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Friday, February 03, 2012
The Other Baby
Boomers
"...and all the
children are insane..."
I TRIED. But we weren't all insane. Just most of us. There were those of us who weren't hippies or revolutionaries or hateful of our parents. I wasn't getting along with my father, but I asked him if I should volunteer for Vietnam. The only time he ever gave me advice. I guess he meant it. He said, "Don't go to war if your country isn't determined to win. I don't want you to die for nothing." Given that I wasn't listening to him much in those days, I hedged my bets. I decided on finishing college. I think I got the last II-S deferment ever granted, based on the fact that I was 17 when I enrolled. When I was classified I-A, I sent a polite letter to my draft board, asking them to check the calendar.They did and gave me the II-S. Then, when I was 19 and graduated, I had my year of lottery eligibility. I was in the top third, certain to be drafted. But that was the year the draft ended. No one was called. The brokered surrender had been accomplished.
Had I escaped anything? No. The rest of my life was going to be the war I didn't fight in. The draft-dodgers captured everything -- the media, the courts, the publishing companies, the universities, science, the arts, the government.Why I wrote The Boomer Bible.
What none of you youngsters understand. Or you oldsters who graduated before us. It was an impossible time to be young. How do you decide? The current Occupy movement is just ridiculous in comparison. Imitative crap. We were kids whose parents had been shaped by the Great Depression and World War II. We had issues, not iPods. I can still remember, clear as day, the first time I heard the song up top. I was in a dorm room, after hours, breaking the rules. I hated it. And I loved it. The world would never be the same again. The same way I felt about all the rock and roll masterpieces that defined the sixties.
You wind up living a double life. I loved the Rolling Stones and yet hated the anarchy they represented. When I watched Gimme Shelter, I so wanted Jagger to be a hero trying to save the victims. He almost did that, but not quite. I forgave him anyway. Because I am a child of the sixties.
I am. I'm a Baby Boomer. I've lived and felt and fallen victim to all our fads. I've had a couple of mid-life crises, quite in line with the media-generated stories of same, and now I am growing old and feeling, feeling mind you, that it's your responsibility to take care of me.
Except that I don't. In my mind, I can go all the way back there and see that not even millennials owe us a free ride. Don't get e wrong. We've done our share. The great technological leap forward we've seen in our time wasn't the product of the so-called Greatest Generation. It was us. The Baby Boomers. We had talent, education, and a chip on our shoulder. We're the ones who made a world in which completely ordinary folks own an SUV, a laptop computer, a 60-inch high-def TV, and a phone that can do more than what a state-of-the-art minicomputer could do in the sainted sixties.
But we let our children down. Catastrophe. We have produced children who not only don't know their history but actively scorn it.
Awful. Why I don't turn them away when they come here with thir tantrums. We're all guilty. Even the Baby Boomers who knew where all this was headed when it started. We should have fought harder. It's payback time.
I'd like some satisfaction. But gunning down children who aren't smart enough to know the score isn't it. NOT satisfying.
My way of of apologizing to Helk and FA. I forgive you. You know not what you do.
