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.

The entire basis for The Candy Store Generation is an impression I got during the 2000 presidential campaign debates, specifically the first debate. George W. Bush and Al Gore argued about what to do with the Federal budget surplus that was just about to become a reality.

The whole thing seemed absurd to me. The surplus was a projection only at that point, a projections by the Congressional Budget Office. How well had they done in the past? I thought it was absurd to plan to spend a surplus you didn’t actually have yet. It seemed I was the only person who thought it absurd, because I heard no news coverage saying it was absurd. No on with whom I was acquainted said it was absurd. I couldn’t get any interest from anyone about it.

The image that struck me was the Bush and Gore were like children in a candy store, with a lot more money than they expected. And I realized they were both Baby Boomers, the first time in history that two Boomers faced each other at the presidential level. I further realized they very well represented their generation. The vast majority of Boomers were children in candy stores, spending recklessly, unmindful of the future.

So I renamed the Baby Boomers, “The Candy Store Generation”, and decided to write a book.

Next post will be about Chapter 2.

Over the weekend I added close to 2,000 words to The Candy Store Generation. That might sound like a lot, but it’s well below the total I wanted to complete. Sunday afternoon and early evening wound up going mostly to editing chapters already completed and making friends on Facebook. Consider that platform building.

I was able to finish one chapter, polish another, and begin to expand a third, one for which I had only about 500 words written. For those who are interested, I think I should give the table of content and where I stand on each.

1. Children in a Candy Story – mostly complete
2. Generational Traits – mostly complete
3. The Clinton Years, the Bush Years – mostly complete
4. Boomer Congress – mostly complete
5. Boomer Corporations – close to complete; need some more research
6. The O.P.M. of the People – close to complete; needs another example
7. The Panic of 2008 – completed this last weekend
8. The Wisdom of Thomas Jefferson – well along, maybe close to complete
9. The View from Nancyland – started; less than 1/4 written
10. Courts Supreme and Inferior – not yet started
11. The Wisdom of James Otis – well along; haven’t looked at in over a month
12. Are We a Socialist Nation? – well along; perhaps half done
13. The Next Decade – not yet started
14. Had Enough – well along; perhaps half done

So, there’s where I stand with it. Over the next few posts I think I’ll discuss several of the chapters and what I’m trying to say with them.

I recently completed work on chapter 5 of The Candy Store Generation, which is titled, “Boomer Corporations”. Here are a couple of paragraphs from it.

What could we expect from a bunch of Boomer corporate officers? Let’s see: We’ve said that Boomers are the first of the instant generations. In Congress they don’t seem to be able to manage money. They were the first generation to grow up on debt and it doesn’t seem to bother them in the least. They would have seen moderate use of debt by the Greats and the Silents, and would have little history or understanding of both the good and bad sides of debt. They would have to learn for themselves.

As an instant generation, the Boomers would be want quick solutions to problems as they developed. They had watched thousands of murders on television, with the guilty being found and punished within 60 minutes (less commercial time). They had watched thousands of relationships damaged and repaired in 30 minutes (less commercial time). So when confronted with a massive problem of corporate loss of liquidity and ability to extend their debt, they wanted an instant solution. The result was an appeal to the government by a bunch of Candy Store corporate executives. And who was in charge of the government? The Candy Store Generation.

I just spent the last hour reading and skimming The Candy Store Generation. Tomorrow night is writers group, and I’ll present the next chapter, titled “Boomer Congress”. Well, I’ll present at least the first part of it, about six or seven pages. Any more than that and I’d be hogging the time. The chapter is fourteen pages long, when formatted for editing as it is now. It includes a number of graphs that demonstrate the condition of our national finances. This chapter is “complete.” I could always edit it some more, look for better graphs, and find more to say.

The next chapter is titled “Boomer Corporations”. I’ve written only 332 words on this chapter. The premise is that our large corporations are being run by Baby Boomers. The Silent Generation has mostly retired, though a few hang on in corporate board rooms. The Greatest Generation is long gone from the corporate world, with almost no one still involved in running companies.

Boomers were in charge of corporations—and we could expand that to businesses, whether they were corporations, partnerships, or sole proprietorships—in 2008 when the great panic hit. In September 2008 the credit markets locked up for some reason. Conventional wisdom it was the poor status by the two mortgage giants, Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, that put pressure on banks, causing them to realize their balance sheets were not what they should be. Suddenly they said they had no cash to loan.

Panic ensued in the business world. A couple of large banks failed. A.I.G., which provided business insurance to these big banks, was squeezed. Coincidentally, the nation was at the beginning of a recession. Would it be mild or severe? The auto industry in the USA was also being squeezed. Dropping sales and no credit put them in a bad spot. Gas prices had been high, further suppressing the economy.

At the same time we were in the midst of the presidential campaign, Obama vs. McCain. Obama had been in the lead, but McCain had edged ahead in the polls based on his post-convention bump. Then came The Panic of 2008. Business needed a solution, and they needed one fast. Or so they said. To whom did they turn?

To the government, of course. What more could you expect of a bunch of Baby Boomer CEOs, COO, CFOs? Children raised on debt had based their business model on borrowing. When they couldn’t borrow, they couldn’t go on. So the banks and related financial corporations, who had managed their businesses badly, ran to the government for a bailout. Though the problem was of their making, they looked for a rich uncle who could bail them out. No rich uncle in sight, or none big enough and rich enough to bail out the entire banking system and almost the entire auto industry, the government was the next best thing.

This is the essence of the chapter that I’m about to write. I need to do some research into this. I plan to use the Dow 30 Industrials as the sample group, and track the three or four top corporate officers from 1970 through 2010, finding our who they were, when they were born, and calculate their average age/birth year at various times. That’s what I did with the “Boomer Congress” chapter.

