I was sitting with friends discussing Michelle Obama's comment that her husband's campaign success was the first time she has felt "proud" of her country...and so we wondered. What American accomplishment in the last 40 years has us proud?

We HAVE to start after WWII and the Marshall plan, and I guess the trip to the moon sneaks in under the 40 year time limit. But what has the richest nation in the world done in the last 40 years that has been great for the world and for its own citizens?

I await your enlightenment.

P.S. If a college-educated group like us has a hard time thinking of these things...the United States needs a better Press Agent.

I think the more relevant question is what has the baby boom generation done? The generation that came of age before and during the depression, overcame the depression, defeated world fascism, rebuilt the industrial world after WWII, built the national transportation systems--ground and air, built the vast suburbs and the massive public school--all before 1960.

They disassembled Jim Crow. They reversed the millenia-old tradition of culturally subordinating women and saw the birth of the Gay rights movement. Those accomplishment took hold before the baby boomer's to hold of matters.

The Baby Boomers have followed all this by practicing a consumerist culture unparalleled in history, even while bemoaning it every step of the way--growing ever more dependent on foreign oil and government subsidies borrowed from Asian central banks. The national debt is nine trillion!

America's manufacturing sector is now half the size of the financial sector and services done for one another have long since outstripped production of anything that could be called durable wealth as the mainstay of the domestic economy.

There will be hell to pay as soon as manufacturers overseas realize the don't need to sell to us and to subsidize our buying at the same time. Every rise in buying power overseas builds another link in the roller coaster track down for America.

Ours is the generation that did as the Spanish, Dutch and English did just before their empires imploded. Only we're doing it to our kids.

The Soviet Union did dissolve and much democratic practice did proliferate overseas in the last 40 years, but it is questionable to attribute those developments to anything America did. Though among ourselves, we are sure that everything in the universe rotates around us. America is number one---in parochialism!

Maybe the slogan for the baby boom generation should be "We didn't screw everything up and we could have if we'd put our mind to it."

We are the only major western industrialized nation that lets thousands of our children die each year for lack of medical coverage.

We care most acutely about issues like what homosexuals might do to our families, while poverty continues among us like it is a necessary component in a free market system. Many of us have come to believe exactly that.

We continue to allow great wealth to accumulate in ever fewer hands, slowly converting our tax code into a listing of special preferments. We think America's future will somehow be free of the decaying influence that concentrated wealth has caused to undermined every previous empire in history.

We allow billions of dollars to stand between us--with our pitiful personal votes, and our elected leaders who pander for huge campaign chests while ignoring policy.

We allow the national dialog to be conducted in terms defined by advertising professionals.

The Baby Boom generation started with the high ideals taught it by elementary school teachers in the 1950s, soured on excesses in the 1960s and has coasted downhill ever since.

Hell, of all the members of the generation, we have elected Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to be our leaders. What's next, an African American president who backed the disenfranchisement of millions of his fellow party members just 40 years after Dr. King died?

We invented and developed the electronic calculater, photocopier, cheap fax machines, personal computers, the internet, and computer games.

I was thinking along the same lines. We had so much hope for the future, dreams. Things seemed to crash with Nixon's resignation. It seems the victors of that political fight were not the good guys after all, just bad guys of a higher class, different, and more exploitive. The Lee Atwater generation had arrived. The late Lee Atwater's apology "missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The '80s were about acquiring -- acquiring wealth, power, prestige" is a very apt description of a great number of his peers.

The Statue of Liberty was restored. Restoring its meaning I guess that's up to our Generation.

Well, we invented the mini-van. And that certainly upgraded the quality of life for millions of American children required to go on family vacations.

We developed global networking communities like MySpace and Facebook so that we don't have to risk going out into the streets and byways of America to meet other people (who may have guns, knives, poisonous hypodermic needles and Nigerian scams to sell).

We have changed the entire paradigm of overweight - taking obesity to heights never before dreamed of.

We have produced a legion of kick-ass documentarians - from Michale Moore to what's his name with the "Super Size Me" and "Where in the World is Osama bin Laden"?

And during this campaign we have succeeded in planting real nails in the coffin of higher education by deeming a gigantic number of college educated Americans as "out-of-touch elitists" and declaring the under-educated, racist poor to be the "real" Americans.

Yeah - we've been busy!