The next day was tomorrow.
That phrase came up recently in a conversation with some baby boomers, and all parties who witnessed/heard it are still trying to figure out what was meant by it.
Which brings us to a discussion regarding the impact of baby boomers. Sure, it’s a leap, but bear with me. Now that we are chugging along into old age at a pretty good clip, it’s a great time to decide if we really were lucky to grow up as baby boomers.
Loads of cultural touchstones surely made it worth it. The TV shows, Saturday morning cartoons and westerns, playing outdoors all day, the fantastic music, hippies, and it was all capped off with Woodstock.
On the flip side however, the duck and cover exercises in school, the JFK, MLK, RFK assassinations, and the war in Vietnam were a reality check on our optimism that everything was going to turn out all right.
It’s been said that we are now in Act III and an easy target for millennials and Gen Xers who, right or wrong, think boomers have screwed up everything. For them, the sooner we get off the stage the better. But let’s not forget some of our contributions for the greater good. We did start a peace movement to end a war, created some phenomenal music that’s still revered by all generations, invented the computer, created the internet, and started the green movement to help clean up our planet. Plus, it’s a little known fact, but baby boomers donated more money to worthy causes than any generation before, and maybe since.
The faults are real but some of the good things are just a matter of opportune timing. We came of age at a time of prosperity and few economic downturns. The market went up and so did real estate values. Did boomers reap the benefits? Yep, and many of us (but not all) are still reaping the benefits. It may be hard for some to accept, but some animosity toward boomers is ordinary and unacceptable ageism, a topic for another day.
I’m aligned with those who think that boomers still have an important contribution to make, and that our social activism may have ebbed somewhat, but we can still be a force for good. Time will tell, because the next day is tomorrow.
Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. You can also visit his author page here. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that’s not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.
Have any of you tried online dating? It can be a fun game, a familiar game, from our procreative years when hormones drove the search and the long-range goal was marriage and family. However, this time around, for us seniors, the goals and objectives are different. Some moves carry-over from the traditional ‘mating dance’ like who calls whom, who pays for the meal, who opens the restaurant door. Sweet. On the other hand, when we get to a certain age, a couple can both agree that we’ve ‘been there, done all that’ and can decide that we’re old enough to skip the coy virgin and the hat-twisting teenager asking a girl to the prom routine. It can get pretty simple: ‘Your place/my place?’ ‘Your grandkid’s birthday/my grandkid’s graduation?’ As always, I think a good anecdote can get to the core of current senior ‘rules of engagement’.
At the bus stop last night I spoke to the youth. He was wearing all black and I wondered if he worked at a business in the area. I had been craning my eye down the street looking for a bus; three minutes, he said.
Have you had any cravings to go back to the way things were? Not talking politics now. We had some crazy things going on 50 years ago. No, I’m talking about putting down all the tech tools and revisiting the good old days…okay just the old days.
Death Valley is a taboo subject at our house, but some have asked what happened to that trip, so here goes.
When I walk downtown in our city, I pass the Medical School. I guess we need it to produce a steady supply of doctors, to competently handle our ongoing medical issues. But then when I watch television, I see a concerted effort to medically educate the general public. I’m talking about all the health-related commercials. Just the superb animation alone, used to show the workings of our vascular, neural, skeletal and other systems, is enough to make a layman think he has completed anatomy 101. Computer artists take us on journeys through veins, bowels and electrical pathways in the service of solving or at least alleviating distress and dysfunction with their specific patent medications. These value-added ads are a much more sophisticated version of a carnival huckster offering cure-all nostrums by the bottle. Viewers who grew up on Sesame Street flashes of information, feel at home with the gorgeous visuals, graphs and progression from ‘the heartbreak of psoriasis’ to clear skin in thirty-second info-bursts. Who needs to dissect corpses like Hippocrates (he of the oath) and anatomical artists like DaVinci to grasp the intricacies of body systems? “We saw it on television, doctor: ‘This is the letter C for Cold, Constipation and Cramps.”
