The baby boomers have been rolling through the demographic timeline like a pig through a python; a similarly aged population who are disproportionaly numerous compared to the cohorts ahead and behind them. They are also very well educated and their adolescence and youth has coincided with a time of unprecedented prosperity. As a result, they, and most of the people they know, their colleagues and contemporaries, have done very well. At their age, they represent the peak earning years of any population.

But now they are starting to age and their own children's generation are starting to compete with them for work in an era of tightening job markets, outsourcing, downsizing, and automation. Add to the mix large numbers of technically well-trained immigrants, mostly Asian, (not all foreigners are illegals or menial laborers) and the lines intersect to mean hard times for people crowding 60. Neither are they psychologically prepared for this, throughout their whole working lives they have been climbing successfully up the professional ladder (everybody between 20 and 50 is on the way up by virtue of their youth and increasing job experience, doing better each year than they did the year before). They and all their acquaintances are in the same boat, they thought the joyride would last forever, that it was the natural state of the world, but now they are approaching the abyss en masse.

These are natural consequences of historical phenomena, it's not a conspiracy, but businesses are adapting to take advantage of this environment in a very competitive atmosphere, primarily by instituting business models that can take advantage of cheaper, younger workers, and encouraging them to change jobs more frequently through incentives that favor mobility and innovation and not stability and loyalty. The boomers not ready or able to retire soon, but still perfectly capable of and ready to work, are being pushed into an increasingly untenable situation: they simply are not going to be able to earn what they think they deserve, and perhaps not even what they need. They may not even be able to work in anywhere near the environment they've been used to. With increasingly less pension and medical benfits available, they are being squeezed and they are the second cohort to be squeezed this way. The generation that expected well-paying industrial jobs with full benefits like their parents had don't have them either. First, the factory workers got pounded. Now it's white collar and lower management's turn. Tomorrow, the middle managers and professionals will feel the squeeze. That's why people aren't retiring at 65 any more. They can't. And that's why they're so scared of losing any position they may now have. Once you fall off this treadmill, they're ain't no getting back on.

Maybe it's not anyone's fault, maybe it's just the way things have worked out, and a reasonable man knows it's up to him to adapt and do the best he can to survive. I can handle that. What I cannot handle is some jerk telling me "Hey, look at all the want ads in the paper, there are plenty of jobs out there."