I’m a Baby Boomer, and proud of it. Let’s see: we fought for Civil Rights, the environment, for feminism, for gay rights, and against the war in Vietnam. The “Blue Dog” Democrats were always Republicans in their DNA, and they were siphoned away from the center of the Democratic Party by the lies and shenanigans of “Tricky Dick” Nixon and the rest of the unindicted co-conspirators.

The “Blue Dogs” became the gutless Soccer Moms and Suburban Dads, as well as the Civil War redux rural population. Yes, many of them were Baby Boomers. And many of them developed selfish attitudes, courtesy of the brainwashing to which they were subjected by those with corporate dollars, leading the way to the Republican-run abattoir. But this has nothing to do with the qualities you decry in your ageist rant; instead, it pertains to the lack of character in people when they’re given a choice between their job and doing the right thing. Most people will choose the former over the latter, because doing the right thing requires sacrifice, and that’s not something people often want to make.

I’m childless and never had anything to do with families with children, so perhaps there is a dynamic at play about which I am not personally aware. But I’m fairly confident that the “helicopter parenting” is nothing more than a guilty conscience manifesting itself by overcompensating for selfish motivations at an earlier part of the helicopter parents’ lives.

At any rate, I think serious, heart-to-heart conversations are far more productive than labeling entire groups into meta-cohorts, which may make intellectual posturing easier, but which produce few, or no, socially-useful means of improving our society.