Planet Preservers

Different times require different thoughts and actions.   Friends, as I am sure you know, we are headed into very different times. Many say we are headed toward very difficult times as we face: global warming.  fundamentalist frictions,  a world wide health crisis,  over exploitation of dwindling resources, economic clashes between the very few rich and the massive numbers of the poor.

Gregory Bateson, a visionary thinker of the 20th Century, defined information as "any difference that makes a difference." 

We are awash in difference.   How we handle the information embedded in those differences will determine whether these coming constraints limit or enable.

We are at a point of punctuation in the process understood as evolution.   All this means is that we are at a time of rapid change and can expect rapid expression of emergent properties activated by novel contextual triggers.   The concept is understood as punctuated equilibrium.

"The gist of the theory was that "significant evolutionary change arises in coincidence with events of branching speciation, and not primarily through the transformation of lineages."

We're at a beginning point of of major world changes, climatic, and ecosphere destabilization from deforestation, toxic poisoning that will result in changes significant enough to probably create speciation and branching.  Or that is what we have to hope for.  The alternative is extinction.  

Late Boomers  grew up with civil unrest, toxic spills, war, and our older brothers and sisters giving up the fight when we most needed them; when the the republican corporatists started to take over.  They almost succeeded, but there is still time to stop corporations from killing the rest of the world.  We can't stop change, but we can ameliorate the damage to some degree.   I am beginning to think we are the only ones who can.  We've been prepped for this role all our lives.  

Early Boomers Feel Misclassified Too

I found a great article this morning!  Turns out the early boomers, at least some of them,feel they too were misclassified.  I'm primarily interested in the description of musicians who were not boomers being used as iconographic images of the Baby Boom.  Most of the musicians associated with the Hippie, free love, free sex, anti-establishment movement in the early days of the Hippie Movement were from the Silent Generation.   Yep, it is true - most were born during the war or were pre-war, late Depression era babies.   All music "of a generation" tends to be created by folks a bit older than themselves.  No surprise there when you stop to think about it.  But it is a fact that is often left out of analysis about cohorts that who and what comprises the music of a cohort and the music by a cohort are rarely if ever the same set of music and musicians.  The article touches on many other tangents of interest to Late Boomers and anyone perplexed by the steady stream of misinformation that has proliferated since at least the early 1960s about who and what the Late Boomers and thus the Boomers too really are.

Without further ado, here is a reprint of the article.

___________________  

Aging Baby Boomers Myths vs. Needed Gov't Elder Policies

I just received a post card from Russell Sage, a Troy, New York women’s college, about the upcoming 40^th reunion for our overly written about Class of 1968. In early November 2007, Amazon.com had almost 18,000 (17,810) books with references to Baby Boomers more than four times as many as for Gen Y (4, 236) or Gen X (3,916) and many more than for the “Silent” Generation (1,158).

As a marketing researcher, I keep up with such generation information with its often-disconcerting stereotypes and myths. Did all Boomers really act out with sex and drugs at big rock festivals?  Even worse, should we all be branded technophobes as in Bill Hendrick’s February 22, 2005 Cox News Service article “High tech intimidates many baby boomers as they move into midlife?” Never mind that Mr. Hendrick’s Simmons Market Research Bureau study of 28,000 adults showed their “tech-shy” segment rose only from 36% among those under 40 to 43% for those 40 and over.

I saw how I too had been influenced by Boomer media myths October 30, 2007 during the 1967 portion of an XM Satellite radio “IT: The History of Pop Music”. In the middle of its “Summer of Love Motown Magic,” XM-6 included a news reminder of that year’s nationwide race riots. My Internet search discovered Detroit riots that summer of 1967 precipitated Motown’s later move to Los Angeles and that was the year most Connecticut county seat cities experienced their late 1960’s riots. So there I was spinning the “16 Big Hits Volume 5–The Motown Sound” album in my parents’ one-acre eight room Hamden, Connecticut home while riots shattered the economic spine in nearby New Haven where I live now. I now schlep out to Hamden and other suburban malls even for doctors’ appointments where I notice inner city bus riders’ risky walks across vast thoroughfares, green buffers and parking lots to their Wal-Mart and fast food jobs.

The Monkees’ kvetching about the comforts of our “Pleasant Valley Sunday” suburbs brought back my after graduation plans for a charming old brownstone Manhattan apartment or one in a modern high rise like my cousin’s. Then again, my Upper West Side brownstone lacked heat between nine and five despite calls to the City’s complaint line and I have struggled for years in tiny Le Corbusier “Radiant City Towers” kitchens including the one my cousin passed onto me. I also so wish we could burn charcoal for just one more family gathering in that big comfy home my mother just sold.

When I wasn’t thinking of leaving “Pleasant Valley” for Manhattan that “Summer of Love”, I was envying affluent peers’ joining Scott McKenzie’s gentle people in San Francisco while I waitressed at Friendly’s. Yet PBS’s April 23, 2007 “American Experience: Summer of Love” shows as many run-away ragged young teens as sophisticated collegians. At the Monterey Pop Festival, they would have more been jolted by the Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, Canned Heat, Jimi Hendrix, The Who and Eric Burdon than mellowed out Simon and Garfunkle and The Mamas and Papas.

