Christopher Hitchens, by his own admission, is one of you. But last January he wrote a piece in Vanity Fair that assailed unmercifully you of the post World War II generation.
He said you are mediocre, selfish and hypocritical, that you constantly whine about whether you'll get your Social Security.
He had praise for us, your parents, for getting through the Great Depression and World War II and "the Long Postponement of Gratification" with self discipline and courage. He says you lack these stoic qualities because you've been spoiled.
"To be a spoiled person," he explains, "is to be well off and favored by fortune and protected from brute realities and not to know it."
He goes on. You grew up largely free of untreatable disease and mass unemployment. Before AIDS, you were the first generation to have the option of unlimited sex, knowing that sex and procreation could be separated. You had great books for pennies, easy car ownership and cheap gas, college for anybody and everybody.
"And yet," he fumes, "in the 50 years since the first boomer uttered the first wail, the wailing has never stopped."
He says boomers think their parents, who could check off none of the privileges listed above, are greedy and selfish to be hanging around and eating their old gray heads off.
As one of those old gray heads (actually, Clairol Autumn Mist), I think he's a bit overboard. But Hitchens is right when he implies that you boomers haven't earned retirement income. Most of you have been retired all your lives compared with your progenitors.
What would you retire from? The Internet? The cell phone? The air-conditioned office? The European trips? The years in graduate school? The widespread affluence that no generation before you has ever known?
If you're looking for a comfortable end to your comfortable lives, you might remember that this random and unfeeling universe offers no rewards or punishments. It offers only consequences, and yours don't look too promising.
As for us, we didn't expect much in the way of comforts. I can speak only for those of us boys and girls who grew up in California's Central Valley and spent our youth and adolescence in the vineyards with hot sand burning our bare feet and gnats in our noses; loading trucks; bending over cannery assembly lines; baling hay; milking cows by hand and shoveling their manure; standing all day in a freezing warehouse with a wet concrete floor; plucking turkeys for Christmas at something like 25 cents an hour; picking and cutting, for drying, peaches and apricots at about a dollar a day; earning whatever driblets of cash were available.
We didn't deal drugs. We didn't shoplift the luxuries we couldn't afford. And some of the boys, unable to get jobs upon graduation from high school, joined the Pacific Fleet and perished at Pearl Harbor.
Until air-conditioning and central heat came along, we endured numbing cold (no nylon or down jackets then -just wool coats that made us all smell like wet dogs when it rained on us) and blistering heat from which there was no escape.
But we weren't all that different. We were simply the product of our times, as you are. Not having questioned authority very much and being pathetically grateful for whatever good came our way, most of us hadn't considered the idea of rebellion or civil disobedience until you came along and showed us it could be done.
The indisputable fact is that our virtues, such as they were, were thrust on us. We had few if any choices, so' we probably were not as heroic as Hitchens likes to think.
We didn't realize there was a Great Depression until it was over, and anyway it was harder on our parents because they had to provide for us.
We didn't know that winning the second Great War To Defend Democracy would lead to a 50-year span of unparalleled prosperity, greed and despoliation that would destroy forever the breathtaking California we were lucky enough to grow up in.
But if we'd known, we probably would have gone ahead anyway, human nature being what it is.
If you're spoiled -- and you are -- we're the ones who spoiled you. We wanted you to have all the things we didn't have, and so we gave you choices; and you grew up believing the world was yours.
A little more adversity would have strengthened your backbone, but we didn't have the heart to hurt you; and anyway, your adversity is doubtless out there waiting for you, to appear when you least expect it.
We've been reading that you -- probably foolishly following the lead of your foolish parents -- are robbing your pitiful little retirement funds to pour money into the market to buy overpriced stocks; to put it simply, you're taking money out of the cookie jar to go on a gigantic gambling spree.
That's what your grandparents did in the '20s -- like this one, a time of over-consumption, of scandals, of crime and drugs and gangsterism, of celebrity worship, of short-lived fads and crazes, of land speculation and overbuilding, of deplorable manners and even worse morals, of a supposedly unstoppable bull market and of a vision -- faulty though it may be -- that the good times will roll forever.
There is certainly a question about whether you'll retire on Social Security. But, as Hitchens so acidly points out, most of you had a pretty cushy life when you put it up against all the others before you.
So stop whining and pull up your socks, cut up your credit cards, pay off your debts, stop looking at catalogs and start contemplating that bleak and dispassionate universe out there.
Remember that to everything -- and everybody -- there is a season, and you might have had yours already. Metaphorically speaking, there's always another troll under the bridge, even that vaunted one into the 21st century.