We are the largest & the most studied generation on the planet. We were the first generation to be given a title in modern times. We were the first generation to move from the slide rule to the hand held calculator (remember texas instruments) & the first to buy transistor radios made in Japan. There were many cultural & scientific advances that we experienced during our childhood as well. We watched The Jetsons cartoon in the morning & watched the first man land on the moon that night on our RCA TVs. Our young imaginations were inspired by the times as we bought well illustrated
books showing us how in the future we would conquer the last frontier in sleek & streamlined spaceships. And so we became the dreamers.
Baby Boomers are not a generation distinctive to the USA alone. In Russia they are still referred to as the “Sputnik” generation for obvious reasons. In the UK Baby Boomers got off to an earlier start but did not capture the lime light till the mid 60’s. In the mid 60’s Italian Baby Boomers were setting style trends still glorified today.
As young children we were also disturbed by things we did not fully understand. As the last generation to perform nuclear bomb drills at school and as young observers of the early Cold War, we were often scared of monsters of a different nature. (I was convinced by the age of 9 that I would surely die in a global nuclear war just like everyone else.) The range in years that we represent is the longest of generations with our births beginning in the mid 1950’s & extending to the mid 1960’s, after which the sudden popularity of birth control pills subdued the propagation of our group to a trickle into the mid 60’s.
Some researchers say that we are too large a category & should be split into two different segments, those who were old enough to participate in the Vietnam War & those who came after. But for the most part if you ask any Boomer they would not make the distinction possible because they had younger & older siblings who would be subjugated and would say “now wait a minute I remember that.” However young we were, the explosion of television magnified our perceptions. Indeed all baby boomers across the spectrum have shared values & beliefs because we all had so many brothers & sisters compared to more recent generations & our relative ages made us to some degree, aware of the world around us.
Certainly we all can remember significant events of the 60’s as later boomers observed the impact on earlier Boomers of our generation. Some of us may have not participated in the “Peace” movement but we certainly, at a few ages younger, developed perceptions of it. Although I was too young to participate in the Vietnam War by a few years, I certainly recall the vivid news reports coming out of the Far East detailing death tolls, progress & setbacks like it was yesterday. Although I was too young to participate in the Hippy Culture of the early Boomers, I was indeed old enough to grasp the general idea of the happenings.
Many of our early generation realized the horrors of the Vietnam War up close. Approximately half of the Boomer Generation was eligible for service in the jungle war that took place half way around the world leaving over 52,000 young American men dead and ended seemingly with no purpose for the sacrifice. Leaving us with memories of brothers lost to an unworthy cause and a definitive scepticism of trust in government along with a sense of ultimate vulnerable never felt before made us sceptical and perceptive.
More than half of us can remember the black & white TV broadcasts & radio transmissions
of the JFK and King assassinations & the Cuban missile crisis as our parents watched intently to the news available on one of three network channels. It’s now almost seems like a dream that back then so many people actually built bomb shelters in their homes & stored huge stocks of canned food in preparation for surviving an attack from the Soviets. We were never told, but somehow knew, that with the push of a button it could all be over. Yet, we unfortunately didn’t have the knowledge that no one was crazy enough to do it. So we had bad dreams too.
I’m not sure but I can speculate that we were probably the last generation that knew how to & routinely did change the oil in our vehicles, how to wash our own clothes & the last to see our mothers at home cooking in the kitchen every day. We were accustomed to rolling up our car windows, manually locking our car doors, changing the TV channel without a remote & the last generation allowed to buy beer at the age of 18 and the last to use manual typewriters. We were then most certainly a hands on generation that mastered the technology at our disposal.
Although those born in the late 50’s were a bit too young to know the early beatle hits of the early 60’s, we did have the know how, at the age of 6, to turn on the record player, place a vinyl disc on it & turn up the volume. I remember when that time came for me in 1964 at age 6. Even though I didn’t fully grasp what I was listening too, I somehow knew that life was going to get interesting as I started swaying to the sound of “I Want to Hold Your Hand”. I can still vividly remember that beat, that tempo that at age 6 made me feel that, in some strange yet to be revealed way, this is what I’ve been waiting for. As adolescents we grew up asking for Donny Osmond and the Jackson 5. As we grew older, reaching our teens & beyond, buying our own music, we past through the influence of various types of music from rock to motown, to disco & back to rock again. Music that stays with us as we hear popular 70’s rock used to sell us Cadillacs today. I find it curious that my daughter of 22 years, when exposed to the range of music experience we listened to, is fascinated with the complexity & romantic melodies of our times regardless of the era. I introduced her to the Doors, Lynard Skynard, Blue Oyster Cult, Jefferson Starship, the Dube Brothers, the Spinners, Al Green, Boz Scaggs, Billy Joel and Blondie (she found her way to discover the disco era on her own). We all know our music will live forever as the best sounds of the millennium. We had Chicago, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Santana
& Electric Light Orchestra on a short list. As Country Music diversified more & more Boomers started learning the two step. Movies with dance themes documented our fascination with Disco, like Staying Alive and Studio 54 and Country like, Urban Cowboy.
