Gen X to Baby Boomers: Move over, you ruined everything. Echo, anyone?

I had to laugh. The editorial headline in the Mercury News trumpeted, “It’s time for disastrous Baby Boomers to go.” (click here to read it)

The author, GenXer Dana Milbank, went on to blame the 50-64 age group for pretty much everything wrong with America: congressional gridlock, squandering the global power and influence inherited from winning the Cold War by embarking on two Middle East military adventures-turned-disasters, crippling debt, and even . . . Donald Trump.

Milbank derided the older generation for its selfishness and unyielding attitudes, the fruits of being coddled in their youth.

Like I said, I had to laugh. Not with the glee of someone who gets a hilarious joke, but with the bittersweet realization that, (1), Milbank has some solid reasons to declare such conclusions and (2), and that I’ve heard it all before.

Literally. I listened to the same message in 1969, putting a 33 1/3 rpm LP vinyl record on my “portable” (75-pound, suitcase size) stereo and dropping the needle into the first groove. The song was “Move Over.” (click here if you want to listen to it)

"Things look bad from over here

Too much confusion and no solution

Everyone here knows your fear

You're out of touch and you try too much
Yesterday's glory won't help us today

You want to retire?

Get out of the way
The country needs a father

Not an uncle or big brother

Someone to keep the peace at home

If we can't get it together

Look out for stormy weather

Don't make me pay for your mistakes

I have to pay for my own
Yesterday's glory won't help us today

You want to retire?

Get out of the way
I ain't got much time

The young ones close behind

I can't wait in line. . . "

Who knows? Maybe Gen X will do better.

Or, at least maybe Linkin Park could do a cover of “Move Over.”

Wouldn’t need to change a word.

2016 Election: Is it really a choise of the 'lesser of two evils,' or voting your conscience?

It is a shame that our choices for the White House have boiled down to holding one’s nose and choosing one the perceived lesser of two evils. 

On one hand, there is the self-absorbed demagogue who steps in the bull flop and then puts the same foot in his mouth, repeatedly; a man who is long on criticism and so short of proposed solutions.

On the other, we are offered a career politician whose foreign policy decisions were disastrous and deadly in their aftermath, whose hubris is legendary, and whose integrity has long been for sale.


The old saw that we get what we deserve when we go to the polls cannot hold true in 2016, can it? How could any nation “deserve” either of our horrible choices this election year?

So, the argument here is basically to choose the aforementioned lesser of two evils; that a vote of conscience — say casting our ballots instead for Libertarian Gary Johnson or Green Party candidate Jill Stein — has no value?

Perhaps, in a political economy of situational ethics, that makes some sense. “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t,” as the idiom says.

Too many are surrendering to that idea, and I understand the frustration that feeds that assessment. But for some of us, voting for either of the major party “choices” is simply too repugnant to contemplate.

Sometimes, a few of us may even say all the time, choosing the right thing is never a waste, even if it isn’t the “winning” choice in the cynical world of politicians.

Vote you conscience.