Boomers took a look at the structure of their culture, found it lacking, and abandoned all of it. They did not like Dick and Jane, and so instead of improving upon it, they threw it out, and Chaucer along with it. It remains probably the 2nd worst case of "throwing the baby out with the bath water" in civilized history, the first being the French Revolution.
Anything not meeting an immediate earthy need was discarded. It began with "what the hell do I need with Brahms? Brahms isn't going to get me laid." Before long it became "what the hell do I need with religion? Religion doesn't dazzle me like LSD does." Finally it settled into "what the hell do I need with regulation and social betterment? There's money to be made."
How can there be any wonder that our parents' and bosses' generation is so insufferably self-centered? I find it pertinent that we talk about this within a week of J.D. Salinger's death, as his Holden Caulfield can be very illustrative in teaching us about the kind of dysfunctional, disenfranchised individual who currently runs our world. As far as the Boomers are concerned, they have defined the culture through their rebellion, and discouraged us from absorbing the kinds of things that gave context to our surroundings. We had to find them on our own. The newest generation entering college now is so detached from context that they seem to be aliens in their own world. They are idiots of course, but I don't hold them to account for it. Their entire world has been scrubbed of context.
I'm in Generation X, and I don't pretend that we did everything right either. We made mistakes, like fetishizing exclusivity, and needlessly feeding the rage of others. Yet at the end of our troubled youth, we sat down, and we wrote about it, as a way of hoping to establish some kind of context. I am slightly comforted in knowing that the next generation, if they hope to understand us any better, will at least be able to read something by Dave Eggers or the like. What worries me is that the coming generation will not read any of it, because they are not interested, and will not leave anything of their own for posterity either.