Boomers
How we got here:As of the year 2000, baby boomers were turning 50 at the rate of one every seven seconds. How did we become the Baby Boomer generation?
The Great Depression and World War II shaped our parents and they did not want their children to live through similar events. Many of our fathers had just returned from fighting the ?war to end all wars.? They became conservative, wanting a home, family, and good jobs.
Our mothers read Baby and Child Care by Dr. Benjamin Spock who counseled them to be friendly rather than stern, encouraging rather than didactic and they would be rewarded with a generation of ?idealistic children.?
And idealistic many of us became. Was it because we were the first generation to live in the shadow of nuclear war? Because the Iron Curtain separated US from THEM before we were old enough to understand who THEY were?
Technology made great strides. Television went on the air April 13, 1946 and became the fastest growing technological innovation of all time. It expanded faster than cars, phones, and radios; faster than transistor radios, VCRs, computers, or cell phones.
In 1947 the transistor allowed everyone to have his own radio and for the first time we could put in an earplug, turn up the volume and block out our parents voices.
We learned about life from radio and TV. White hats always beat the black hats and every family but our own was perfect.
We learned about life from radio and TV. White hats always beat the black hats and every family but our own was perfect.
The Truman Doctrine, the CIA, Cold War, UFOs, AK 47s, suburbs, and VW bugs entered our lives before 1950.
Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier and we grew up hearing sonic booms.
The Brooklyn Dodgers picked up Jackie Robinson and the first crack in racial segregation was made.
Joseph McCarthy presented his infamous list and created a distrust of government that has never left us.
Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, the book with all of the four-letter words we just had to read as teens, was published in 1951. And Holden Caulfield was us. He was alienated from everything and everybody. He was us not yet realized.
In 1953 we had the Kinsey report telling us about sex before we had any need to know. Then in 1956 that other “dirty book” was published. Grace Metalious’s scandalous novel Peyton Place combined cheap thrills and disillusionment.
Marlon Brando brought us juvenile rebellion in The Wild One. Before we were even out of diapers he created a prototype for our generation – juvenile delinquent.
Four years later James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause gave us someone to emulate. Unlike later icons, he never grew old or had the media report his fall from the pedestal.
Duck and cover, civil defense drills, fallout shelters, Emergency Broadcasting tests telling us to tune our radios to Conelrad, 640, 1240 AM were a part of our youth.
But not everything was grim and dark. Our own personal anti-hero, Alfred E. Neuman of Mad Magazine, came along to make sure we never took anything too seriously.
Lucy and Desi brought laughter and the networks brought censorship. Lucy could not be seen, on TV, in the same bed with her husband. She did not become pregnant, she was expecting. Our tender sensibilities might suffer if life were not filtered for us.
And then Hugh Heffner did offend many people’s sensibilities with his new publication, Playboy. The magazine generations of young men have cherished and hidden began publication in….
Dinah Shore told us to “see the USA in our Chevrolet” and Ike provided the Interstate highways to make it easier.
The Russians beat us into space; we beat them to the moon.
And so we grew – through the Mickey Mouse Club, Elvis, Barbies, American Bandstand, and the hula hoop.
We survived polio vaccines, Sputnik, Nikita Khrushchev, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. And life went on.
From, “Never trust anyone over 30…” we became 30, 40, and 50 ourselves.
Where we are now:
Are we as baby boomers truly different from generations before us and the generations that followed?
Or are we so self-centered and egocentric that, even as we turn fifty and consider ourselves to be mature adults, we still think the world revolves around us?
We were 76 million strong. Between the years of 1946 and 1964 we arrived at the rate of more than 338,000 a month.
During the first year of the baby boom 3.4 million babies arrived – at the time a record number for one year. In 1947 the number increased over 1945 by one million. From 1954 on, over four million little boomers appeared on the scene each year, peaking at 4.3 million in 1957 and finally exhausting itself in 1965, when births fell below four million, where they have stayed.
In 1996, counting deaths and 8 million foreign-born boomers, our generation reached almost 78 million. We account for 31 percent of the population. As the oldest of us have moved into our fifties, the youngest have entered their thirties.
Baby boomers can be broken into two waves, the first of which have very little in common with the second. Those born after 1957 comprise the second wave. The first wave were hippies, the second wave punks. Both experienced dissatisfaction with the world though they rarely can relate to each other.
We of the first wave of baby boomers shared more with the pre-boomers, those born between 1941 and 1945, than with the second wave boomers. These pre-boomers were often the people with the most influence over our lives.
They include Bob Dylan, Tom Hayden, Joni Mitchell, Angela Davis, Bill Bradley, and The Beatles. Technically they aren’t boomers. Still, as youths the same forces shaped them and they helped to shape us into the people we became.
We witnessed the assassinations of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy in our formative years. The civil rights movement and Vietnam came of age with us. We protested our school dress codes and went on to protest the war in Vietnam, crusade for civil rights and women’s rights, and fought to protect our environment.
We are the best-informed generation ever. More of us went to college than any generation had before. Economically it was more feasible than ever. Also, Vietnam prompted many to go to college and stay there in order to avoid the draft.
Our generation is considered liberal but according to surveys only 20 percent of us are, just as only 23 percent of us participated in the counter culture. We are depicted as a generation of stoned, longhaired, hippie freaks but only some experimented with drugs. (Some of us didn’t even inhale!) Far fewer actually dropped out and went to live in a commune.
The sexual revolution affected most of us. The double standard was being challenged. We demanded equality in the bedrooms and in the workplace. Seventy-five percent of baby boomer women entered the workforce. More of us opted to delay marriage and childbirth until we were older.
Most of us have held ten jobs and over half of the first wave boomers make $40,000 a year and own a home similar to the one they grew up in. Both husbands and wives work and most of us haven’t hit our peak earning years.
Our lives are faster-paced and more stressful than our parents. We demanded better day care and maternity leaves from our jobs. Our numbers and our demands to be heard have changed the workplace as well as the home structure.
We love computers and anything high tech. We eat more natural foods and avoid artificial flavors and chemical additives.
We are still skeptical of authority. We have forced informality into nearly every level of our lives. From casual Friday to an insistence on first names – we just don’t do formality.
By 2030, one in five Americans will be a senior citizen. Can we handle the next twenty or thirty years? Time will tell. The Beatles asked it first, “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four?”