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We Boomers….
Younger generations say we screwed up the world. We weren’t better, or worse, than other generations. We made mistakes, but we’ve learned a few things along the way. Some of us, maybe….
“Ok boomer….”
A refrain we’ve heard countless times….
My generation. Born 1947–1964.
The youngest of us turn 60 this year. The oldest are in their late 70s. We were the largest generation in history up to that point. There are around 73 million of us.
Some of us are retired and living on “nest eggs” and Social Security, which some pundits say we are breaking. Plenty of us are still working. Some by choice; some not.
There were really two waves of us. Older Boomers stopped being born around 1955. The second wave, my cohort, then started. The two cohorts are different.
Older Boomers either went to Vietnam or protested the war. Many tried dope; some, psychedelic drugs like LSD, became Hippies. They went to Woodstock, the music festival. Later, they started seeing dollar signs and joined the “Establishment” they’d disdained. They cut their hair, put on ties, became Yuppies — young upwardly-mobile professionals. Economically conservative but socially liberal, and all that.
Not all, of course. I hope it’s clear: these are tendencies, not universals. Some bucked the trends of their time, and still do.
We later Boomers were too young to protest the war or attend Woodstock. I was 11 when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon and 12 when the Kent State killings happened. We were in high school when Watergate dominated news cycles, pushing even the energy crisis of the early ’70s aside. I was a rising senior the summer Nixon resigned.
I think my cohort was less idealistic and more cynical than our elder generational siblings. Many of us came to identify more as children of the ’70s than the ’60s. I thought of myself as a “Watergate teenager” who’d stopped trusting governmental authority and would discourage others from doing so.
Both cohorts, older and younger Boomers, grew up in the shadow of the Cold War. As did older Gen Xers. Signature films of the era…
