I may not prove the title in an air tight way in this rant. I am just going to posit this statement and make suggestions for how I see things.
Others have danced around the obvious here. They have shown that crime rates peaked when the boomers were young adults. Crime and especially the more violent crimes have fallen over the last number of years as the baby boomers have aged and have become more violence adverse. This has been a North America wide situation.
One of my assumptions is that young people commit the most violent crimes. Why? Because that young person is more likely to win in a fight or violence showdown than those over 40 and those under the age of majority.
I haven’t gone over the crime stats to see whether the police and others pointed the finger at baby boomers as being the cause of all this violence. I do suggest that someone should do the proper research to either prove or disprove my title assertion.
As well, it is possible that there were more crimes when the baby boomers were young adults simply because there are more baby boomers than people of other age groups. Really this comes down to a matter of degree. Real statistics are needed to assign severity to the correlation I have pointed out.
What I can show is that illegal drug culture expanded exponentially when boomers were young. These blatant drug crimes have become commonplace since the time of the boomers and thus is born the legalize marijuana debate and laws. This is because people (many who are boomers) still indulge. When even presidents of the United States admit publicly that they put marijuana smoke in their mouths, you know that most boomers were crooks – at least with regard to drug laws.
What I can also show is that baby boomers had the opportunity to be crooks. There are so many boomers that schools and hospitals had to be expanded all through boomers’ lifetimes right up to the point that now senior services are being expanded like never before. With that kind of a population bulge, boomers are left with less guidance per capita and less policing by their elders. Boomers had the opportunity to be crooks and many, I think, took it.
I know it will never hold but I, as a Gen Xer, suggest we change the term ‘baby boomers’ into the term the Crooked Generation.
I offer this post so it can go against the wind of marketers who are still telling baby boomers they are wonderful and even that they were wonderful in their youth.
