Boomtastrophe

State Senate leader Don Perata proposed a ballot initiative last month demanding removal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Explaining his rationale, the Oakland Democrat evoked the blood spilled by his generation during an earlier war of choice. "A lot of us Baby Boomers, we've been here before," he said at a press conference. "We lost our moral center in this country because of what happened in Vietnam. I'll be damned if I'm going to let that happen again."

Despite a ripe sense of entitlement and past drug use, George Bush may seem an unlikely figurehead for his generation. A momma's boy who stocks his Cabinet with Daddy's friends, he respects his parents, violating the Boomer golden rule. As a young man, by all accounts, he showered regularly, wore nothing tie-dyed, and regarded Kissinger as the true lizard king. He tuned out the consciousness revolution, perhaps unable to pronounce its name.

All of which confirms Bush's squareness in the view of his generation's liberal bloc, whose ranks include no small number of the 10 million Boomers in California. Beyond the Red-state/Blue-state rift, however, he represents his cohort's abiding self-interest with as much fidelity as his predecessor, Bill Clinton.

Boomer-aged voters supported Bush and Clinton in huge numbers in their respective presidential bids. Bush appealed to them with tax cuts; Clinton appeased them by honoring his pledge to "end welfare as we know it." The combined fiscal policies of the two Boomer presidents have split the U.S. along a different color line, argues Santa Cruz sociologist Mike Males.

"There's been such a rapid increase in Boomer wealth, it's created a racial segregation that's worse than what we had in the '50s and '60s," he says. Consider the city that sired the Summer of Love. In the Western Addition, walk-ups worth $1 million or more border the district's chain of public housing projects, where minorities comprise most of the resident population. Neighbors live a street and a world apart.

Yet as Boomers voice faint concern about the widening economic divide — everything's fabulous on our side, thanks — they persist in lionizing their role in the civil rights crusade. "They don't like to admit hypocrisy," says Males, who's writing a book titled Boomergeddon, an analysis of his generation's influence on America. "They like to think, 'We are good, we are just, we do almost no wrong.'"

The tendency of Boomers to claim the moral high ground as their private domain explains the popular perception that they alone agitated for civil rights. In fact, their parents and grandparents, the Silent and G.I. generations maligned by Boomers as social conformists, supplied the movement with brigades of foot soldiers and its most visible leaders — Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Stokley Carmichael, and Rosa Parks, among others. "Boomers take the credit, but the Silent Generation should get it for civil rights," says social historian and author William Strauss, an expert in generational studies. "What the Boomers were doing was starting riots."

Strauss exaggerates — somewhat — for humor's sake. Undeniably, the largest generation in U.S. history invested bodies and passion in the fight for civil rights, feminism, and nuclear disarmament, as it did in protesting against the Vietnam War. Boomers magnified the urgency of every cause they joined.

Still, just as undeniably, advocating for the greater good now holds scant appeal to them. They're too busy living well. The nation's richest generation to date, its members devote their days to attending Pilates classes and scouring organic-food stores for the finest saffron. They host home spa parties and fret over whether their wine collection needs more pinot noir. They sleep with a copy of Real Simple under the pillow.

Boomer apathy toward the economic underclass parallels their disregard for the green movement, one more cause they deserted in favor of that other kind of green. Starting in the mid-'80s, seduced by greed's goodness, hippies "evolved" into yuppies and cashed in with most everyone else in their generation. Soon enough, Boomers were driving Ford Explorers and living in McMansions, their memories of VW vans and communes dissolving like bong residue.

Boomers piously insist that conservation remains high on their to-do list. After all, they haul their recyclables to the curb each week and volunteer to clean up riverbanks every Earth Day. They saw An Inconvenient Truth (Al Gore is one of theirs, don't you know). Some sat in a Prius once.

Over on the "Killing Earth" side of the ledger, fully one-quarter of Boomers own a second home, and roughly half of the SUVs and RVs on the road belong to them. To this generation, conservation means buying a smaller Cessna.