A Commentary by Doug Draper
When Pete Townshend of the legendary rock band ‘The Who’ wrote the lyrics back in the 1960s; “Hope I die before I get old” for a song called ‘My Generation’, I took it to mean that it would be better to die than grow up to be like our parents at the time.
Peter Kent, a Baby Boomer and the worst federal environment minister Canada has ever had. His theme – ‘anyone who advocates for environmental protection is a radical’.
Now, as I approach my senior years and watch my aging Baby Boomer peers and the havoc our collective self-centeredness is wreaking on the planet and the lives of younger generations who will be burdened for decades to come with the mess we have made, I almost do wish that our generation had died before it got much past the age of 30, which was the cut-off age for our generation back then. Remember that other old line from the 60s; “Don’t trust anyone over 30.”
If you think I am being unfair to a generation of post-Second World War babies that went on to cry about love and peace and communing with a verdant, sun-kissed Mother Nature, let me say one more time that I am part of that generation and I find that generation to be wanting. It is a generation that had the nerve to rebel against its parents and grandparents who struggled, rather heroically, through the Great Depression and a Second World War they were actually willing to sacrifice and pay for rather than expect tax cuts. The people from that generation, to the extent they are still alive, is going down as the ‘greatest generation’.
What will the Baby Boomers go down as?
I believe that the Baby Boomers – even if I must include myself in this greedy, self-absorbed, who-gives-a-shit-about-anyone-else mess of a generation – will go down as a bunch that always cared more about their narrow asses than they do about anyone else. I mean, it is all about health care and other coming seniors care entitlement for themselves, and who gives a shit about the health and welfare of future generations.
That ‘who-gives-a-shit’ attitude rings particularly true when it comes to environmental protection – anything to do with protecting the quality of our waters or air or preserving what is left of our greenspaces from the low-density residential and retail developments Baby Boomers covet more than the Mother Earth they once pretended to care for.
Just look at what Canada’s federal government – made up of Stephen Harper and a cast of mostly other Baby Boomers – are doing to environmental regulations in this country that have been half a century in the making.
This Baby Boomer government has already gutted the federal Fisheries Act, has cut back more resources to Environment Canada and has further placed the rights of scientists in that agency to speak openly in chains, and is now moving forward with other cuts to Canada’s Navigable Waters Protection Act and the country’s Endangered Species Act (as weak as it is, compared to its counterpart in the United States). And there is hardly a whisper from Baby Boomers.
All aging Baby Boomers give a shit about is their senior entitlements around health care and social insurance and so on. They blather and whine on about those things and yet hardly have a word to say about cost cuts to education or the gutting of environmental regulations that impact on younger people.
Yet the health care and senior benefits for the aging bulge of Baby Boomers will place an ever exploding burden on younger generations of Canadians and Americans that are having a harder time finding a job in an economy and environment these Baby Boomers have left in a mess.
It gives a whole new ring to the lyric; “Hope I die before they get old,” doesn’t it? Or rather say today; ‘Boomers would be doing young generations a one hell of a favour if we die before we get old.’ It might have even been better if we kicked off 20 or 30 years ago.
(Niagara At Large invites you to share your views on this post. Remember that NAL only posts comments by individuals who also share their first and last names.)
Niagara At Large 
Doug,
You ask, ‘who gives a shit’? I say there are a lot of the Boomer Generation that ‘do give a shit’ and in fact just as many and maybe more than any other generation! First there’s you and second there’s me so don’t despair.
The problem is with the self-centered old farts that are in a position of power and really only care about their government pay than actually caring about our environment. In fact they have become so cloistered that they refuse to respond to alarms from those who do care. As an example please visit an attempt to inform the Councilors and Bureaucrats of our Niagara Regional Government as of August 22, 2012.
http://newsalertniagara.blogspot.ca/2012/09/pollution-alert.html?showComment=1350002565626
To date we have not received a single answer to our question. It’s not a generational problem, Doug.
It’s a contemptuous lack of courtesy and a heaping helping of arrogance!
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Hey Doug on the surface it may seem that you are right. However, remember that these baby boomer politicians are POLITICIANS. Not all politicians are totally evil and out to serve the affluent who helped get them where they are but unfortunately it seems that those with the most influence and the biggest mouths are mouthing what they need to in order to keep the rich on their side.
I am a baby boomer and so are most of my friends and I do not waste my time with idiots who are environmentally stupid. I know there are a lot of us who are aware enough of the slaughter of all things nature-related that we attend meetings, protests and election candidates soirees hoping to bend the mercenary murderer’s minds back to reality. Everything in your commentary is correct except that there are pro-eco fighters out there and we need to be stronger and perhaps more focussed. I do not care when some twit tells me I am anti progress or anti development.