By the time of the Watergate Scandal we were all, well old enough to understand the implications of government corruption & the idea that you shouldn’t believe everything you hear from the media. But as the evidence came out we realized that governments shouldn’t be trusted but rather monitored to preserve ethical purity & how talk was cheaper than we thought, that we indeed were inheriting an imperfect world.
Later, as those who were fortunate enough to to enter the work force before the late 70’s, there was economic prosperity enough to encourage us to start families, but that period didn’t last long. Soon we became all too familiar with the term “stagflation”, a stubborn term lasting 6 years, that we understood to mean: don’t make any plans, bud. It’s onset convinced us to finally buy those smaller cars built in the far east as OPEC decided to get rich quick by doubling the price of leaded gasoline from $0.35 to $0.70 a gallon. So we were the generation who got lean, mean & most importantly smarter, although we were still unable to purchase homes with mortgages still in the 12-11% range.
We crawled our way out of that period of malaise starting the small business boom noted for pulling us out of those dark times with the help of a little know actor, President Ronald Reagan, who we remotely remembered last hosting a B & W TV show called “Death Valley Days” before he took office. He told us it was “Morning in America”, & that we could fulfill our dreams with the right attitude. So things began to look brighter for us as we got employed, started families & wow retirement benefits & stock options entered our vocabularies. We discovered the competitive idea and the notion of “consumer orientation”. Our dreamer attitude returned and found new meaning. The timing was perfect as we found ourselves eager, able & willing to craft our long awaited stamp on the world. We worked hard, saw our families begin to take shape and began to take the time to smell the roses we all talked about back in the 70’s.
One of the largest booms in home ownership transpired during this period. We were happy to acquire home mortgages with annual interest rates bearing 9-10%.that we were later able to refinance at lower & lower rates. Our piece of the pie became a good investment too.
Yea, it looked like the easy times were going to come sooner than we thought. We started watching power movies like American Gigolo and the Godfather. Whereas James Bond used to fight the Soviets, now he was battling Spectre & had female accomplices who were every bit as able to deal with the bad guys. And his gizmos, like our’s, were getting more & more sophisticated. Like the characters in “Scarface”, we began to discard the beeping pagers for bulky cellular phones as we all became more public figures and our privacy began to wear thin. We stopped pumping our own gas & stopped changing our own oil.
From the beginning and all along the way, the huge world of advertising was there to lead the way. In terms of dollars spent on advertising attention, we Boomers are A #1, Top of the Heap, even though there is some drive to keep the attention on the younger generations in music & film. Remember the “Pepsi Generation” or “RC the One with the Mad, Mad taste” & later Coca-Cola’s “It’s the Real Thing”. Interestingly much of our music & popular themes are recycling or holding firm. I’m glad that National Geographic still uses their theme song from my childhood as I pondered the schooner shipwrecked on the beach. It’s good to know 60 Minutes is still there-all 60. I often toy with my daughter about new versions of our old songs like “Angel in the Morning”. She’s certain the new version is original until I prove her otherwise with a quick visit to my collection.
On or about that time the World starting stretching, going Global with some good & bad results for the Boomers. We enjoyed low inflation, buying better, less expensive homes as products shifted from “made in the USA” to “made in China” & the likes. We stopped buying RCA & Motorola and started buying Sony & Cannon. We became willing to pay more for a European car. The Women’s Movement & the “Sexual Revolution” were upon us. We started getting married later & opted for smaller families. We perfected the “its all about me” syndrome. The Media finally got through to us as we dug deep into our pockets for more. We learned about economic cycles & the cycle of life as we saw the need to start keeping an eye on our parents, as well as our kids, as life expectancies soared during our span. We began to inherent the Planet.
By all accounts, Our generation, the Baby Boomers dominate the political, economic,
cultural leadership virtually worldwide, representing almost 30% of the adult population in the U. S. Our opinions more cemented and better pondered but just as diverse as ever. Indeed, we elected two presidents of our own generation in four of the last four elections for President. however different their positions were. Clinton did seem to be an effective bridge builder in the end despite his misgivings while Bush’s story is yet to me told. Two Boomers with significantly different political outlooks.
Our children are reaching beyond school years to leave us Empty Nesters. Some off to fight again, like our older brothers did three decades ago. Leaving us with time on our hands to contemplate more on globalism, war & peace, or for that matter, our own destiny, since our time isn’t up yet. Studies show that we are becoming more religious as drifters return to the flock. Certainly we are becoming wiser, and I think more thoughtful. What will history say about us in years to come? I hope it is written that we were Proud Veterans, many the courageous only remembered. That we were dreamers & Achievers. That we were Hopeful & Independent. That all throughout our time we were Righteous & Tolerant with a collective wisdom that left its mark, its contributions. (I for one, will give careful consideration to the older generation’s candidates in future elections, but certainly not the younger ones, They will just have to wait their turn!). Well, I’d better go. I Don’t want to miss Saturday Night Live!
