Who we are...Who we are not
Demographers have official definitions of generations. If you google "generation names," you will probably read that the Silent Generation extends from 1925 to 1945 while Baby Boomers were born between 1946 and 1969.
Wikipedia makes more sense to me because it defines Baby Boomers as everyone born from 1939 through the sixties, a definition that groups people by shared experiences. I was born in December of 1943 and have no memories of the war or the Great Depression. My mother was born in 1921. How can I accept a label that comes close to putting me in her generation when we were nothing alike? That makes no sense.
In my high school days, social studies teachers lectured that we could expect lives of scarcity because of the sudden burst of too many children already known as Boomers. Overpopulation was predicted to doom the world then as global warming is now. Soon, we were warned, the Baby Boomers would graduate to high school--like a cloud of locusts--and then there would certainly not be enough of anything to go around. So if technically I am not a Boomer, I have nevertheless spent my entire life feeling as if I were trailblazing for the Boomers, walking point for them on the mined road of life.
In college, whenever flowers came to hand, I wore them in my hair as I had seen in Bob Hope road movies with Dorothy Lamour. Town folk saw flowers behind my ear and smiled at me with amused approval. Then I spent a year abroad and when I came home all the girls were wearing flowers in their hair. Girls with flowers in their hair appeared on magazine covers; magazines, published unflattering stories about the girls with flowers in their hair. My harmless eccentricity, derived from an exotic movie star in the blandest of Hollywood's presentations, had morphed into a cultural phenomenon that few grownups were smiling at anymore.
When everyone began to go barefoot, I ceased to be a delightful nymphet for shedding my shoes in unexpected places.
Strings of beads--suddenly everyone wore them.
Short, loose dresses cut to look a lot like Orphan Annie's--now everywhere you turned the girls were dressed exactly so.
Long hair hung loose on every head--male or female--although my hair was not as dirty as theirs; I washed my hair every week or two whether it needed it or not.
I had been unique and had delighted in being unique. That is, after all, what adolescents do. If they are not conforming then they are aiming to be unique. Now the younger girls--girls the age of my younger sister--had stolen my style.
At every choice point in my young life, my parents and their peers called my decisions into question. Then in no time at all, a thundering herd of Boomers would be following me down whatever path I'd chosen. It was as if my little sister's voice, magnified by hundreds of thousands of her peers, was shouting "wait for me....wait for me...." Like any big sister, I did my best to run away from that call, to ditch the baby sister chasing me, but like most big sisters I either failed to run fast enough or relented and stopped to wait for the chasing baby.
So when speaking of myself and all the other war-born older siblings, I shall include us as Boomers, too.
Then there is the question of whether the Boomers are now middle-aged or seniors. Sometimes I think it might be incredible to suggest that any of us could be grownup enough to be in either of those categories. I can remember being twenty going on twelve, and thirty going on sixteen, and forty going on eighteen. Today, if I'm not looking in a mirror, the girl who sits inside my head--just behind my eyes--is a far cry from midlife. In Boomer years, I am perhaps twenty and feeling damn mature and wise to have reached that lofty stature. Boomers may not live to 130, but sixty sounds a little early for the midlife of a Boomer. Surely we couldn't be mistaken for seniors when we're barely adults.
When I call someone a senior, I mean someone who endured the deprivation of the Great Depression and the sacrifices of World War II, someone old enough during those time to understand their experiences and remember them. Seniors in their eighties and nineties today shared tough times that molded them, warped them, and influenced their response to all other events to come, including parenthood.
If Boomers were doted on, indulged, and spoiled, it was exactly because our parents wanted to give us the childhood they wished they might have had. Because they had grown up too fast and missed too much, our parents secretly--sometimes not so secretly--hoped to relive their childhood through us.
My father grew up in poverty. He knew hunger. Treats were rare. When he grew up, he made certain he and his daughters had frosted layer cake every single day. For better or worse--and the mirror says for worse--we got what he had most missed.
The luxuries lavished on us were not without a price. My mother's family weathered the Depression with minimal suffering. (They made pickles. Pickles sold individually in those days and cost a penny or two. Pickles were a cheap indulgence for a family's meal during the Great Depression.) Still, my mother had to fight for the money to pay college tuition. Her family didn't think a girl needed an education. When she became a mother of three daughters, my mother was fond of saying that she would be a scrub lady washing floors if that's what it took to put her girls through college. But her daughters also grew up knowing that there was no option of not attending college. Her dream was so strong that all choice had been eliminated for us. The opportunity she fought for became her daughters' obligation to her.
