Popular myth paints baby-boomers as a bad lot.
We're the bullying old drunks who stormed the birthday party, ate all the saveloys, and left the kids with the crumbs.
In short, we pillaged the joint.
The last appalling baby-boomer was born in 1964, in that period of prehistory when a balding accountant called Wilson Whineray captained the All Blacks, and Prime Minister Holyoake was actually nicknamed "Kiwi Keith''.
In 1964, the boomers' trendier mothers were experimenting with modernisms like the exotic "pizza'' -- a novelty created by garnishing a pie base with a tin of Wattie's spaghetti.
These titans of cuisine were also the poor sods who had to raise the rebellious boomers.
In recent weeks, boomers were bashed with a fresh spate of bad press.
In Britain, they were blamed for old-fogey Brexiting of the dreams of the young.
Here in New Zealand, each new round of finger-pointing over house prices is dressed with another overdose of boomer-bashing.
We all know the charges laid against the boomers - that we bludged cheap educations, weaseled permanent jobs that we clung to and somehow afforded homes.
Now, after all that good luck, boomers are retiring, expecting the next generations to push our wheelchairs.
There's a strong defence case for the boomers, but we've heard it so often we can recite it.
Universities could afford to give us cheap educations because so few of the early boomers actually enrolled for it.
The same boomers who sweated out 20% interest rates on their mortgages are today funding their kids' house deposits.
Who was it invented rock'n'roll? Huh?
And meanwhile the Me Generation millennials waste their days on Facebook narcissism.
I could spend the rest of this column re-arguing the generation wars.
But I won't, because actually they are profoundly stupid.
People don't choose to be born as millennials, generation X, or boomers.
Generations are as much the accidents of history as individuals are the accidents of birth.
Boomers exist because of an event they had nothing to do with - their World War 2 fathers trooping home en masse to sow oats and families.
Nor should Boomers be castigated for loafing through the so called '50s and '60s prosperity - most were still in short pants, and saving their sixpences.
Today's high house prices aren't caused by boomers.
In Ancient Egypt the price of pyramids also went through the roof.
So should we blame them for not thinking of cranes and forkhoists?
Or democracy, for that matter. Obviously not. We deal with the times we live in.
Listening to the rants, you'd think modern New Zealand was founded by the boomers.
It wasn't - modernity was built on the backs of the pre-war Kiwis.
If there was ever a "heroic'' Kiwi generation, it was surely that one.
They survived the Great Depression to invent the welfare state; they built the base of almost all our modern infrastructure; and they beat both Hitler and the Emperor.
Maybe the worst thing you should say about boomers is we were extraordinarily ungrateful to the hero generation - our parents.
No generation ever plans to harm the next, and always, each wants their kids to move further up the ladder.
But how realistic is this dream?
Thomas Piketty, the economist of the hour, specialises in a timely subject - the inequality of wealth.
Piketty gives us the bad news that in all known societies, in all eras, the least wealthy half of society has owned almost nothing.
That's of no comfort for today's boomers, who still worry we'll be the first Kiwi generation who leaves its successors less well off.
While house prices make the headlines, today's biggest issue is that the food which technology eats for breakfast is tomorrow's jobs.
Another economist, urging his government to roll up its sleeves and deal with this issue, said: "There cannot be a more legitimate object of the legislator's care than the interests of those who are sacrificed to the (technology) gains of their fellow citizens and posterity.''
That was John Stuart Mill, 175 years ago, with his knickers in a knot over the new steam-powered machines decimating factory jobs.
It took an entire generation of misery to discover there were actually new and different jobs, that the steam age had made possible.
Will we have to wait that long again?
John Stuart Mill was right with his line that there is "no more legitimate object of the legislator's care'' than populations being put out of work by technology
Today, more than half the bums sitting comfortably on the plush green seats of Parliament belong to Generation Xers.
Oddly, we hear little of the legacy they're to leave.
Time for them to get on with it?
- John Lapsley is an Arrowtown writer.
