... it's self-flagellation. And the Boomers seem determined to demonstrate their mastery of both.

A few years ago, I wrote this letter to Salon:

All I know is that, as a child of one parent who was just barely a Boomer (born in 1947) and another who came just barely before (1943) I'm damned glad to have grown up in the, er, echo of the Boom. I like the world of sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll my generation (call it "X" if you insist) inherited from our parents. I like the fact that I can work a respectable job with a beard and long hair and nobody thinks it's worth mentioning, that I have friends of all different races, that I can wear blue jeans everywhere, that "the church of my choice" is no church at all, that I call my boss by his first name, that I'm a liberal and a libertarian and a veteran and a grad student and straight and gay-friendly and all the rest of the freedoms, large and small, that I and others my age and younger exercise every day, all at once, without contradiction, usually without thinking about just how extraordinary those freedoms are.

This is what freedom looks like: not just the absence of foreign tyranny, but also the absence of those stifling social mores which can end or destroy lives just as surely as a bullet to the head or a jackboot in the face -- an absence, I should add, from which conservatives benefit just as much as liberals, no matter how much they may hate to admit it. And it was our parents who bought that freedom for us, for which I will always be grateful. In fact, about my only disappointment is how eager so many Boomers seem to be to sell themselves and their generation's accomplishments short; given that they're still the largest identifiable demographic group in America, that seems a sure recipe for bringing back the bad old days. That's certainly not something I'm eager to see, and anyone who doesn't see the danger isn't paying attention.

Boomers, if you want your children and grandchildren to appreciate your accomplishments and forgive your mistakes, then just shut up for a while. Please. Stop talking about yourselves as some unique, defining generation in American history (you weren't) and stop painting your parents in misty, rose-colored tones as the sainted "greatest generation" (they weren't either). Accept that you're part of an ongoing story, and that like every generation, yours was good and bad in about equal measure.

"There is no more challenging, rewarding or important job than being a mom."

I wish she had said, "Being a mom can be incredibly rewarding and challenging," or "You may find that being a mom is the most rewarding thing you've ever done." But I do take exception with what she actually said, as it is insulting to women who choose to remain childless and to women who have children but don't find it to be the most challenging and rewarding thing they've ever done.

I think that saying that is no job "more important than being a mom" to women just about to graduate from college is bothersome, to say the least.

"We" (baby boomers?) didn't break the world, anymore than our parents (Greatest Generation) broke it, or saved it, or anything else. The WWII generation (The Lost Generation) was all angsty and self-involved too; that didn't help, and our whining won't help either.

Economies run in cycles. Our biggest "fault" was believing that we had overcome that tendency, and that THE FUTURE would be just like TODAY -- only more so. More prosperous, more fun. Up, up, up! But nothing goes up forever.

It wasn't fun fighting WWI or WWII, and it wasn't fun growing up in the Depression (as my parents did). It won't be fun living through this economic downturn. But we will survive. Human beings survived the Ice Age. Maybe they whined and bitched all the way through it, but they survived.

As far as your big shot speakers, they are all "celibritards", IMHO. Ellen DeGeneres? Talk show host. Katie Couric? News puppet. They are immensely rich and sheltered from economic realities; they are THE LAST PEOPLE I would want to hear from if I was a scared, nervous college grad leaving school $85,000 in debt and with a degree in finance or "communications".

@Daniel Dworkin: Gee, I'd love to work where you are working, so I could wear hippie clothes and bare feet and faded jeans. Most people still do not work in environments like that, Boomer Generation or not...we have to wear "work clothes" and while we may call our boss "Fred", he's still the boss and we are still the peons.

I'm a little younger than your parents, but not much. However, I sat through history class, and I recall this country was founded on religious freedom. I don't remember anyone in my childhood forced to go to church, or belong to a certain faith, or that atheists and agnostics (some of my relatives) were harassed or forbidden. Some things have changed during the dominion of the Boomers, but not nearly as much as you seem to imagine.

In his shockingly candid address, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels told students that baby boomers had been "self-absorbed, self-indulgent and all too often just plain selfish." He counseled students "to live for others, not just yourselves. For fulfillment, not just pleasure and material gain.

Right, America become the most incarcerated country in the world because boomers were just living for themselves?

Bullshit.

We have so many people locked up in prison in this country because too many controlling busybodies decided their job was to supervise other peoples' lives and punish them for not living right by locking them in a filthy cage with murderers and rapists.

(Where around 20% of them did end up getting raped, by the way.)

The world does not need more controlling assholes who think it's their job to closely supervise the lives of others and take away their freedom if they don't live the way the controlling people want them to live.

The boomers only claimed to be about freedom and self-gratification. That was a lie.

The baby boomers turned out to the most controlling and boundary-violating generation ever.

Remember -- this is the generation that decided everyone has to pull down their pants to get a job.

Gray Davis is a baby boomer. He's a great example of a controlling asshole who ruined the state economy by locking up way more Californians than California taxpayers could afford to support in prison.

It was the baby boomers who made three strikes a reality.

Now we have to close schools and take health care away from poor children so we can honor all of our incarceration commitments we made when the boomers were getting high on three strikes ideology.

For the last 30 years, the biggest single campaign donor in the California gubernatorial election has been the prison guards' union.

It was the baby boomers who put the prison guards' union in control of California state politics.

The self-indulgent myth is a load of BS.

If the boomers had known about global warming thirty years ago, you'd go to prison now for forgetting to turn off your lights.