The real seniors worked hard for what they got in life. They were cautious to keep what they had. They saved conscientiously to protect their future. They were team players. They kept their dreams small and mundane and tailored for risk avoidance. Yet they taught their Boomer children to dream big and to take risks. They taught us that we should grab for the gusto because we had the good life coming to us. They lived for tomorrow but somehow trained us to live for today. Our parents paid cash or did not buy; we invented the credit card, followed closely by credit card debt. Our parents made their golden years golden at the price of their youth. Boomers built memories instead of nest eggs.
Our parents grew up craving safety, security, prosperity and conformity yet they still nurtured rebellion, adventure, and independence in us. Or maybe the difference in generations came from our rejection of their lives. Their security seemed to leave them sad and unfulfilled. When they told us to expect more from life, we took them at their word. We looked at their lives and said, "I must have more than that...I won't settle for that."
Our parents also lived in a society that supported the stability they craved in ways it no longer does for us. Marriages lasted whether happy or not. People lived in the same house for fifty years and didn't view that house as an investment opportunity.
Vine Deloria wrote that corporations would become the new tribe. That was true for my parents' generation. A person who took a job and did that job reasonably well got to keep that job. Most jobs really didn't pay tremendous amounts, but most jobs offered free health insurance and most jobs offered a promise of tidy rewards for staying the course. When our parents left a company after thirty years, they had a generous pension and free health insurance, too.
We, on the other hand, are on our own.
In the sixties there was a famous poster about love that I like to paraphrase because to me what it said was, "I'll go my way and you go your way and if my way and your way are not the same way then nuts to you." And people who lived by that sentiment were often surprised to discover themselves divorced as if that were not the predictable outcome of their philosophy!
Our homes, of course, were magnificent investments. How come no one noticed that the value of a home had soared so high that it was valued out of reach for most incomes? How come no one expected a real estate bust?
As for jobs, we're not only supposed to adjust to changing jobs regularly, we're not supposed to notice that job opportunities dry up as we age because the health insurance industry dictates that people over fifty should be unwelcome on payrolls.
Few corporations still offer pensions. At best they match a small percentage of a 401k contribution when times are good and suspend that match if times are bad. Free health insurance is a thing of the past for both current and retired employees. I suspect that it won't be many years before corporations stop offering group health insurance at all.
As many Boomers as once marched in the streets chanting to end a war now march chanting for a libertarian society where indifference of one to the other will be codified into the fabric of society. Every man for himself: "I've got mine--if you don't, then nuts to you...."
Wikipedia makes more sense to me because it defines Baby Boomers as everyone born from 1939 through the sixties, a definition that groups people by shared experiences. I was born in December of 1943 and have no memories of the war or the Great Depression. My mother was born in 1921. How can I accept a label that comes close to putting me in her generation when we were nothing alike? That makes no sense.
In my high school days, social studies teachers lectured that we could expect lives of scarcity because of the sudden burst of too many children already known as Boomers. Overpopulation was predicted to doom the world then as global warming is now. Soon, we were warned, the Baby Boomers would graduate to high school--like a cloud of locusts--and then there would certainly not be enough of anything to go around. So if technically I am not a Boomer, I have nevertheless spent my entire life feeling as if I were trailblazing for the Boomers, walking point for them on the mined road of life.
In college, whenever flowers came to hand, I wore them in my hair as I had seen in Bob Hope road movies with Dorothy Lamour. Town folk saw flowers behind my ear and smiled at me with amused approval. Then I spent a year abroad and when I came home all the girls were wearing flowers in their hair. Girls with flowers in their hair appeared on magazine covers; magazines, published unflattering stories about the girls with flowers in their hair. My harmless eccentricity, derived from an exotic movie star in the blandest of Hollywood's presentations, had morphed into a cultural phenomenon that few grownups were smiling at anymore.
When everyone began to go barefoot, I ceased to be a delightful nymphet for shedding my shoes in unexpected places.
Strings of beads--suddenly everyone wore them.
Short, loose dresses cut to look a lot like Orphan Annie's--now everywhere you turned the girls were dressed exactly so.
Long hair hung loose on every head--male or female--although my hair was not as dirty as theirs; I washed my hair every week or two whether it needed it or not.
I had been unique and had delighted in being unique. That is, after all, what adolescents do. If they are not conforming then they are aiming to be unique. Now the younger girls--girls the age of my younger sister--had stolen my style.
At every choice point in my young life, my parents and their peers called my decisions into question. Then in no time at all, a thundering herd of Boomers would be following me down whatever path I'd chosen. It was as if my little sister's voice, magnified by hundreds of thousands of her peers, was shouting "wait for me....wait for me...." Like any big sister, I did my best to run away from that call, to ditch the baby sister chasing me, but like most big sisters I either failed to run fast enough or relented and stopped to wait for the chasing baby.
