Some people suffer from an inferiority complex; these people [i.e. baby boomer children] suffered, on moral grounds, from an "illegitimacy complex." So said young people embarked on a reverse passion for the "other"--not hatred for people who are different but a love for them, in eager acknowledgement of their very difference. They said, in effect: I struggle on behalf of others, therefore I am. They conceied an idea of identity through action.

They imagined that, through radical action, they were going to revive the heroism and moral clarity of the old Resistance struggle [i.e. the struggle of their parents] against the Nazis. The young wanted to aid the Algerian revolutionaries in their struggle against French colonialism; to lend military support to the guerillas of Latin America; to do SOMETHING. The adults flared their Communist nostrils, smelled petty-bourgeois adventurism, and gave the order "No." And so the young looked at their elders and felt--contempt.

They felt for their elders all the contempt that otherwise they might have felt for themselves, as the do-nothing heirs of heroes and martyrs.

For to be young and morally troubled in 1968 was to feel, at least in a small way, the same painful doubts and anxieties that the tiny handful of Jewish and non-Jewish left-wing youth activists had begun to express a few years earlier in their battles with the left-wing elders. It was to feel morally worthless in the face of what their parents' generation had gone through--or had gone along with. And it was to feel contempt for what the parents had become.

The young people wanted to redeem their souls. They wanted to leave behind the privileges and comforts of middle-class student life that post-WWII afforded them, and go fight in the street and in the universities for a better world, just the way the heroes of the Resistance [i.e. their parent] had gone into the street to fight against the nazis.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2788618&forum_id=2#27162841)