational abuse on a massive scale. The tech monsters who are busy accumulating fabulous wealth by digitally enslaving naive unsuspecting children, that is their own posterity, make the tobacco companies look like angels of mercy by comparison.

What went wrong with this Boomer generation, willing not only to sacrifice entire nations but even to turn on its own posterity, manipulating and exploiting them like lab rats for obscene profits? As such they personify and in fact have become the most narcissistic, self-centered generation in history, leaving a hollow legacy of anger and hopeless despair to their progeny. I am of course speaking in broadly general terms because there remain many decent members of my generation. Still I weep because it is a fact that Millennials and Gen Z are being left holding the bag of reckless and self-absorbed Boomer lifestyles to the degree that these unfortunates were given little knowledge of God or true religion; they have fewer prospects for marriage and children, not to mention any realistic chance to ever own a home. The opportunities that the Boomers of my day casually took for granted, the younger generational cohorts are being ever more deprived of, including the opportunity for gainful employment at a decent wage. (This reality will only get worse as AI robots replace even the low paying service jobs.)

The Boomers were perhaps the most coddled and adored crop of children in human history but we seemed to lack the sense of generosity which our forebears exhibited. Our parents, who had survived both a Great Depression and a World War, were thus determined to give us a better life and more opportunity than they had known. To a large degree they succeeded. As children, Boomers were idolized by entertainment and media, granted tremendous freedoms, and raised in at least a nominally Christian environment. Yet these products of the 1950s and ’60s “Ozzie and Harriet” world embarked on a very different path once they had shipped off to college in unprecedented numbers. There they ran into two howling social headwinds which quickly derailed their rather shallow, as it turned out, Judaeo-Christian ideals and principles.

Those headwinds were the Vietnam War and the Sexual Revolution coming into full swing. The admitted hypocrisy of the Vietnam debacle undermined patriotism even as the venereal pleasures of the sexual revolution swept away any such fragile moral sensibilities as might have remained. Those young men who fought in Vietnam returned for the most part either disillusioned, psychologically damaged, or addicted to powerful drugs like heroin. Their peers who spent the war years on a college campus protesting the war evolved into highly educated, hedonistic agitators intent on re-inventing society. Among all classes however the optimistic idealism of the early 60s JFK era melted away like butter on a hot brick. Good and evil; right or wrong were increasingly seen in relativistic terms. Truth surrendered to subjective analysis meaning that religion no longer provided answers to the heart’s deepest questions. Power ~ whether political, economic, or social became for that generation the only important or relevant reality. Truth, faith, morals, decency were generally relegated to the status of secondary concerns.

Henceforth, the thing was to be ‘nice,’ pleasant, agreeable, and humorous if possible. These traits covered a multitude of sins. One could be rotten to the core so long as he had a pleasant voice and cheerful demeanor. In the end the hypocrisy which Boomers decried in their elders was adroitly repurposed to their own ends. The killing they had so vociferously condemned in Vietnam was later defended in Serbia, Lebanon, or the West Bank. The swelling list of human rights being imposed on other countries and cultures they scrupulously denied as applicable to fully developed, yet unborn, children in a mother’s womb. The discrimination against minorities which they loudly abhorred was applauded when turned against next generation white males.

These are very broad observations, of course. Not all Boomers abandoned religion or morphed into money grubbing opportunists. A substantial number became ardent defenders of unborn life and eschewed the promiscuous behavior of too many of their fellows. Yet long before every kid had a smart phone, another phenomenon gained currency among Boomers, both good and bad. Many adopted a ‘fear based’ rather than a ‘trust based’ approach to child rearing, appropriately named ‘helicopter parenting,’ which appeared about the same time that the internet was popularized. Thanks to non-stop media fear mongering abetted by a risk averse legal profession, the idea evolved that the outside world is such a dangerous place that children required non-stop parental surveillance and protection. The parental role gradually took on the tone of a domestic CIA.

