"What Do You Give the Country That Has Everything?"

"In his recent biography of 20th-century media baron Henry Luce, professor Alan Brinkley of Columbia discusses Luce's famous 1941 essay, 'The American Century,' in which Luce urged Americans to take on the burdens of world leadership, and 'to promote, encourage and incite so-called democratic principles throughout the world.'
"Brinkley, a Boomer but usually the most reticent of narrators, can’t resist stepping out of the story at this point to comment that he first read Luce's essay in the 1970s and it struck him as 'an obsolete relic of an earlier… and now repudiated American age. Little did I know how soon its sentiments would be popular again.' American exceptionalism—the belief that the rules of nature and humanity don't apply to us—and American hubris about promoting our values in the world got us into Vietnam. This was the analysis of most anti-war Boomers. (The ones who rejected America and its values were a tiny minority.) Mainstream Boomers believed that Vietnam inoculated us against these vanities and would keep us out of trouble. (Hawks feared they were right.) But the inoculation lasted less than a decade. We started small, with Ronald Reagan's invasion of Grenada, and now, like other imperial powers before us, we're mired in Afghanistan.
"But we're still spry. It's not too late for a generational gesture, something that will be the equivalent of—if not actually equal to—our parents' sacrifice in fighting and winning World War II: some act of generosity or sacrifice that will inspire or embarrass the next generation, as the sacrifices and achievements of the 'Greatest' generation inspire and embarrass many Boomers.
"So, what'll it be, folks?"

In The Atlantic, Michael Kinsley offers a modest proposal for Baby Boomers.