A review of our daily digest, just from last week, reveals a series of articles that don’t just provide information about the state of boomers’ retirement savings. They scold, berate and shame.

Here’s a couple of samples (my caps): “Baby Boomers are FAILING to follow the retirement planning DISCIPLINE that enabled their parents to achieve a satisfying retirement ” (Plan Adviser); “GO TO YOUR ROOM: Adult Children of Retired Parents Need More DISCIPLINE in Retirement Planning” (PR Newswire) And recently, the scoldiest of them all: (Ben Stein in the April, 2008 issue of Money Magazine) “What’s the problem with boomers? A SHORTAGE OF INTELLIGENT BEHAVIOR. We’re a LAZY, UNDISCIPLINED generation.”

I don’t want to leave you in suspense. I am not amongst those who believe that boomers’ lack of financial readiness for retirement is the sign of a character flaw, personality disorder, or lack of moral fiber. Here’s just a few reasons why:

1. The generation that preceded the boomers laid their plans for retirement during a time of economic growth and prosperity. The house they bought for $14,000 is now worth $300,000, $500,000 or a million or two. This was not the by-product of superior intelligence or discipline: just plain, dumb luck.

2. The American economy dominated the world and could afford to have a paternal attitude towards its employees: Remember pensions? Those things our parents had and we don’t?

3. Big things cost less back then, i.e. university educations for their children (the boomers) , healthcare costs for their families even summer camps. They didn’t go bust trying to give their kids (and elderly parents, for that matter) some semblance of what they had growing up. Boomers do.

4. One of the shared memories amongst leading-edge boomers is “duck and cover”—atom bomb drills in which we hid under our first grade desks. Who thought we’d live this long—let alone to ten? Everything since then has been a bonus, as boomers learned to live in and for the present. “Be Here Now” was the best-selling book of the boomer’s day, which makes good sense when you’re basically trained from birth to believe the world is about to end.

5. Boomers have lived by their wits, rebelliousness and resourcefulness all their lives, often staying one step ahead of whatever dire warnings society was issuing. (You’ve got to eat red meat to be healthy; only white males should be president, women should stay home and raise the children; people of color should sit in the back of the bus; trust the government to know what’s best.) A lot of good has come society’s way because of the boomers’ unwillingness to let fear “discipline” them into passive obedience. Now they are accused of having refused to buy into society’s notion of how a good citizen prepares for retirement. Perhaps something good will come out of this, too.

But if not, if boomers have truly miscalculated their economic destinies, is it truly because they are rotten to the core? Or have they been, like the generations before and after, simply doing their best given the circumstances into which they were born, the challenges with which they were and are faced and the reliance upon solutions that worked for them in the past?

In other words, give boomers a break. They’ve already got their hands full enough dealing with their own concerns about their financial futures, and if our economy is going to avoid full-blown catastrophe due (only in part) to boomers’ lack of planning, wouldn’t it be better to be able to fully utilize all of our resources? And wouldn’t it be better if boomers were embraced as amongst those valuable resources to be respected, empowered and understood—not diminished, scolded and dismissed? Just asking.

Carol Orsborn