I am anti idiots who want to ruin this planet for my children and grandchildren. There are so many ways to have development with reusing property that has been used for something before but now sits with vacant structures on it. To do this is called: “construction without destruction”. I have done it and I know the costs were less than beginning from with a start that meant raping the land.
The Crystal Beach Co-op was built on property that had housed a school and a community hall. Nothing intrusive to nature was needed to build that Co-op. The Town did have to be convinced at an O.M.B. hearing that made me not too popular for a while but there is always an alternative to ruining nature. Unfortunately greed seems to prevail over the logic of being intelligent and aware enough to do a bit of leg work, compromise a little and understand that doing the right thing can be done even by right wingers who can come to their senses and aspire to be eco-heros. It is never too late to care.
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I agree with both posters so far. I do give a shit and so do many baby boomers. As Patricia said, the baby boomer politicians are POLITICIANS. I find it frustrating that even for earth hour I’m the only one in my neighbourhood who turns off the lights and appliances and sits in the dark admiring the sky. Lordie, it’s only a symbolic hour and people can’t even do that! I don’t have any family to be concerned about after I’m gone but I still care about this fragile orb we inhabit, at least for the plants and animals if not so much for we cancerous humans.
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As a 33 year old it is a tempting morsel to bite on the notion that ‘boomers are at fault for the state of things. Peter Kent is an aweful choice for Minister of the Environment, and the inclusion of so many things in the Omnibus II budget without proper debate is fundamentally unCanadian but I am greatful for universal health care and my Ontario Seconday School education, two of the boomers legacies. I do wring my hands a little about how influential their generation could be instrumenting change, but I don’t think that my generation, or the generation after me is asking for the right kind of help to cause change. Outside of quitting premiers and a “majority” government put in place by less than 40% of the public there can be a will built for the greater good, but our collective generations need to re-shift focus to community and away from this degrading notion of unlimited financial growth. So maybe the boomers are letting the economy and environment be gutted, but is anybody from the younger generations asking for help in stopping this process, and if not when do we all become complisate in letting this happen?
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I am a senior, and along with other boomers and other boomers+, many still fight the good fight. The first group I joined when I came back to Canada in the early early 70’s was Pollution Probe Niagara, and I have so many social justice groups and causes, and heritage ones too, that my all-suffering husband has asked me to not join so many groups pushing for change. We agree on everything, except the time that I put into these bushfires. What we in these groups find is that it is hard, very hard to engage the younger group of people in their twenties and thirties to join for social justice causes, environmental causes, and certainly to engage in any political causes, whether Federal, Provincial, or two-tiered Municipal interests. Think Raging Grannies, although I am not sure we have a chapter in Niagara, or Grandmothers to grandmothers for the Stephen Lewis Foundation in Aids in Africa. I agree with the comments above about the egregious Peter Kent.
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A few short years ago it was reported that Peter Kent, once an employee of the people (The CBC) jumped to another corporation because he was passed over for a position he craved with the CBC.He ranted and raved about the CBC for years and finally entered the political arena, where Harper assigned him to the role of Canada’s envoy to the Organization of American States where he championed the role of Corporations over the rights of the too often subjugated, harassed and in some cases murdered peoples of the countries of Central as well as South America and the Caribbean. I read some of his BS and realized his dilemma …My only hope is that he and his kind are soon gone from the scene
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Does the fight against acid rain and the clear cut logging on the QUEEN CHARLETTES jog any of your memory Doug? How about Greenpeace and the whole enviromental movement — is it starting to come back to you now who gave birth to these. Boomers to doug — Boomers to Doug — take something the colic and get back in the saddle encouraging all generations to FIGHT FOR THE ENVIROMENT Something OUR generation on MASS gave rise to!!!
A brief reply from NAL publisher Doug Draper – I agree with John Holbourne wholeheartedly that the Baby Boomer generation was very much involved in the first Earth Day – circa 1970 – that fueled what was once regarded as the modern-day environmental movement that spawned groups like Pollution Probe in Ontario, Friends of the Earth, North America-wide, and on and on.
My commentary was not written to negate all that, but to point out that many of the Baby Boomer generation – and I was one of them, born in 1951, out there picketing in front of polluters on the very first Earth Day – sold out in the sense that they went on to build and purchase gas-guzzling SUVs, build and live in over-sized, big box houses in sprawling suburbs that paved over woodlands, wetlands and farmlands, and have voted in governments (like the Baby Boomer government of Mike Harris in Ontario) that gutted many of the environmental protection laws and ministries that, quite ironically, some of the very same Boomers, when they were younger, fought so hard to support.
In the mind of some, including this aging Boomer, that is called selling out, and leaving it to the kids to deal with the fallout of costly, unsustainable sprawling growth, greenhouse gases, the tar sands, our lack of individual will to conserve energy by turning off those bloody air conditioning systems and so on.
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