Boomer Destiny

The U.S. experiences a major crisis about every eighty years, and the last big crisis started more than eighty years ago. If history is any indicator, argues author Tom Osenton, we are in the very early stages of the next major crisis—one that could make the Great Depression seem like a day at the beach. The storm clouds are on the horizon: A slowing U.S. economy, major banks failing, a weakening dollar, the subprime mortgage debacle, a widening gap between the wealthy and working class, credit delinquencies and bankruptcies on the rise, infrastructure crumbling, healthcare in crisis—the list goes on and on. Baby Boomers, says Osenton, are standing precisely where FDR stood at the beginning of the Great Depression, and they are in a unique position to help pull society out of the morass and set the country on a course of growth and contentment for generations to come.

It's no wonder that most young people do not feel they will be better off than their parents. Besides a looming economic crisis, we face a number of other crises: budget deficit, environmental, real estate, infrastructure, education, immigration, and healthcare. Now throw in some unforeseen wild cards such as terrorism, war, disease, poverty, homelessness, and natural disasters, and you have a recipe for a cataclysmic, multi-generational failure that will take decades and trillions of dollars to fix. Boomers are about to move into the role as the elders of an America desperate for leadership. It will be Boomers who take responsibility for directing us through the minefield of crises that will profoundly shape the U.S. for decades to come. It will be the Boomers' responsibility—and their destiny and legacy—to lead the U.S. through a thicket of issues that have been back-burnered by at least the last five presidential administrations. Full of solutions to seemingly intractable problems, Boomer Destiny shows how they can do it.

Tom Osenton, is an adjunct professor of marketing at the University of New Hampshire's Whittemore School of Business and Economics. He is also a partner in Chicago-based market research and one-to-one marketing company Customer Share Group, Inc. Previously, he held senior-level positions at such companies as CapCities/ABC, VNU, and the Times-Mirror Company. He is the author of Customer Share Marketing: How the World's Great Marketers Unlock Profits from Customer Loyalty, and The Death of Demand: Finding Growth in a Saturated Global Economy.