"Nothing has prepared us for the baby boomers’ return to infancy."

I'm leading with this photo of Luna because communing with our three cats is much more fun than contemplating my status as a baby boomer. It annoys me tremendously to belong to this cohort, but if the youngest of the boomers are 54 and I'm 59, nothing much can be done about it apart from my ongoing efforts to stay out of simplistic boxes.

Consequently for some boomers, this opinion piece might seem overly harsh. Unfortunately for them (for us), it's largely spot-on. Scrooge-like deathbed conversions, anyone?

What the Hell Are We Going to Do About the Boomers?, by Bernie Bleske (Medium)

Nothing has prepared us for the baby boomers’ return to infancy

... The boomer generation’s youngest member is now 54, and as a group, they are 65 million strong, the largest generation in U.S. history. They are the children of the late 1940s, the ’50s, and the early ’60s, who came of age in an era of unprecedented prosperity and hard-earned luxury. No wars, no famines, no economic disasters occurred their entire lives. (The hardships they endured pale to what had come before.) The one great threat, the fall of capitalism to communism, never happened. (Like almost everything else in their lives, they exported the violent part of that conflict to Asia and South America and other places where the people weren’t white, even in their own country.)

They grew up with massive infrastructure projects — the U.S. interstate highway system, the power grid, and the water supply — which were all completed while they were still young. Their parents were forged in a time that saw two world wars, the Great Depression, and pandemic disease; a generation who vowed that their children, the boomers, would never suffer as they had. Hardened like steel by their experiences, the Greatest Generation succeeded. Universities were state-funded. The government was greatly expanded to include Medicaid and Social Security. Peace was built through diplomacy and U.S. dollars. The environment was protected. Parks were built and waterways cleaned.

So, what have the boomers done as they have aged?

Losing basketball games to dogs, or why "This Is Going to Get Worse."

Burmila's thoughts are angry, gloomy, dark and largely accurate -- and the melancholy isn't confined to Trumpism.

This is Going to Get Worse, by Ed Burmila (The Baffler)

“Send her back” is what Trumpism has been all along

WATCHING A VIRTUALLY ALL-WHITE CROWD of viciously angry, red-faced people chanting “Send her back!” at the mention of Representative Ilhan Omar during the President’s latest herrenvolk rally was horrifying. But the real horror is that this, sixteen months out from the election, is just the tip of an iceberg. This is bad and it will get worse. Much worse.

The Democratic Party has little to offer in terms of solace, merely a promise to fail in the same way as before.

It will get worse because the Democratic Party still believes that the mushy center is the place to campaign against Trump, that white votes are the only votes worth winning, that people of color or young people will never vote so why bother giving them a reason to, and that, in the brilliant words of Chuck Schumer, “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.”

The following passage cuts closest to the bone. I may have arrived at the tail end of the Boomers, but in the final analysis, their narcissism wins out.

It will get worse because an entire generation of people under forty has already been written off to a life of lowered expectations and debt peonage—a generation that might get more riled up by the politics of Social Security and Medicare had they not already resigned themselves to the reality that neither will exist when, if, they reach old age. None of the relevant social, political, or economic institutions are undergoing an intergenerational transition of power; instead, Boomers have decided simply to stay at the helm until death comes, and since nobody except them has ever mattered it’s no big deal if everything burns down on their way out.

Service amenities: "The Real Source of America's Urban Revival"?

But they'd still have to drive to the water slide.

The Real Source of America's Urban Revival, by Eric Jaffe (City Lab)

Millennials, housing costs, and shorter commutes are the usual explanations. But a careful new study points to another reason young college grads returned downtown in the 2000s.

 ... New living habits of Millennials and Baby Boomers, delays in starting a family, a tougher home-buying market, a hatred of long commutes—those social factors have all altered cities in recent years. But Couture and Handbury pin the return of downtown on a new fondness for service amenities: music venues, theaters, bars, gyms, and the like. Not the growth of these things but a fresh taste for living near them, a broad cultural shift that could make urban revival more durable.

“If this revival comes from a change in preference, then it could be a long-lasting phenomenon,” says Couture. “We have ruled out various explanations based on temporary trends.”