So, there's this Youtube vid that's already garned 183k views after being out for a day, and I thought it had some pretty thought-provoking material there:

If I'm interepreting this video correctly, it seems to be saying: "Please do not denigrate our generation as being lazy and self-indulgent, because we're not as far along in established life goals as the Baby Boomers were. Our parents brought us all up to think that we were special, without having to really work much towards being special. Therefore, we were shocked when we graduated with an average 30k in college debt(which you guys are responsible for jacking up tuition, BTW) and no chance at a decent job (which is the fault of you Baby Boomers for gutting manufacturing in the 90's and creating the housing bubble), and we're facing a massive federal deficit to pay off because of the two quagmire wars that your generation began. Oh, and since you guys didn't save anything towards retirement, you're not retiring in droves like you should be, keeping the Gen Xers in middle-management and us either in entry-level or shut out completely. But yes, given that you guys are so awesome and did such wonderful things for our country, we'll try harder to model ourselves on you!"

Pretty scathing, I thought. Is it valid criticism, or do you find it whining self-entitlement?

I lean towards thinking that it'll be nice when the Baby Boomers finally start retiring more (the Baby Boom peaked in 1957, I believe, so the bulk of them should be retirement age by 2022), but I think the processes that they're talking about are far more complex than just the narrative of, "The Greedy Baby Boomers fucked us all over!"

For example, with college tuition...my impression is that the reason why college tuition went up so high is based on several factors. The first is that there was an Echo Boom, so college populations expanded in the late 90's and 2000's after being dormant in the late 1970's through the early 90's, which seems like the last time period college was actually pretty affordable. (Seriously, I listen to Gen Xers tell me what they paid for tutition and I want to weep.) When college populations expanded after being dormant for so long, colleges had to scramble to keep up with the demand, leading to major college renovation/projects. Students had higher expectations for their dorms and general campus buildings, and since the 1960's/1970's era buildings that were put up to house the Baby Boomer College explosion were substandard, they were replaced with brand-new sparkling buildings. It made the colleges more competitive with the potential freshman giving tours, but those costs had to be passed on somewhere, right?

I don't feel like I know enough about the gutting of the manufacturing, the gutting of unions, and the 90's housing bubble to try and explain the complexities, though...

Although I will say...didn't the Silent Generation actually have a lot of power throughout the 80's and the 90's? I'm not really sure it's accurate to say that all of that happened under the Baby Boomer's watch- yes, we've had a Baby Boomer president since 1992 (Obama is borderline Baby Boomer/Generation X), but I don't really feel like the Baby Boomers had a monopoly of power since the 80's that they used to drive all the major direction of this country.

What are your thoughts, if any, that you have any on this subject?