I tell this theory whenever it comes up in conversation, but I am not sure I have ever put it in writing.
The baby boomers had issues because they were raised by their parents: The Greatest Generation.
And The Greatest Generation was full of people with undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
See, they grew-up in the stress and hardship of The Great Depression, and the moment they turned eighteen – we shipped them all off to fight in World War II.
Then the survivors came back from the war, started families, and raised The Baby Boomers – before PTSD was even a diagnosis.
Every World War II survivor should have probably gone to twenty years of professional counseling.
My grandfather was a cowboy and was part of that group too, he never wanted to talk about what happened in the war.
“Be that as it may, the several cowboys I knew who fought in World War II seemed to have refitted themselves to civilian life by forgetting—or more probably suppressing—what they had seen and taken part in. … The local cowboys who had been to war had more to say about their horses of the moment than they did about a world war.”
–Larry McMurtry, Walter Benjamin At The Dairy Queen
