Where we’ve come from, as Boomers

   Recently my cousin Jim wrote a letter to my brother Steve which was on Facebook.  I was so impressed with Jim’s recounting of the formative days of our lives as the Baby Boomer generation.  When you see history compressed like this it is quite impacting, at least to me.  Our culture has certainly changed rapidly in our lifetime.  I am trying to keep up and not be an old fuddy-duddy.  I want to be culturally relevant and yet maintain standards which some would call old-fashioned.  I think I’m becoming my own Grandma.

Jim said,

“I just found a picture in our archives with Jack and I wearing the same jackets and bow ties. It was dated 1960 , just 14 years after World War II, so I was 9 and Jack was 7-1/2. We look like innocent little men in that shot. It was the brief peaceful period of our lives before the perfect storm arrived in the mid 1960's. Then began a 10 year explosion of powerful music, civil unrest, and cultural change, driven by the upheavals of America at the time, that changed the country forever. The fear of the nuclear bomb we and our enemies have that could obliterate each other off the face of the earth. The assassinations of our president John F. Kennedy,his brother Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. The drug culture, Woodstock, pot, LSD, Timothy Leary, antidisestablishmentarianism , Patty Hearst and the SDS, The Weatherman- a subversive underground violent protest group, conscience objectors to the war, Charles Manson, bombings by violent protest groups and murders of police officers, hippies, the never ending Vietnam war- the most divisive and hated war of our lifetimes and unwarranted anger towards servicemen who risked their lives for us, major riots in the streets, sit-ins, the civil rights movement, protest songs and movements, the black panthers, the pill, communes ,the massive changing of social, sexual, and cultural mores, free love, do your own thing, tune in and drop out, if it feels good do it, country wide civil unrest, The Watts riots, the killings of 4 students at Kent State by the national guard, Watergate and President Richard "I am not a crook" Nixon, who resigned the office of President in disgrace, the loss of faith and trust in our own government. All of this happened by 1969 and are just highlights off the top of my head.”

I wonder what all this stress has produced in us. My brothers and me, born 1950, 1951, 1952.