Bruce Gibney has written a book called “In a Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America” (I can comment on the account of the book and its review by Dana Milbank because I am not a boomer). The Boomers, Gibney says, are guilty of “generational plunder”. They are accused of “the mass, democratically-sanctioned transfer of wealth away from the young and towards the Boomers. In addition to making a mess of Social Security and Medicare, they dragged the national savings rate down to 5% between 1996 and 2016, from 10% between 1950 and 1985. They were (are) divided bitterly into two camps: the Woodstock counter-culture types and their ideological opposites, who created the modern religious right. These two blocs have been at war since the 1960s and it has paralysed the country for a generation; more than a generation, actually – look at how the Senate is being ruined and its traditional, bi-partisan way of working being undermined at this very moment. This is the fruit of the un-giving, unforgiving and uncompromising natures of the two ideologies.

It was never like this when I first traveled around America, penniless, hitching rides and being offered more wonderful hospitality than could never be returned in two lifetimes. Yes, there were weirdos who thought the United Nations was taking over America and those frantically building nuclear shelters, but back then there was an open, can-do atmosphere. You could be given a ride in a hearse driven by an African American one moment, and a ride in a corporate jet by the Chairman of a big corporation the next. Democrats and Republicans were working together (more or less) for the good of the country. Now, no one trusts the hitch-hiker or the young, foreign visitor. And watch out carefully if you are clad in moslem garb.

But most serious is the accusation of generational plunder; it has been the Boomers who set the stage for the obscene gap between the rich and the poor, who gave free rein to the banking scam artists and set the stage for the 2008 financial bust. Greed has been raised to the level of art, and we have ended up with a President and a top level of government which is mind-bogglingly rich and is setting about cementing the power of the oligarchy and dismantling the rights and the protections of the very people who voted them in. This is the crowning achievement of the Boomers, even if most in the new government are not technically boomers, just inheritors.