So when speaking of myself and all the other war-born older siblings, I shall include us as Boomers, too.
Then there is the question of whether the Boomers are now middle-aged or seniors. Sometimes I think it might be incredible to suggest that any of us could be grownup enough to be in either of those categories. I can remember being twenty going on twelve, and thirty going on sixteen, and forty going on eighteen. Today, if I'm not looking in a mirror, the girl who sits inside my head--just behind my eyes--is a far cry from midlife. In Boomer years, I am perhaps twenty and feeling damn mature and wise to have reached that lofty stature. Boomers may not live to 130, but sixty sounds a little early for the midlife of a Boomer. Surely we couldn't be mistaken for seniors when we're barely adults.
When I call someone a senior, I mean someone who endured the deprivation of the Great Depression and the sacrifices of World War II, someone old enough during those time to understand their experiences and remember them. Seniors in their eighties and nineties today shared tough times that molded them, warped them, and influenced their response to all other events to come, including parenthood.
If Boomers were doted on, indulged, and spoiled, it was exactly because our parents wanted to give us the childhood they wished they might have had. Because they had grown up too fast and missed too much, our parents secretly--sometimes not so secretly--hoped to relive their childhood through us.
My father grew up in poverty. He knew hunger. Treats were rare. When he grew up, he made certain he and his daughters had frosted layer cake every single day. For better or worse--and the mirror says for worse--we got what he had most missed.
The luxuries lavished on us were not without a price. My mother's family weathered the Depression with minimal suffering. (They made pickles. Pickles sold individually in those days and cost a penny or two. Pickles were a cheap indulgence for a family's meal during the Great Depression.) Still, my mother had to fight for the money to pay college tuition. Her family didn't think a girl needed an education. When she became a mother of three daughters, my mother was fond of saying that she would be a scrub lady washing floors if that's what it took to put her girls through college. But her daughters also grew up knowing that there was no option of not attending college. Her dream was so strong that all choice had been eliminated for us. The opportunity she fought for became her daughters' obligation to her.
The real seniors worked hard for what they got in life. They were cautious to keep what they had. They saved conscientiously to protect their future. They were team players. They kept their dreams small and mundane and tailored for risk avoidance. Yet they taught their Boomer children to dream big and to take risks. They taught us that we should grab for the gusto because we had the good life coming to us. They lived for tomorrow but somehow trained us to live for today. Our parents paid cash or did not buy; we invented the credit card, followed closely by credit card debt. Our parents made their golden years golden at the price of their youth. Boomers built memories instead of nest eggs.
Our parents grew up craving safety, security, prosperity and conformity yet they still nurtured rebellion, adventure, and independence in us. Or maybe the difference in generations came from our rejection of their lives. Their security seemed to leave them sad and unfulfilled. When they told us to expect more from life, we took them at their word. We looked at their lives and said, "I must have more than that...I won't settle for that."
Our parents also lived in a society that supported the stability they craved in ways it no longer does for us. Marriages lasted whether happy or not. People lived in the same house for fifty years and didn't view that house as an investment opportunity.
Vine Deloria wrote that corporations would become the new tribe. That was true for my parents' generation. A person who took a job and did that job reasonably well got to keep that job. Most jobs really didn't pay tremendous amounts, but most jobs offered free health insurance and most jobs offered a promise of tidy rewards for staying the course. When our parents left a company after thirty years, they had a generous pension and free health insurance, too.
We, on the other hand, are on our own.
In the sixties there was a famous poster about love that I like to paraphrase because to me what it said was, "I'll go my way and you go your way and if my way and your way are not the same way then nuts to you." And people who lived by that sentiment were often surprised to discover themselves divorced as if that were not the predictable outcome of their philosophy!
Our homes, of course, were magnificent investments. How come no one noticed that the value of a home had soared so high that it was valued out of reach for most incomes? How come no one expected a real estate bust?
As for jobs, we're not only supposed to adjust to changing jobs regularly, we're not supposed to notice that job opportunities dry up as we age because the health insurance industry dictates that people over fifty should be unwelcome on payrolls.
Few corporations still offer pensions. At best they match a small percentage of a 401k contribution when times are good and suspend that match if times are bad. Free health insurance is a thing of the past for both current and retired employees. I suspect that it won't be many years before corporations stop offering group health insurance at all.
As many Boomers as once marched in the streets chanting to end a war now march chanting for a libertarian society where indifference of one to the other will be codified into the fabric of society. Every man for himself: "I've got mine--if you don't, then nuts to you...."
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