Tony Abbott was spewed forth into this world in 1957. He most definitely is part of the boomer generation.

Gordon Gekko was definitely and definitively a Boomer

Leaving aside various other candidates for the title (e.g. the French ancien regime, the slave-owners of the Old South or the Russian feudal aristocracy of Tolstoy’s time

None of those are generations though. All of them are examples of an aristocracy or a “privileged few” rather than an entire generation. And the whole point of aristocracies is that the privilege is passed down to the next generation.

The difference between your examples and the Boomer generation is that in the latter case multiple laws have been passed to make the Boomers wealthier at the expense of their descendants. Laws have always favoured those with property and wealth, and the beneficiaries have always skewed to the elderly (given they were generally on their way to being old when they inherited their parents’ wealth) but our current laws don’t just favour the wealthy – the entire Boomer generation has been given an advantage at the expense of younger generations.

We did everything to benefit ourselves and everyone else’s future.

Maybe, but you’ve also been the ones instrumental in tearing it all down once it was no longer relevant to you.

Maybe the ‘X’ (Greed is Good) Generation that reacted so strongly to their Boomer parents? Perhaps we were too generous in our ideals.

I think he was flawed by the fake humanism in Christianity. Other wise he was OK. (Apart from trying too hard to be a Christian).

In full agreement about illusion. I spent my early childhood in what is now known as preschool, but in the 1950s as ‘nursery school’. My father was establishing his business with a 500 pound bank loan, and my mother was assisting him (sexing chickens if the truth be known, while she was still pregnant with me). The ‘nursery school’ was run by a Mrs. Fink, who was a migrant refugee from the second World War. My memories of that time are happy. When my mother was pregnant with my sister(s) my parents hired a ‘Nanny’ to look after us while she was in hospital. Olga, another migrant refugee. They were happy days for myself and my sister. Any psychological scars I might bear were inflicted by a parochial public High School controlled by crypto-fascist Catholic trained disciplinarian teachers.

Forty-something years later I was in a relationship with a single mother when I was attending a University with a child-minding center. I was able to get her six year old kid into the University child minding center while I attended my lectures. Thank the Goddess for childcare for working mothers.

In multiple metropolitan newspapers and annual lucrative xmas-filler calendars and booklets for four decades+, the Boomer Definition of Narcissistic Hypocrisy: the Superstar-Lefty Cartoonist SHOUTING AT US ALL to embrace the simple pleasures of self-effacing tribal nobody-hood.

Nice work, if you can get it.

And yet your generation is, collectively, the richest ever in Human history, and it’s almost guaranteed that no subsequent future generation will ever again get close, collectively, to the level of privilege, comfort and security that you have enjoyed for your entire life. You have also allowed us, on your collective generational leadership watch, to put the entire Human biosphere in the kind of existential peril from which it is increasingly unlikely to escape.

I am sure you personally had nothing to do with all of that, Ray. But something just doesn’t add up. You tell me what it is. So we and subsequent generations can at least try to recalibrate the world yours will leave us with.

Correct – she has a parent problem