LEARNING FROM WHERE YOU LIVE, PT2: BABY BOOMER ERA

 

The baby boomer era state of mind.

 

What is there to learn from the baby boomer era?

Every passing year the nostalgia grows stronger, but that doesn’t change history.

Consider the boomer time line from 1946-1964.

The oldest boomers were twenty year olds in 1966.

The youngest were twenty in 1984.

My cohort turned twenty in 1974 or ’75.

Some of them remember things differently. And that’s the problem.

Parents whipping their kids with extension cords has become a badge of courage.

Forcing kids to finish everything on their plate, or go to bed hungry, is a recipe for eating disorders.

Falling off bikes without a helmet and cracking your head on pavement doesn’t make you brave.

Through the rear view mirror from 2017 it all looks and feels like a great time, something to explain to the soft, coddled millennials.

Strangely enough, millennials not buying it, the soft, or the coddled.

The only timeout anyone got in the baby boomer era happened in sports, not child discipline.

And it wasn’t a timeout for hydration.

Drinking water at football practice was a sign of weakness, that you couldn’t hack it.

If you didn’t run bleachers until you fell over and vomited meant you were lazy and weren’t trying hard enough.

After a certain age it’s considered impolite to question participation.

If you claim to have played high school sports, and no one from the team is around to correct you, then you played high school sports.

Call it the age benefit.

Early maturity made some kids junior high superstars, but when the thumping got tougher they found other things to do. Like school work.

Imagine a skinny sophomore doing line drills against a 230 pound blocker in front of a 240 pound runner.

Does it makes sense to drive a kid into the ground then step on them?

“Makes a man out of you,” was a common coach refrain. “Do it again.”

There’s a big difference between fifteen year olds and eighteen year olds, not that anyone noticed.

If you hurt your knee the doctor/coach rubbed dirt on it.

If you took a big hit in the head and came out dazed, they questioned your integrity.

“We all get hit, get used to,” they said. Then rubbed dirt on it and sent you back out.

School counselors graded students as college material, or not college material. If you were deemed not college material you got a sheet of paper with directions to the closest saw mill, or factory.

Self esteem was not part of the program.

Male teachers took a hard line with students so they wouldn’t be mistaken for the school marms they worked with.

Those men and women are today’s Tier One PERS retirees blamed for ruining the state budget. They earned their pay, not the resentment from young electeds.

You won’t find the baby boomer era on any map, but talk to anyone in their fifties and sixties today and you’ll get relocated.

Boomers feared their parents. Hear about sweet old grandpa giving mom a going over with a razor strop doesn’t sound like much until you see a razor strop.

An extension cord whipping sounds like a reprieve.

Not every household had a club made from a big knot at the end of a thick tree branch like the one grandpa gifted to his daughter as a joke.

It’s funny until she brings it out to beat some sense into your high school truck after you roll up the windows and lock the doors.

When the thin line between fact and fiction grows thinner every passing year, the glow of the baby boomer era brightens.

Forget about the draft that sent hundreds of thousands of spooked baby boomers to a bogged down Vietnam as canon fodder.

Today a draft dodger who spent his draft years in Canada wears military costumes from Andy and Bax as normal clothing and talks in a fake drill sergeant voice they learned from Full Metal Jacket and R. Lee Ermey.

He’s just supporting the troops, don’t you know.

Rioting in the cause of civil rights? Dogs and water canons? Whatever it takes to restore order, nothing more.

In my late twenties I had a disturbing conversation with an older lady from Massachusetts. She was a very cultured, very proper woman, who always said the right thing to the right people.

I asked her about the early sixties and how she saw the JFK assassination as an adult .

“As a Republican it was a relief to see him out of office. We didn’t like the direction he was taking the country any more than we liked LBJ and his Great Society. Finally we got Nixon in there to set things right.”

The times may have been changing, but they never changed for Kitty.