Since my last few columns have pretty much been to the point, I decided to provide some history and comedy this month. In previous columns, I talked about generational differences and their impact in the future. I enjoy reading about the different generations and their personal and professional thoughts on different things.
A few weeks ago I had a few of my high school friends over at my house to grill on the back deck (BYOB). We graduated from high school in 1972. So I grilled out with some fellow high school buddies who are also baby-boomers. I wish I had thought to film it – it would have gone viral.
In looking at our 1972 yearbook, we noticed how many people signed, “Don’t ever change. Stay just the way you are!”
What a strange valediction to give each other on the threshold of life. (Boomers, born between 1946-1964.) We are the generation that changed everything. Of all the eras and epochs of Americans, ours is the one that made the biggest impression on… ourselves.
We sat around and talked about where some of our other high school friends were, including some of the teachers and then reminisced about who went to detention hall after school. (I was reminded by these friends that I was one of those.)
Of course, we had to talk about the hardest and meanest teachers at our high school.
We started with Ms. Aste’s history class. I believe she advised me to drop her class after the first two weeks.
History is full of generations that had too many problems. We are the first generation to have too many answers. Well, back to Ms. Aste’s class…
I remember to this day one of her lectures. She said, “Consider the people who have faced up squarely to the deepest and most perplexing conundrums of existence. Leo Tolstoy, for example. He tackled every one of them. Why are we here? What kind of life should we lead? The nature of evil. The character of love. The essence of identity. Salvation, Suffering, Death.” I raised my hand. After all I was a boomer.
I asked Ms. Aste, “What did it get him? Dead, for one thing. And off his rocker for the last 30 years of his life. Plus, he was saddled with a thousand-page novel about war, peace, and everything else you can think of.”
Years later though, I reflected about that lecture. I thought what a life. If Leo Tolstoy had been one of us he could have entered a triathlon, invented a baby boom innovation of the middle 1970s. By then, it was starting to sink in that we couldn’t run away from our problems.
We now number more than 75 million, and we’re not only a diverse generation, but take thorny pride in our every deviation from the norm (even though we’re in therapy for it.) We are all alike in that each of us is unusual.
Then, in Mr. Garret’s class, he went on at length about the New Frontier. It was full of Comanche’s, gunfighters, and cattle stampedes. Kirby, one of my friends in high school said, “I couldn’t picture myself dramatically wounded and bleeding to death while bravely urging Sargent Shriver to leave me behind and repair the village.” Well, he had just popped the top on his third beer.
One of my guests was the type we many times referred to as a hippie; long hair and always smelled of incense. I wouldn’t have remembered him from high school if someone hadn’t had told me. The word retire had barely been uttered when this classmate said, “We can’t retire. The mortgage is underwater. We’re in debt to the Rogaine for our son’s college education.” Funny stuff.
I have a confession. This article would never have been written if it weren’t for two books I have read. P.J. O’Rourke’s “The Baby Boom, How It Got That Way And It Wasn’t My Fault And I’ll Never Do It Again.” And “Millennial Momentum” by Morley Wingrad and Michael D. Hais.
In case you haven’t read any of his books, O’Rourke says in the very beginning, “Herein is a ballad of the Baby Boom, not a dissertation on it. A rhapsody, not a report.
A freehand sketch, not a faithful rendering. That is to say, I am – it is a writer’s vocation and the métier of his age cohort-full of crap.”
Think of the baby boomer presidents that we’ve had so far – Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. They are spread as far across the political map as you can get without going to Pyongyang.
According to Mr. O’Rourke, “Baby Boomers who are younger or female will vote for the Silly Party, Boomers who are older or male tend to vote for the Stupid Party. Then there are the Independents, product of the fact that they don’t know which is which.”
Remember folks, these are Mr. O’Rourke’s words not mine.
And yet we are the best generation in history. Which goes to show that history stinks. But at least we are fabulous by historical standards.
Our passionate belief in change hasn’t altered, going from “got spare change?” to “Hope and Change.”
We’re still opposed to prejudice, poverty, war and injustice. We’re a generation that doesn’t appreciate consequences. And we appreciated consequences even less after the Vietnam War, which had 47,415 of us killed in combat, not counting 153,303 wounded.
In conclusion: We bother and control our older children and interfere in every aspect of their lives because we don’t want them horning in on the fun of being a juvenile, which rightfully belongs in perpetuity to the baby boomers.
Bill Appling, FACMPE, ACHE, is founder and president of J William Appling, LLC. He is a national speaker, presenter and a published author. He serves as an adjunct professor at the University of Memphis and is on the boards of Hope House and Life Blood. For more information contact Bill at j.william.appling@outlook.com.
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