Will my research show that the Boomers were in charge of corporate America during the Panic of 2008? I think so, and I’m basing a fair amount of the book’s conclusions on that. Now is the time to do the research to back up what my gut tells me.

A colleague posted this on Facebook:

…we have the Tea party types…people with stunted
social consciousness and the need to find a mouthpiece that justifies their
greed.

Let me get this straight. “Tea party types” are people with stunted social consciousness who are greedy. That’s their motivation for holding the government to account for following the highest law of the land (a.k.a. The Constitution) and for being fiscally responsible with money the populace has entrusts them with. This is what qualifies as greed? As stunted social consciousness?

No. I think it’s greedy to demand a check from the government, a.k.a. your neighbors, when you are able to work. Recent television shorts have shown people who brag about scamming the welfare system. I realize that’s not a scientific sampling of those on welfare, but it’s an indications.

I know people who have physical or mental disabilities who can’t work. They would like to work, but the hand they were dealt in life prevents them from doing so. Their families are not financially able to support them. For these, a safety net is required. And we provide that, both a public safety net and private charities.

But we have a huge mass of people who are able-bodied, and smart enough, who choose not to work. They have learned that the government will give them a check if only they can convince the government that they can’t work. I don’t know how large a group this is, but I think it is as large as those who have a legitimate need of a safety net.

America is quickly dividing into two nations: those who receive a check from the government, and those who pay taxes so that others can receive a check from the government. A long time ago, when maybe 1 percent of the population needed a safety net and 99 percent paid the taxes, this was easy. But recently it has been reported that close to half the population receives a check from the government. Is this true?

If so, it means 50 percent are paying the taxes so that 50 percent can receive a check. If this is true, it is not sustainable for a long period of time. I’m not sure it’s sustainable for a short period of time. And while I believe that those who don’t pay income taxes because of law income actually do pay taxes through the goods and services they purchase, I don’t see how any clear thinking person can believe it’s a good thing for 50 percent of the people in the United States to be receiving a check from the government.

So I’m writing The Candy Store Generation to address some of these points. I personally feel a big part of the problem is the Baby Boomers, who are currently in charge of the government, business, and institutions. We seem to think ourselves privileged, and haven’t a clue as to what good government is. I don’t know if America can survive us.

As I’ve posted before, my next work-in-progress, after completion of In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People is The Candy Store Generation. This is a political book, telling my opinions of how the Baby Boomer generation has screwed up America. The title came from my impressions of the first of three presidential debates in 2000, Bush vs. Gore. I described the origin of the term in my friend’s political blog. I did three follow-up posts on the topic, but they aren’t all properly tagged. If you want to read them, follow the link, then go to newer posts till you get all four. And the most recent post on the blog (as of 1/30/2012) is another of my thoughts about the subject.

After letting the concept sit a couple of years, I decided it would be a good topic for a short book, maybe 30,000 to 40,000 words. Since I’m firmly within the Baby Boomer generation, I figured I could write about it. Research would be minimal; my opinions would be foremost. I decided I wanted to do research into average birth years of the House and Senate over time, to see when they flipped from one generation to the next. That’s fairly time consuming, but I’m close to half way through that.

I copied the four blog posts into one file, and discovered they only came to a little over 2,000 words. Yikes! I thought sure I had written more than that. I took a few days to think through the contents of the book. I came up with ten chapters I thought were needed. That meant 3,000 to 4,000 words per chapter. Given that the words already written were spread out over five of those chapters, I clearly had some work to do.

The first chapter came first. I took the 500 words already written and began expanding them. This chapter serves as an introduction, without much commentary, describing the genesis and purpose of the book. It explains my shock at how, during that debate, the two candidates treated a budget surplus that hadn’t happened. Over several days I added a paragraph here, corrected a sentence there, clarified something in another place. I think it was last Thursday that I counted chapter 1 complete, though of course subject to edits. The word count in the chapter: 1,200.

Well, the Introduction needs to be shorter, I thought. So I plowed into the second chapter, the one that defines what the different recent generations are in popular terms and what the most common characteristics are. I found it slow going. Thinking you can describe the dominant attributes of a generation is easy when you say in your head you are going to do it, harder to actually put the words on paper. I allowed myself to become distracted with many outside things.

On Saturday, rather than write in the book, I brainstormed what the book would contain. A couple of news stories gave me ideas, and I reworked my table of contents. It’s now up to 14 chapters, so the word count per chapter is down to something like 2200-2900. I realize that an artificial word count per chapter is not smart. Each chapter must tell its story in whatever words the story demands. But average chapter length is a good indication. If after a few chapters I’m way under or way over the range I’m looking for, that says either 1) the project is not viable in the length I’m protecting for it, or 2) it’s going to be a more significant work than I expected, and I may need to adjust some expectations and publishing schedule.

Finally, yesterday afternoon I was able to knuckle down. I drew some simple information from the Statistical Abstract of the U.S. and from a couple of websites—nothing I can link to as a reference, but they gave me some ideas and refreshed my memory as to what I already knew. I was still distracted, and still struggling for words, but I was able to work at it for a few, interrupted hours.

My writing goal for Sunday was 1,000 words. When my writing day was done, I had 1,250 words, all of them in Chapter 2. That’s not a complete chapter by any means, and I’ve barely begun discussing other generations. So it seems I ought to be able to make my word quota for the chapter with no problem. It looks like the chapter will be at least 2,500 words to contain everything I want it to, and maybe over 3,000. So far so good.

That makes me feel a lot better about the project. This is a political season, and I’d like to have to book available well before the election. I have no illusions it will be a best seller or that it would influence the political debate. But having a political book come out several months before an election can’t hurt.