Do you recall hearing that phrase in the news not that long ago?
Well, if you happened to miss it, it refers to a remark in 2019 by a New Zealand government official who was talking when an older official interrupted her.
She reportedly dismissed his interruption with two words, “OK Boomer,” which soon became a viral phrase as a general putdown of older people by young upstarts.
Ah yes, the ongoing battle of the generations.
Are you – like me -- a Baby Boomer, sometimes just referred to as a Boomer?
A Baby Boomer is defined as someone born between 1946 and 1964 – an 18-year span. I’m from the early part of that span, born in December 1949.
Now, I have to take issue with how generations from the mid-20th century and now the early 21st century – Boomer, Generation X, Millennial, etc. -- are divided up.
My issue/complaint about being a part of the so-called Baby Boom generation is in how wide of a spread that 18-year span is both culturally and historically.
A person born in 1946, for example, would have some memory of the early Cold War, “duck and cover” nuclear exercises, bomb shelters, Davy Crockett coonskin caps, hoola hoops, the birth of rock and roll, the civil rights movement, the Beatles and the British Invasion, the Kennedy assassination and landing on the moon.
Someone born in 1964 – and reaching some kind of worldly understanding in say, 1974 at age 10 – would have little to no first-hand experience with those events.
Lumping that entire 18-year time span into one Boomer generation seems to make little sense when viewed that way.
But that’s how it is.
Me, I’m OK being identified as a Baby Boomer. When we Boomers were growing up, the older generations looked upon us as a massive new cultural phenomenon – more than 70 million strong – and advertisers saw us as ripe for all kinds of products to sell to us.
We mostly grew up in a time of unprecedented affluence in American history, with the ability of many to go to college on our parents’ dime while rebelling against most everything that came before us.
To me, we were really the TV Generation, as television arrived in the U.S. from Europe in the late 1940s and bloomed into “living color” and multi-channel cable by the early 1970s.
TV brought home the events of the day as radio – our parents’ main information and entertainment medium – never could.
The national evening news brought civil rights struggles, the space program and the war in Vietnam into our living rooms.
And for Boomers like me, coming of age in the late 60s and early 70s, those events profoundly shaped our lives and future selves.
Many of us became turned off by society’s rampant consumerism and the materialistic values of our parents. We became idealistic and anti-war, and turned to drugs to escape the insanity of both cold and hot war and ongoing racism.
We turned away from booze and cigarettes and chose to smoke marijuana and drop LSD instead, infuriating our parents and the powers-that-be.
Unfortunately, people being who they are, soft drugs evolved into the hard drugs of heroin, cocaine and other substances that sadly soon ate away at our “flower power” purity and hippie idealism.
Now, 50 years later, so much has changed. Many of us Boomers have also changed, growing more and more conservative with the passing of time and abandoning the idealism of youth.
Still, I’m proud of what we Boomers accomplished in our time on the main stage: the maturation of rock and roll, the birth of the Green Revolution, the end of a rotten, pointless war in Asia – among other events.
So…are you a Boomer?
I am, and I’m proud of it.
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