Baby Boom Regret

What follows is based on anecdotal, not empirical, evidence, at least the part about my baby boom cohort. But by the time I’m done you may want to eschew empiricism with the same abandonment we eschewed feudalism, monarchy, republicanism, and social democracy (at least those of us who think The Nation is wimpy).

My partner Mark is 62 and has pancreatic cancer. Our friend Richard is in his early sixties and had surgery for prostate cancer. Our friend Alan, who is in his fifties, lost a kidney to cancer. Gilbert, our neighbor, who in his sixties and a former Los Alamos National Laboratory subcontractor, also had kidney cancer. My friend Emma’s sister, who is fifty, has colon cancer. I am 60 and have an autoimmune condition called CREST syndrome. My brother-in-law has suffered from psoriatic rheumatism, another autoimmune disease, since his fifties. My sister was diagnosed with fibromyalgia in her late forties. The local postmistress, in her fifties, has lupus.

The list goes on and on, but what stands out about it are the predominant ages: fifties and sixties. Cancer and autoimmune diseases have been around for a long time, of course. But the frequency of their occurrence in my generation, the baby boomers, seems to me to indicate a causal relationship. Our post-World War II generation was largely bottle-fed, as the formula industry, in concert with the gynecological industry, convinced mothers (and fathers) that breast feeding was unnecessary. So our first line of defense—mother’s milk—was compromised right out of the womb (and now we know cancer causing chemicals leach from the plastic used in bottles). The formula industry, of course, was just part of the food industry in general, which proceeded to package our food for mass consumption by adding artificial colors, preservatives, and flavors made with cancer causing chemicals. The farms that produced the food also became highly industrialized as well, and the cancer causing pesticides and herbicides necessary to support that industrialization entered the food chain in massive doses.

This has all been documented in books like Silent Spring, Fast Food Nation, and Omnivore’s Dilemma, so I won’t belabor the point. Combined with an exponential increase in air pollutants, as urban areas became clogged with cars and the entire country was contaminated by energy and manufacturing development, baby boomers were clobbered from all sides. I’m afraid the environmental safeguards that were promulgated in the 1970s with the passage of government regulatory laws (the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, etc.) were too little, too late.

So what we’ve been exposed to by scientific (chemical), medical (gynecologists), and industrial (power plants) development, all in the name of progress, seems to be killing us. Whereas previously we died in massive numbers because of the lack of scientific discoveries like penicillin and medical inventions like angioplasties, now we’re dying in massive numbers (when you count the number of people who are dying not just from cancer and autoimmune diseases but industrial pollution and accidents, the number is massive) because of technological poisons. I can’t take the long view on this, that every generation has suffered its particular burdens, because this is my generation Most of our parents lived into their seventies and eighties (never exercising, drinking martinis). Many of us will not. That may not be such a bad thing, when I see the individual suffering of those kept alive by medical intervention and the burden that places on society as a whole. But we’re suffering, too, both physically and emotionally. We’ll probably be the butt of many jokes regarding our slogan—“Don’t trust anyone over 30” — and our delusions of immortality, but despite our excesses and self-indulgence, we developed a conscience and decided as adults to breast feed our babies, grow organic food, and riot for revolution. We were too preoccupied being active, political, and creative to see this coming.