In fact, the next time you're forced to watch some old guy raise his pants leg on national television to show off his USS Indianapolis scar, consider what sorts of unworthy enemies we Boomers had to measure ourselves against in our youth: the suburbs (a stultifying prison of Eisenhowerian homogeneity intended to subvert our uniqueness and unfairly curb our sense of entitlement) and Vietnam (a supposed bulwark against Eisenhower's dominoes that was as phony as McCarthy's list of Communists).

You should take pride in knowing that we did better than any other generation could have done with such thin material, first by protesting against and then by abandoning both the suburbs and Vietnam as not being in our best interests. Yes, making the personal political required a kind of genius that, historians agree, no other generation had ever exhibited. It took unprecedented audacity and courage to trash the dean's office, shut down the university, set fire to the ROTC building--and then hand the dean a list of demands that began with "no reprisals."

From the Weekly Standard. Ouch.