Boomer

Searching For My Generation Gap

/ cigarman501 / 9 Comments

“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” – George Orwell

I’m a Boomer and I don’t say that with much pride these days. I have joined a few Facebook sites touting Sixties and Seventies music, fashion, lifestyle, culture, etc. The “free love” Sixties are not immune from inflamed politics or the lamentation for “the good old days.” What happened to the “first” “Me Generation?”

Why have we, the Boomers, become so judgmental, so jaded? What did we do to become the end all adjudicators for societal judgement? I mean, we invented the term “generation gap.” What happened?

We once put a premium on thinking outside of the box. We were the epitome of non-conformity. We were going to go out and change the world and we did. Boomers did some amazing things…and then sat back on their laurels and bitched and moaned, “What happened to our youth, no manners, no work ethic, yada, yada, yada?”

We allowed the world to beat us down, turning us into our parents, and now we want to make sure our future generations get beaten down too by pointing out all their failures when we are the ones who raised them. I hope these new generations will save us from ourselves or will at least save themselves from us. We need a little Sixties-style nonconformity.

Am I looking through rose-colored glasses at the past? Newberry College in 1968-1973 was not a liberal baston of “wokeness” despite being a “liberal arts” college. I mean it was in South Carolina, a conservative baston and a champion of the “Lost Cause”.

I remember plenty of folk who did not toe the expected line. We weren’t all about panty raids, Purple Jesus, and singing “Dixie” or “Hail to the Redskins” at football games. (The Newberry College mascot was once “The Indians” and not “The Wolves.”)

I remember people who not only colored outside of the box but tore the box up and used it for kindling to start a fire in one of the outside entrances to Brokaw Hall. It wasn’t willful destruction. They picked the safest place to start a fire so they could broadcast the “Fish Cheer” from their dorm windows to the powers that were gathered outside. I’m not sure the Dean of Men ever recovered. I know, there were bigger war protests at certain “left” coast institutions of higher learning, but we did have them and only had a student body of eight hundred or so.

What happened to us? We came of age during a decade of protests, primarily centering on an unjust civil right of segregation and an unjust war fought in Viet Nam. Church, state, and parents were all called into question and found wanting by us…and now we have become them…or at least the most vocal have.

My research has given me some insight. The Boomers are not monolithic, nor are the Generation Xers or Millennials we raised. Those Boomers who were born closer to the end of WW II tend to be more liberal than those born in the later period. Interesting but I digress.

We utter the same battle cry our parents did. “That’s socialism” or “that’s Marxism” anytime anything is done to try and help people other than those at the top of the food chain. Helping those on the lower end of the food chain is not socialism. Socialism is, “a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.”

The last time I looked, “the means of production, distribution, and exchange” is still in the hands of the owners of said means of production, distribution, and exchange; ergo, not socialism.

The fact is we “sold out” during the 1980s and became part of the materialist, consumer culture. We became members of Reagan’s “moral majority” which was anything but moral as far as treatment of people. Remember the beginning of the AIDS epidemic? It was “hurrah for me and the hell with everyone else.” “Trickle down” only happens with rain…or “the man” pissing on our heads.

For those of us who might have championed capitalism we should have learned how corrosive capitalism can be when unaccompanied by a counterbalancing belief of moral restraint. When did our 1968 idealism turn into materialism? When did we become so pontificated against the generations that we raised?

We judge the new generations as being lazy, without morals, or taste. We had the best fashion, the best cars, the best music, we say. We forget about the class struggles, the war, and civil rights assassinations and riots. This fictional world is no longer our oyster…nor is it Generation Xers. We taught you too well to be just like us.

One of the tasks for those who succeed the Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials is to restore some good old fashioned, 1968 idealism. The great challenge of this moment is the crisis of isolation and fragmentation, the need to rebind the fabric of a society that has been torn by selfishness, cynicism, distrust, and autocracy created by my generation. Good luck. You have a huge job ahead of you.

Please follow Don Miller at https://www.amazon.com/stores/Don-Miller/author/B018IT38GM?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true

Relics of the “Good Old Days”

/ cigarman501 / 8 Comments

“One tatty old man in jeans—what was he thinking? Jeans are for young people.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

I stood in front of my closet staring at racks of pants, neckties, and dress shirts that I wore when I fought the teaching wars. I’ve been fully retired for nearly a decade, and these are nothing more than relics from those days. Several suits and old man Fedoras that I once thought were cool are among those relics.