Not only did the new parenting style curb many of the simple freedoms we Boomers had known and enjoyed growing up: walking to school, exploring one’s neighborhood, playing outdoors with other kids until the street lights came on ~ the ‘helicopter syndrome’ made children unnecessarily fearful and dependent. Instead of playing street hockey kids were now regimented into organized activities under relentless adult supervision ~ thus the emergence of the ‘soccer mom.’ Rather than exploring the local woods or riding bicycles with friends, the newer generations had to be driven to any and every activity which lay beyond the confines of one’s own back yard. Kids who naturally seek to be self reliant and expand their boundaries were instead running into the authoritarian brick walls of parents, teachers, and coaches intent on keeping everybody ‘safe.’ Many kids were simply not allowed to independently develop adult skills or challenge themselves.

There was a time (for most of human history) when 14 year olds assumed adult responsibilities, worked at jobs, and often even married. In the new world of repressed adulthood, bored and resentful adolescents retreated into their solitary dens to play video games for hours on end; locked like prisoners into the ‘safe spaces’ in which no chance to experience the larger ‘real world’ existed. For such kids, the real world became the virtual space which existed only on a video screen.

This habit of locking down children out of exaggerated or completely irrational fears was perhaps the biggest sin the Boomer generation perpetrated against their progeny. In trying to protect their children they instead made them weak and vulnerable; incapable of dealing with criticism or any other unpleasantry. What resulted was an non-resilient ‘boy in the bubble’ generation who expected supervised protection, even as college students, from any scary or uncomfortable ideas. Of course this only succeeded in instilling in them a sense of dependency rather than the ability to become strong men and women manifesting adult responsibilities and values.

The Boomer generation was no smarter nor ambitious than any other generation. We just happened to be lucky, born at a rare moment in history when the stars happened to be ever so rightly aligned. We were the recipients of a post World War II economic boom, political stability, plentiful education opportunities, and a technological explosion made possible by the timely arrival of the silicon chip. The fates smiled on our generation, perhaps too abundantly. We let it go to our heads that we were something special; basking in a superficial Starbucks culture of easy money, big homes, expensive vacations, and our 1.5 (on average) children. We took material success for granted so much so that we neglected to instill those necessary values and beliefs in the next generation which would help them prosper later, when the stars invariably re-aligned to bring about a more challenging world than the one we had known.

Prosperity is the one thing that human beings never seem to handle well, and the Boomer generation is no exception to that rule. Our pitiful legacy has nothing to do with global hegemony, the internet, or artificial intelligence. Rather it is the legacy traced in the flesh and blood lives of our descendants ~ two or more generations who are to a great extent emotionally unstable, economically disadvantaged, and spiritually empty. As I watch them struggle with today’s world it pains me that many of their problems trace directly back to my generation, possibly the most narcissistic self-centered one in history, who have left an empty legacy of anger and hopeless despair to their progeny.

I believe that it is long past due for Boomers to acknowledges some responsibility for their malfeasance and virtual embezzlement of their children’s rightful patrimony (both spiritual and material) by starting to make at least a few token amends. We need to express some honest mea culpas to our descendants for carelessly squandering much of their patrimony. We ought to sincerely apologize for leaving them little more than an empty trash heap and a huge cleanup bill for the wild party in which for decades we so thoughtlessly indulged ourselves.

I do not believe that the guilt is communal since God will judge us as individuals, not as a group. But I do believe that there is such a thing as a shared generational responsibility, some kind of reparation in which this entire Boomer generation ought to participate because we were effectively charging decades of personal expenses using someone else’s credit card. The present Boomer controlled government still spends trillions more than its incoming revenues. Who will have to pay those debts? Meanwhile Big Tech companies continue to lure susceptible youngsters with addictive online Apps in order to digitally enslave them. Who, in the end, will be left to pay the piper but those unfortunate generations. 

Ultimately posterity will survive because human beings are resilient creatures, as God designed us to be. I have no doubt our children and grandchildren will make lemonade out of the lemons we so stingily bequeathed to them. But I sincerely believe that as this Boomer generation inches ever closer to our final end, we should perhaps get off the golf courses to make time to spend in a nearby church. It is time to make some spiritual if not material amends, having sinned gravely against our own posterity. We exchanged our children for dogs and lattes. The sad thing for so many is that as they lay on a bed gasping for those last few breaths of life, there will be no one there to console or pray for them, either the children they never had or the ones who may exist but were never taught how to pray.

Francis J. Pierson +a.m.d.g.