That is the last thing they would aspire to.
They have no legitimate claim to be better than those that followed them when it was those who followed them who had the morality and the guts to take the “Whites Only” signs off the windows.
Oh, and those who followed them also had to fight their own war, which for some reason tends to get overlooked by “Greatest Generation” pimps.
In my opinion, it’s inane to try to grade generations by relative “greatness,” but the Civil Rights movement was about as great an ethical achievement as any generation has ever accomplished.
BTW, I’ve never heard an actual member of “the Greatest Generation” refer to themselves that way or claim that it’s a deserved title. (Except maybe Bob Dole … .) It’s mostly used by younger people with an ideological axe to grind.
Excuse me, but who was actually involved in the civil rights movement, those born after WW2 - who were, after all, teenagers at the time - or those born before it?
Anyway, this whole “Greatest Generation” has nothing to do with politics and generational conflict and everything to do with Baby Boomers feeling guilty over the deaths of their parents. As usual with Boomers, it’s all about them.
You don’t suppose it might be because from the vantage point of being in your 70’s or 80’s, Obama might look a little young and inexperienced? Does it always have to be about race?
I have no trouble referring to the G.I. Generation as “the Greatest Generation.” I’m a Boomer (according to the book Generations. I use the term “the Greatest Generation” as a way of thanking the last of a group of people who lived through some harrowing times.
If you haven’t heard personal accounts of what it was like to live through the Depression, that may make a difference in how you see it. I know my father was so desperate that he offered to work for free for a man and told him not to pay him if he wasn’t worth it. Well, he worked so hard the man had to pay him and he kept him on the job.
From the 1930’s through the 1960’s my dad owned his own business and worked over seventy hours a week for fifty-one weeks a year. And I never heard him complain about it.
I think that was true of the generation as a whole. They worked hard and they just weren’t whiners. They endured. And, as William Faulkner said, they did more than that – they prevailed. This was true of the Depression, World War II and the Civil Rights Movement. They were the beginning of it in the 1950’s. The sit-ins at the lunch counters are the first things that I can think of. Correct me if I’m wrong.
I’m impressed at your ability once again to turn anecdote into data, Johnnie. 
Right…those baby boomers JFK, RFK, Lyndon Johnson, Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King (born 1917, 1925, 1908, 1926, and 1929, respectively)
No it doesn’t always have to be about race, but I would be willing to bet large amounts of cash that a good percentage are influenced by the race factor.
you mean cites? so what do you want me to do, go around canvassing elderly homes? 
Cites … oh, look a shiney object!
They didn’t have much choice - the depression kids, especially, were trapped in a system that was good and broken but still held all the power. What do you do in that situation but knuckle down, smile for the Man, and do your damndest for you and yours?
In so doing, they built a better world for their kids than they could ever have imagined. What they didn’t count on was that their kids came to expect that things should be that way. That grated a little - as the oldsters saw it, not everybody was entitled to speak and vote and go to school past grade eight. Those were privileges to be granted individuals, not rights inalienable to society.
The GIs didn’t fight for a future for the world or even the nation. GIs never do. They fought for those close to them and for their futures, AND - and this is important - because they believed in their leaders, and an abstraction called their country - as such. They mostly didn’t have the option not to, because in times like the 1930s and '40s the individual didn’t really matter a damn. What counted was how useful he was - what he could do in society, and if he had a little time and energy left over, for society.
Baby boomers fought in a war too, by the way. Why wasn’t their sacrifice as good as those who fought in WWII?
People working hard because they’re hungry and desperate makes them better than those who aren’t as hungry or desperate? Well, I guess the greatest people in America are illegal Mexican immigrants then.
It was still the boomers who marched and demonstrated and put the pressure on for changes to happen.
I don’t see how you can prove that. Boomers were mostly teenagers or younger when the civil rights struggle was being waged.
You have half of the white Protestant work ethic. The other half is that they have to be white and Protestant.
Not just turn anecdote into data, but wade through reams of conflicting and contradictory data en route to his terminally flawed conclusions.
That’s ridiculous. Clinton has a very low percentage of black voters. Are they racist?
Hey, you don’t have to do anything at all. Like I said, i’m merely impressed that you can extrapolate the feelings of an entire generation from the members of it you personally know. You seem to have a particular knack for understanding people in this way - any better and we wouldn’t have to say anything to you at all for you to make up your mind.
Boomers figure prominently in the follow-up or third phase to the Civil Rights movement, but by the time the very first boomer turned 21 and was allowed to vote, (11 months later), the Civil Rights movement had already seen the desegregation of Little Rock schools and Ol’ Miss, the march on Washington, the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights bill, the deaths of Medgar Evars, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwermer, Viola Liuzzo, and many others.
I participated in many marches, but the idea that we teens were the catalyst for the changes, or even provided significant support, is hyperbolic, at best. (You can make a stronger claim for boomers having an effect on the Vietnam War–both as participants and as protestors–but boomers did not figure prominently in Civil Rights until the 1970s when they took on the tasks of providing legal counsel and voter support to change existing conditions that had already been mandated while they were too young to have an effect.)