I may be on shaky ground with this chapter. I’m not a sociologist, nor did I take any university level classes on this. The closest I came to that is sitting in on a couple of lectures Margaret Mead gave at the University of Rhode Island in 1970. Of course, had I taken any, that would have been at least 38 years ago, and they might not do me any good now. Maybe it’s better that I didn’t have any of those courses, and instead had to do my study now.

Actually, finding references, both scholarly and popular, on how one generation differs from another is easy. There is no end to the books written about the Baby Boomers. I found a couple of those references, and from them was able to extract some of the dominant characteristics of the Boomers, the Greatest Generation, the one in between them (often called the Silent Generation), and a little bit about Generation X and Generation Y.

One thing I have tried to do, however, is to consider the fundamental reasons why the Boomers are the way they are—or I should say the way we are, since I’m one of them. So I sort of approach this chapter not just from characteristics but from changes in the world that I think caused those changes. Will this work? Will learned readers laugh me out of the publishing world?

I hope not. After all, I’ve observed the Boomers at close range. I sort of know why we are the way we are. And I don’t know that, in this chapter, I’m saying anything controversial. I’m just trying to give some causes to the Boomer traits, because I think these causes are important to understand how the Boomers are leading this country into oblivion.