Not nearly as cool, but just as important. U.S. News and World Report profiles Theodore Roszak, who 40 years ago wrote The Making of a Counter Culture. Earlier this year, The Making of an Elder Culture was published. According to News:
“The former captured the late-1960s disaffection by young people across the country. They had been raised in material comfort following World War II, but they rejected the world created by those comforts. They opposed the Vietnam War and the industrial-military complex they blamed for the war.”
In the latter, Roszak argues that the baby boomers are hardly finished making their mark on the world.
“Boomers, who will usher us into senior dominance, are the best educated, most socially conscientious, most politically savvy older generation the world has ever seen,” he says. “I believe that generation will want to do good things with the power that history has unexpectedly thrust upon it in its senior years. What boomers left undone in their youth, they will return to take up in their maturity.”
According to the story, Roszak is still crusading.
“Conservative government leaders and consumption-driven corporations are still his bad guys. But while he makes a lot of valid points, the polemics of The Making of an Elder Culture can get in the way of the powerful forces at work here. Seniors have rising power, in numbers and especially in the voting booth. This is a global trend; the U.S. actually is younger than other industrial democracies.
In the elder culture that Roszak envisions, longevity and health become driving social and economic forces. Aging boomers will return to their youthful idealism. They will work to improve the environment and climate problems. They will volunteer like crazy. In their longer lives, they will embrace newly rediscovered values.