Okay, already! I confess
it. I'm a baby boomer. You know. We are the generation that changed everything.
We brought you the 1960's and 70's with all the social change that came about.
We revolutionized forever attitudes about money, family relationships, society,
religion, and the government. We lived through the civil rights struggles that
brought about radical and permanent social change in America and elsewhere. We
fought the war in Viet Nam. Many of us were at Woodstock and experimented
openly for the first time with sex, drugs and marijuana. We were the last
generation to be drafted into the US military. We believed that our parents'
generation could not be trusted. One of our favorite sayings was, "Never
trust anyone over 30 years old." We became fiercely individualistic and
demanded the rights to privacy to keep out the snooping eyes of those in
authority.
Economically, from our
earliest days in childhood, we felt entitled to a good life and a good living.
Why not? For many of us our parents were living the American dream. You know
what that was - own your own home, have a good job with a steady income. Father
goes to work every day and mother stays at home to take care of the kids and
keep the wheels from coming off the family. We were idealistic. We believed in
a world of optimism and hope. I have heard a sociologist say that we were the
first generation to truly believe that our lives would be better than that of
our parents.
Maybe it isn't so hard to
understand how disillusioned and cynical we became when you consider that all
the blind optimism and idealism that we grew up with was shattered by the events
of our youth - the deaths of JFK, his brother RFK, the whole civil rights
movement and the death of Dr. King. On top of all of these were the national
crises of confidence surrounding the war in Viet Nam and Watergate.
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