SPENDING TIME LIKE YOU’LL NEVER GET OLD?

Spending time together in the right places make the best memories.

The guys in the image are two brothers I follow on twitter. One is a sports talk guy, the other is a regular guest.

They go beyond sports with their life lesson takes including recipes, medical advice, and their brand of man-knowledge.

The tweet about getting old hits the right place.

The right place: A warm evening at an outdoor Portland table on NW 11th and Davis.

I’ll take that one frozen in amber with the works.

Even the best of times comes with extras. But what do I know?

I’ll tell you what:

I’m a baby boomer blogger, a Portland, Oregon middle boomer writing BoomerPdx.

Am I making up my own world here? Every post aims at change for the better, for what it’s worth.

I write from this: academic history research, news writing classes, fiction writing classes, the under-grad Shakespeare cycle, Yeats and Joyce, and reading a ton in support of higher education.

Also included are life experiences as a high school all-American, failed college wrestler, Army medic, history museum professional, husband of a powerhouse wife, father of two kids pounding out lives for themselves, father in-law, and Granddad to little red.

What’s this supposed to mean? I’m aiming for the comfort zone of, “He’s good enough and people seem to like him.”

How’m I doing so far? I’ll ask again later. Now to the point.

Generations Apart: Spending Time From The Greatest To The Millennials

Boomer parents are generally in the Greatest Generation with boomer children generally in the Millennial Generation.

If we’re good on that I’ll skip the Silent Generation, Gen X, and Gen Z and continue in an effort to explain the current climate that allows Roe v Wade to collapse.

Young men went off to WWII to save the world from the likes of evil, industrialized evil, never seen before.

The World War

The War in the Pacific followed Japan from the Rape of Nanking, to the Rape of Singapore, to the Rape of Manilla.

Japan invasions had a common theme.

Germany built death camps and trained in victims from the nations they controlled.

America addressed both with war on two fronts.

We could do that because of logistics, a supply chain that brought men and materiel to the far away battles.

It included a huge group of soldiers as occupying forces supplying the front. In the Pacific it was all about island hopping to Japan; in Europe the men were stationed in England, Italy, and France.

Did America have a more conservative culture in the 30’s and 40’s, arguing and fighting over women’s health, reproductive rights, and adding fundamentalist religion to the mix?

Women During the Great Depression

The 30s were hard on women who’d seen progress.

With fewer jobs available, employers generally preferred to award those they had to men who’d traditionally worn the mantle of the family breadwinner. As fewer and fewer women were able to find employment, the societal ideals that had embraced increasing female freedoms did an about-face. Domesticity, motherhood, and homemaking once again became regarded as the only truly proper and fulfilling roles for women.

Little Johnny grew up under that thumb, then got shipped off to fight on a foreign land.

If they landed in a job behind the lines loading trucks, they had time to walk around town.

Whether it was England, Italy, or France, the young men found themselves spending time among the most beautiful women in the world, women who had grown up different than American girls.

Some soldiers got married, some came back to sweet Loretta from high school. All who came back had adjustments to make, one of which didn’t include cigarettes and nylons to ensure a hot date.

The men had taken a walk on the wild side, and now it was time to calm down and toe the line with their little ladies.

Three men in the U.S. Senate were born in the 1930’s. They remember.

How much influence do they have in defining the only truly proper and fulfilling roles for women?

Men In The ‘Free Love’ 1960s

Baby Boomers are the majority generation in congress.

Born between 1946 – 1964 they either lived it, or heard about it.

The ‘it’ was “Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll,” and they remember.

Which good boy has more regret, young men who lived a life beyond their limited experience in England, France, and Italy where women thought of them as personal saviors?

Or the strait laced church kid who grew his hair and broke away for a tripping summer of love in San Francisco?

Which one came home with the most resolve that no one should ever be exposed to the unholy experiences they’d had, the freedom to find an identity other than what their parents made for them?

Oh, the horror.

Millennials From Here On Out

If you liked the rollback of Roe v Wade, decisions that go against women, women’s health, reproductive rights, gun control, and the next affront and the one after, then it’s all good.

Will you enjoy being ruled by laws enacted by a Supreme Court that is supremely flawed and pandering?

The old farts will eventually pack it in and shuffle off this mortal coil, but the laws they made will be left behind for you to navigate. It’s almost like we’re spending time with fossils already.

Dear Millennials,

Learn how to navigate. Start with voting in elections. Vote for candidates who understand current times better than some old, encrusted, barnacles on the congressional hull.

Trump was a baby boomer, the worst of the peace, love, and understanding generation.

His political success has spawned a slew of followers working to duplicate his career. How? By being more extreme wrapped in a softer package.

Millennials, if you don’t use your ‘Biggest Generation In History’ power to vote in competent legislators, you will end up living with the dregs from the bottom of the electable cesspool.

If you can’t learn to navigate a ballot, you’d better learn how to hold your breath if you think it stinks now.

Spending Time With The Sukes Of Hazzard

Check the top image one last time.

This is a post about them from 2015.

I’m a fan.

They don’t ask you to understand their topics and takes. That you’re sporty enough to find 1080 on the AM dial says enough.

This is Portland’s ESPN/Disney affiliate. It’s NBC/Universal. It’s Comcast/Sportsnet.

This is big time sports talk radio, brother. If you don’t like sports, play OPB.

And here come The Sukes of Hazzard, drowning out sports’ corporate structure with their brand of radio.

Since the audience expects sports talk when they tune in, they make room for non-sports talk from the two college and pro football brothers.

They may not talk sports but it’ll be a competitive topic with brotherly competition, which is even better.

The show came out of a commercial break early and Brother Suke asked Big Suke who he was texting.

He broke the radio wall the way TV and movie actors do when they talk to the camera instead of each other.

Maybe it’s the brother thing, of maybe it’s genius staging of the Sukes of Hazzard, but the most important thing right then was who the heck Big Suke was texting during a professionally produced radio show.

“Shame we gotta get old stallion. We did the things though.”

I remember spending time with my first Stanley Cup.