The Boomer Buster

Mike males is talking about his generation. They think they're going to live forever, he's complaining. They're in unbelievable denial about their vulnerability. Look at the numbers: dying of drug overdoses in this state at more than twice the rate documented in 1990. Fastest-growing age group for felony and violent felony arrests in California. Biggest demographic for HIV and AIDS cases. One in three not just overweight but obese.

He sets aside the pile of papers he is grading in his apartment near UC Santa Cruz, where he teaches. The street below bustles with young people, but they're not the issue--teenagers' markers of trouble have been declining for decades.

"No one wants to hear it," says Males, a gray-bearded sociologist whose latest project is a book tentatively titled "Boomergeddon," "but we're having a lot of problems with the middle-aged."

Males has been talking this way for a long time, and he's right on at least one count: The public hasn't always been listening. Ten years ago, when news magazines and academics were warning that a generation of "super-predator," "time bomb" adolescents were shooting up schools and risking their lives with unprotected sex and hard drugs, Males, then a graduate student at UC Irvine, fact-checked some of those assumptions and wrote "The Scapegoat Generation: America's War on Adolescents" (Common Courage Press). The 1996 book, dense and jammed with statistics, was prescient in its examination of the ways in which adult interest groups had exaggerated the problems of young people while ignoring or minimizing comparable dysfunction among themselves.

The book made a splash, but adult crackdowns on kids continued. Males pressed his point with more books, including "Framing Youth: Ten Myths About the Next Generation," and "Kids & Guns: How Politicians, Experts, and the Press Fabricate Fear of Youth." Government statistics and other scholars confirmed his story: In measure after measure, problems among teens were declining, but problems among their baby-boom parents were another matter. Policymakers all but ignored the information.

So Males has decided it's time for a full reassessment of boomers.

As it turns out, this time he's not so alone.

For the past half century, the lives of the baby boomers have been coalescing into a shared legend: Once upon a time, a Generation was born.