I'm David Hoffman, filmmaker, and I made this clip and I'm showing the clip right now because if you look at the comments on all of my clips on baby boomers, there is so much hostility to the boomers, so many people who want to kill him.

Listen to this thes, um, comments I took this morning.

Very recent comments from my channel from different of my baby boomer clips, why we hate the boomers so damn much.

They lived an incredible, easy way of life, and they ruined it for everybody else.

Now what a disgusting generation.

They destroyed social norms and mannerisms.

They change the way we dressed.

They created the drug crime culture.

They changed that any gender, any race could be okay, depending on how you felt another one.

They cried because life was too harsh for them and they created disgusting rock n roll.

A disco and hip hop and rap is another one.

All they did basically was sit around and eat and watch TV, and by stupid shit, they made us consumers another one.

Boomers flooded the country with nonwhite hordes who worked cheap boomers did drugs.

They left each other like dogs, destroying the institution of marriage.

Boomers divorced because they were too selfish to keep their marriages and their kids together.

Boomers led the gays run wild because of their personal choice.

Last one, baby boomers.

Thank God you'll be dying off soon.

Some of you wrote this.

I think it's unfair.

But I'm gonna tell you after you see this clip, uh, when I really do think what I think is wrong with what the baby boomers did and what I think is right that baby movies did.

Well, you're about to hear the parents think about this, does it, kid?

Become an adult without a parent, Not easy.

If the baby boomers are who some of you say they are, many of you say they are.

Then the parents are responsible, Really?

And these are the parents kind of defending themselves because back in 1989 when I did this, I was asking brands, Hey, uh, are you responsible for your kid?

Did you make the skin?

And these are the answers that I got.

Those of us who brought the baby boom into being the returning World War Two veterans.

We didn't know what the hell we were doing.

I mean, we really didn't know.

We all came home and we all had Children.

There was no advice, really.

Dr.

Spock's got a book out, but we didn't know anything about child rearing.

In other words, let me try to say it this way.

There's certain things that you just did.

We didn't know anything about relationships.

Communication between husband and wife.

There was very little communication.

Children, child rearing.

How do you raise Children?

No, one new.

In other words, it was opposed.

Just tow happen.

The parents of the 19 fifties were, I think, the most unusual generation of the 20th century.

These are the people who had grown up in the Depression.

They had experienced real tough times when they were Children in and when they were teenagers and then world war to hit, as many of them were just reaching adulthood and they had the trauma of the war.

And then, after all that, they reached the 19 fifties at a time when the U.

S.

Was tremendously prosperous, when the economy was booming as We've never seen it before, and I think they reacted to that prosperity.

And they think I think they reacted strongly to all of the trauma of the Depression in the war by turning inward a bit by marrying Young by emphasizing home and family as if that was something they couldn't get back in the thirties and forties and now valued all the more.

It was a perfect setting in which the youth culture, in a certain sense, could could blossom.

Life in the suburbs was organized, organized around the kids again.

They were the center of attention of rat, endless round of Little League games and P t A meetings, et cetera.

So it was in the suburbs in a certain sense, that this message about the importance and the uniqueness and the generational potency associated with these kids, I think was delivered with real force.

This was a distinctly new way to be raised in the world, and it allowed for a whole generation that I suppose we would now call spoiled, spoiled kids, which, from another point of view, simply men kids who had very high expectations in life with respect to freedom and happiness, they thought life was about being free and about being happy.

And they carried those expectations forward into high school and into college.

On brought with them a kind of ah ah, level of expectation that was simply unprecedented.

And I would say in world history, this thing, whole image of giving your Children everything you had and they have to be satisfied and they have to be content, and I think we gave them much too much.

We found out in the fifties that if you get up in the morning and went to work and did a good day's work, uh, the things got better.

You got promoted or you got more money.

Ah, you were able to buy furniture, you could have more Children, the Children could have better clothes and life just improved.

We knew it was because you went to work, but I'm not sure our Children realize that they saw simply that the clothes got better.

The house got bigger.

This the neighborhood got nicer.

And I have a strong suspicion that what happened in the late sixties was that the kids who rebelled took it for granted that life would improve automatically.

My dad was always above board in all his business dealings, But I would say money and getting ahead and and and making a lot of bucks was his goal.

And I think what it was was Dad meant.

Well, Dad wanted to love us.

But dead was so busy at work he would work till 23 in the morning, doing artwork, artwork for the business.

He'd get up early and be gone.

I hardly ever saw this son of yours has been fighting again.

Look at this shirt.

Can I tell you about it, Pop?

Look, he's proud of it.

Please, pop.

No jury.

I'm tired.

And I said you didn't have the guts to stand up for yourself, So I took a poke at him.

It was all right, wasn't Mike.

What TV show you waas.

A world in which men were sexually impotent Didn't have any right to say that about you, did he?

Pop, go to your room and get a decent shirt this minute.

Did he pop?

There were no chance for risk.

There was no place for excitement.

There was no place for no challenge is being offered whatsoever.

And the other kind of show you could watch with westerns, which showed what a real man could do.

Measuring himself against other men, especially with a gun on.

