To the Editor:
Re “Do Younger Boomers Swing Left?” (Op-Ed, June 24):
Like Jennifer Finney Boylan, I was born in 1958 and have always felt that any similarities my cohort had with the older boomers was a marketing director’s delusion.
We watched our older siblings and cousins wear groovy clothes, protest the war and go to Woodstock; by the time we were of age, all we got were gas lines, energy crises and ugly polyester.
We graduated into what was until the 2008 recession one of the worst economies since the Great Depression. Unless we became lawyers or jumped on the corporate wagon, we settled for poorly paying jobs. Even if we met with some success later on, we are permanently left behind.
I hope that we are “swinging left,” but too many of the peers I grew up with smugly held on to the on-paper privilege of being (white) boomers while evading any sense of responsibility for the world and its inhabitants.
We made the last 40 years possible, and I do not mean that in a good way. It’s time that we did something about it.
Kate Tyler Wall
Newark, Del.
The writer is the author of “Arboria Park,” a novel about the boomer era.
To the Editor:
As a younger baby boomer at the time of the Summer of Love in 1967, I thought that Jennifer Finney Boylan got the differing politics and culture exactly right.
When I entered Washington University in St. Louis in the fall of 1971, the fire at the ROTC building there the year before was what defined the campus (counter) culture. By the summer of 1975, with the Vietnam War over and the economy faltering, the students’ focus was already shifting heavily toward building résumés, not burning buildings.
Disco fever was just over the horizon.
Michael L. Millenson
Highland Park, Ill.
Looting and Racism
To the Editor:
Re “Valuing Property Over Black Lives” (Op-Ed, June 23):
I agree with Robin D.G. Kelley that looting is not the problem but rather a symptom of the underlying racism that gives it impetus. But it is also a serious impediment to a solution.
Looting, like kneeling during the anthem in front of tens of thousands who are standing, alienates those whose support is crucial to solving the underlying problem.
Jonathan Kutner
Dallas