I haven’t worn these clothes in a while. I’ve turned into the old man who wears shorts or blue jeans and tee shirts…occasionally a flowered Hawiian if I really want to dress up. If I can’t get away with those choices, I rotate between three dress shirts and two pairs of dress trousers…both khakis. If I must go somewhere that requires a necktie I don’t go.

Why do I keep these relics? I have no intention of going back to teaching. Someone could use them if they weren’t concerned about this year’s fashion statements, the width of my ties, or the sweat stains on my fedoras. It must be the memories of the “good old days.”

“When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

I’ve heard too many of my peers express their feelings about the “good old days.” Waxing poetic about how the days of our youth were so much better than present days. I’m sure it is due to a lost relic from our past. The relic we once called our youth.

I am a Boomer. I was born in 1950. I mostly enjoyed my childhood. I was, as were most of my friends, blessed with a family that extended far outside the walls of our homes, a family that included those with different surnames and DNA.

The African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child” was a truism even if the village I grew up in was far from Africa in both location and thought. The saying emphasizes a child’s successful upbringing is a communal effort involving many different people and groups, from parents to teachers to neighbors and grandparents.

If these are the “good old days” you wax poetically about, I am in total agreement. They were as good then as they are gone now.

“Glorifying the past because we like the story better isn’t history; it’s propaganda.”
― Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth

The good old days are person specific. Just because you or I remember our childhoods as wonderful doesn’t mean everyone remembers theirs that way…and I doubt everyone’s life was wonderful all the time. It is easier to remember the drunken party fun and forget the blinding hangover the next day.

There seems to be much debate about our youth. I hear that when we were kids, things were different. Things were better. Things were less politically correct. There was more freedom. The world was safer. I agree it was different but argue it might not have been better.

Safer? No seatbelts, riding in the back of pickup trucks, riding bicycles without helmets, lawn darts, cigarettes everywhere, drinking from rubber hoses…get my point? I survived but have many scars to remember the “good old days.”

Maybe you heard your own parents talk about how kids (you) used to be better behaved, how when they were your age, they worked harder and had their act together. I heard this in 1969 when my first semester grades were reported to my parents and found to be quite lackluster.

Think our youth are worse? Here’s a quote from the Fourth Century BC, over 2500 years ago. Credit Plato or Socrates. “What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders; they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets, inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?”  This was during the Golden Age of Athens, Greece.

Truthfully, the quote is more of a summary of the period and Plato’s and Socrates’ thoughts, but the summary is now over one hundred years old. The facts are, kids have always alarmed their parents, new generations are always vexing to the generations that came before.

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt

You might want to ask the question, “The good old days were good for whom?”

Black people, Indigenous Americans, “ethnic minorities”, the poor, women, people with a disability, gay people? The trouble with this question is it is often answered in a straight, white perspective that is decidedly masculine. The Sixties were populated by protest and the growing pains those protests fostered.

Today, most of us are fighting on some side of the culture wars but the Fifties and Sixties were fraught with minefields for the “others.” Civil Rights, the war in Vietnam, The Cold War, assassinations, riots, gays forced to stay in the closet lest they tempt being rolled on a Saturday night. Women’s rights? Women couldn’t apply for a credit card without their husband’s permission. The disabled didn’t even have a way to the table much less a seat. Oh…those good old days.

In some ways, the more things change, the more they stay the same. We are fighting the same battles today. Only the battlefield names have changed.

“There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.”
― Sophia Loren

So why do we look back on those days of yesteryear with so much fondness? Why do we save the relics of our past? I have a theory.

At a certain age it is easier to look backward because we know the story on the road already traveled, and the road we now travel on is much shorter than it once was. We make the road we once traveled warm and fuzzy and slightly out of focus instead of facing today’s grim reaper we see closing the gap in our rearview mirrors.

I believe Sophia is on to something. My body creaks and cries out in protest every time I think about cranking a lawnmower or chainsaw, but my mind wants to be creative and active. My mind makes me go on and crank the lawnmower or chainsaw.

Where there is creativity there is youth. Afterall, Anna Mary Robertson Moses, better known as “Grandma Moses”, did not start painting until she was 76 years old. Even though she had no formal training, she painted every day for 25 years and produced thousands of paintings.

I have hopes that I’m not just a relic from times past. I have hopes that I can still contribute…Maybe I can HELP make these the “good old days” for another generation instead of lamenting how sad things are now.

Don Miller’s works may be found at https://www.amazon.com/stores/Don-Miller/author/B018IT38GM?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true