HOW HARD? BOOMER HARD

via “D & S Most Excellent Bakery” with candles that burn four hours. Any longer, call a fire truck.

Growing Up During Baby Boomer Years Made You Hard.

The last thing you want to be called is soft. Soft in the head, soft in the gut, soft arms.

Part of living a sedentary life, not a lazy life but not active, is how it leaves a body. Soft.

Soft and lumpy after too many hours in a chair for too many years.

I’ve been in the gym for a few years now and haven’t lost a pound. Inches, yes, but not pounds.

Call it living in the same house and moving the furniture around; stack on some muscle and it looks like you lost weight.

The baby boomer advantage is the back-up we carry. We’ve lived through some hard times.

How hard?

If you joined the Marine Corps you’re Marine hard. The Army makes you Army hard.

If you grew up with a Marine hard dad it doesn’t make you any harder. Some things you do on your own, but having a Marine dad sets a standard for hardness.

The older boomers get, the more they look back with hard eyes. Now we see how bad it was in Vietnam; did the draft make it worse?

How many of your generation gives a fist pump for veterans as long as they didn’t become one. Supporting the troops, active duty and retired, is one thing. Being one of them is a 24/7 deal.

Keep thanking vets for their service. If you thank them for being hard enough to submit to the draft process you might get a different response.

You get hard training for war, but the battlefield is the final judge. You can be barracks hard, but until you’re under the gun that’s all you are.

Speaking of gun, how hard was it watching JFK week in Dallas? Kids learned about Lincoln and Garfield and McKinley and register them in history somewhere that assassinations happened. Way back when.

Then Kennedy takes a hit and we’re all living on the edge of destruction. How did an American President get killed in an American city? That’s the world we live in? It is and it makes you hard in the fourth grade.

We talked to my Marine dad about Kennedy and he told us about PT 109 and how hard Kennedy was. It helped.

We grew hard watching civil rights demonstration with dogs and cops and water canons. Who unleashes that sort of hell on fellow Americans? Who? People that need to sit in a special seat on a bus, at a lunch counter. People who need to see one shade of color in the classroom.

Seeing the pain in the streets, dogs chomping legs, little girls under guard to make it to class, makes people hard, boomer hard.

When the leading edge of the baby boomer generation protested Vietnam by throwing their dorm-rat softness against the machine it made us harder.

Chicago riots in 1968 showed some hard boomers, though some were older.

Formative years, informative years, made us all hard. We were old enough to understand Watergate, and smart enough to see the inside moves.

The Sixties and Seventies did one of two things: they either turned you away form civic participation, or spurred you on.

You probably know people who turned away, then turned back. They are fired up, demanding, and riding a gravy train fed by ignorance. Right wing hippies know the drill. Youthful exuberance, they say. Indiscretions, they insist. It was college, you know how it is in college?

They grew hard over the years. Hard to understand, hard to reach, hard to live with.

Those who jumped on the civic bandwagon and never left grew hard with effort, enthusiasm, and knowing the right thing isn’t what happens all the time. Tempered by disappointment they spoke up during the Reagan years, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama years.

Their’s isn’t a scream of outrage, but encouraging a better solution. Why is it that campaign reform, redistricting, and corporate donations need more attention than policy matters? Because money decides elections. The harder you make it for deep pockets to buy influence, the better off we are.

Boomer hard people carry themselves with pride. They’ve survived. They continue to survive in a world unlike the one they expected.

Who gets accused of sucking up all the resources and wasting good opportunities to help others? Soft boomers.

Boomer hard means restraint and respect, and that’s not easy in a world of soft boomers.

Which one are you? Which one do you want to be?