I think that anybody who was ah, red blooded American boy in the 19 fifties knew that they wanted to beam or like Matt Dillon or Maur like, uh, the paid gunfighter and have Gun will travel.

Then they wanted to be a Beaver Cleaver's father.

And what did girls feel was in store for them?

A life just like their mothers Duty doesn't allow that.

Here.

Sorry, Mother.

I was just thinking about what, You know, thinking how awful war stay used to be for you.

If you had the electric water heater.

I had four choices of things that I could be when I grew up.

I could be a teacher, a nurse, a stewardess or a secretary.

Um, I couldn't go into things that dealt with medicine.

I couldn't go into law.

I couldn't go into the real professions.

Um, it was it was extremely limiting.

And, of course, the overall goal was to find a husband, um, get married, have Children and live with a white picket fence.

Okay, so you saw the clip.

First, let me remind you of a few things.

First of all, 1/3 of the baby boomers are part of what's called the sixties generation, So the majority of boomers lived in the fifties, grew up in a normal, normal lives.

But about 1/3 of the generation, which is quite big still probably 30 million people consider themselves the sixties generation.

Also, think about this.

Boomer's fit in two generations, the boom was born from right after World War 2 46 2 maybe 54 on the earlier generation, and maybe 54 to 64 off the second generation of boomers, The first generation serious, not major drug use is not.

Drug use is pretty much at all working people, but with kind of exploring values of, I guess marriage, sexuality but very conservative really.

Give me an idea in my school high school on Long Island, 5000 kids in my school.

I knew three and I knew most kids kids.

I was the president of my school.

I knew three kids who took marijuana.

One of them was May I was the fourth.

On occasion, some guy drove in tow Harlem, and he bought a £5 bag and drove it back.

The Long Island.

Nobody ever heard of that stuff.

No cops knew what it was and we tried it maybe three times in a year.

Um, the second generation of boomers totally different, much more drugs partying, much more fun, including the music.

The early Beatles are so innocent relative to the later beetles.

So think about two generations of sixties people.

Now, let me give you a sense of how I feel.

First of all, in some ways, quite a few ways.

I'm said by what the boomers created.

I feel we've lost some critical things that needed to be changed but not destroyed.

Went way too far.

I'm gonna give you a few examples.

But then there were other freedoms that we needed to have.

And I'm not talking about civil rights, which I believe in, or about women's rights, which I believe in.

I'm talking about individual rights, which you all care about.

I'm gonna share some of that with you.

So, first of all excesses here, a few of the excesses that I feel education Our education system was severely damaged by the baby boom by the boomers took away grades, took away standards, took away teacher student relationship, which was already changing.

In 1957 for example, the Sputnik created a whole new generation of education.

Individuals who believed in special studies science like this was going on.

The boom was kind of ripped into that and kind of destroyed it in the sixties.

I believe that's very sad and has hurt the education system.

And we're still hurting today.

We need kind of a new kind of education system to teach the second thing that I regret ethics and values You, those of you who write the ethics and values on like they were in the fifties are correct.

We had them.

We need them now.

And we needed an improvement on some of those old ones because they didn't work for the modern world and for how people felt.

But we didn't need none.

I have no ethics, no values.

I mean, it wasn't just the hippies, by the way.

It was all kinds of people breaking rules and then not presenting another ethic as good or better, just leaving it sort of blank.

That, I think is a great excess of the sixties, and I feel very badly about now.

Freedoms, one big freedom, which all of you are benefiting by who are American and hopefully anywhere in the western world.

At least be me.

Be me.

Sounds awful.

Sound selfish, but the alternative was be them not.

You fit standards.

The man in the gray flannel suit.

Well, the men do this.

All the women do this.

She's supposed to like your housework is supposed to go to work in, like working for the boss.

You're not supposed to talk about things.

You never supposed to talk about yourself.

Be me that experience of becoming myself.

I was not an athlete and I was not an academic.

And in my school you had to be an athlete.

And you had to be an academic to be popular.

And you had to be one other thing.

Ah, muscle man.

All the muscle men were what girls were supposedly looking for.

And the £98 weaklings.

I wasn't £98 but I wasn't strong.

Uh, we were supposed to be ignored.

We weren't the real men.

Well, that was horrible for a lot of people.

And that changed all kinds of people began to be themselves different.

What difference was accepted, not a standard norm, and that really applied to men as a young man at that time, for example, you did not cry.

You did not express emotion.

You didn't do a lot of things that men should do to be healthy, to live a long life, to have a good heart, have art.

We learned how to express ourselves.

That's a result of the sixties.

That's a freedom that's quite beautiful and really healthy and really necessary.

Men feel maybe not to the extent women feel, but men feel plenty, and I feel plenty on.

I wouldn't have been a filmmaker, and I wouldn't have been sensitive to people if I had been what they told me to be.

When I was 16 and 17 years old.

As an early baby boomer, I told you about not being normal, that normal.

You have no idea what normal meant, but it was torture for almost everybody.

In fact, a few people who I knew who really fit normal and I still normal today.

I know them.

They're in their seventies and is still normal, and they're still living in my little town and they're still doing the same things they did back then.