Nor would my fellow Boomers have seen many rockers their age at rock or folk concerts in San Francisco or anywhere else for that matter. Only one Boomer, The Who’s late Keith Moon, was in the 1968 Film “Monterey Pop.” Throughout 1967, only thirteen other Boomers were rock stars--Stevie Wonder, Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees, Peter Noon of Herman’s Hermits, Howard Kaylan of the Turtles, John Hayward of the Moody Blues, Jim Messina of the Buffalo Springfield, Tommy James, Janis Ian, Donovan, Arlo Guthrie, LuLu, Robert Hall Weir of the Grateful Dead and Leslie Gore “blast from the past. “Wikipedia’s” well-documented birth dates reveal most 60’s rockers and folkies were pre-1946 “Silent” Generation members as were anti-war and feminist movement leaders.

Later that day, after Boomer Linda Ronstadt’s 1968 feminist anthem “Different Drum,” my computer’s freeze returned me to present realities. I have more worries about my future than Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin in “The Graduate” of that year.

One worry is how Baby Boomer myths affect government and other policymakers. Will they or anyone for that matter seek representative sample research and accurately report its information for decisions about us Boomers? For example, will prospective employers’ beliefs that we cannot learn computer programs shut out Boomers who continue working to offset pension losses? Turning around statistics in the previously mentioned 2005 Simmons Market Research Bureau Study, a majority of us, 57%, are not “tech-shy.” Conversely, will federal administrators for a senior job program at which I sought a part-time cash flow continue to see Boomer seniors with our expensive academic and technical training as qualifying only for minimum wage unskilled jobs? I was sent for a file clerk position at a home care agency when I wrote a marketing audit and plan for a similar agency earlier in my career. The Census American Community Study’s age and income statistics for Boomers of 2001—then 35-54—show 59% have had some type of formal post-high school education compared to 43% for those 55 and over. Those statistics would not have counted in all the continuing ed computer programs courses I’ve taken with other Boomers.

While our income security decreases, gentrification in many central cities and inner–ring suburbs keeps increasing Boomer property taxes and rents along with increased health care costs. Will politicians continue to focus on tax and other incentives to developers of luxury units in rural 55+ enclaves where many of us will to be driven about at some point or in this century’s first city redevelopment program condo towers that many of us cannot afford.  A Chadwick, Martin Bailey-Arnold Worldwide study of one thousand Boomers (reported in the February 2007 Quirks Marketing Research*) discovered that in our highly segmented group, only 26% are primarily classified as the materialistic “Status Seekers” more likely targets for these high amenity communities. Instead will they preserve property tax breaks for city Boomer homeowners? Will they develop new creative tax incentives, mortgage financing packages and grants for new and refurbished affordable central city senior-only rental complexes—for less well-off Boomers and middle class Boomers--with nearby transit and retail amenities as in the 1960’s.

When I look around New Haven for more affordable options, none will work for me as a non-driver. Connecticut central city government-run lower income senior income/asset-limited housing now includes disabled people, some of whom are drug addicts not in recovery. One of my grandmother’s friends was attacked in her lower income senior apartment by such a neighbor. All middle class senior affordable housing built with government tax incentives requires long walks or bus rides to pharmacies and supermarkets.

Putting all these worries about my future aside, as one of the “usual suspects,” I look forward to joining the Sage 1968 reunion among the many that never tried LSD—thank goodness or I could not cope with such problems facing me. However, do not expect me to further describe my classmates with their varied graduate education, professions, family experiences, achievements and political leanings! I do know, however, all will well-understand my report about starting a class web page on MySpace or Facebook.

*Pages 70-71

I am now a market research freelance analytical manager with a July 2007 Marketing Research Association Expert Professional Research Certification. I lobby for transit service and pedestrian safety improvements with a 2002 M.S. in Urban Studies/Planning from Southern CT State University.

The article reprinted here is by Lynne D.Shapiro is:  and is  
Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Lynne D. Shapiro, 111 Park Street, 9K, New Haven, CT 06511 203-777-5222 LynneShapiro2@aol.com

Seeking Truths About My Generation November 12, 2007

the document is listed as 
/LShapiroBabyBoomerMy%232EB200.doc

and may be downloaded from:  http://www.archive.org/details/BabyBoomerMythsDebunked

The Prototypic Baby Boomer Toots Her Own Horn

I'm reclaiming my authority on this topic.  (Yes, you are allowed to have Cartman echoing in your head, "Respect my authority!")  The last half of the baby boom needs me.   Well they wanted to call us the "me generation" so I might as well act like I have a super huge ego. 

Seriously,  I ranted and raved about how the baby boom was not one group, how it was at least two distinct cohorts, how the government seemed to decide on a course of action for our lives rather early on when the boom was arbitrarily cut off at the 1964 year rather than waiting for the demographic trend to taper off to pre-1946 levels (which it did by 1968.)  I ragged on this topic from 1998 until 2002-2003 when my personal life got complicated and I joined with other women across the country and around the globe to try to provide some karmic balance balance to the lies that were being pumped into the U.S. bloodstream via fear, the media, and silence.  I pumped the word Late Boomer into the media however I could using what would now be called a social media strategy.  The term was picked up and is in fairly common use.  That was all I wanted.  Similarly I feel my energies given to peace work since 2003, and to my family have also been successful.  But the mis-identification and targeting of Late Boomers is still problematic. Time for "super Late Boomette to the rescue!"

But now it is time for me to take up the reigns again and remind my cohort that we are powerful and have much to do to counteract the negativity and misdirection that transpired in the first part of this  last decade.   

So much of what I do as an individual is partially influenced by my generational identity.  I am the prototypical baby boomer.  I was born in 1957, the height of the baby boom, I'm female, and females outnumber males at all , and as a cultural anthropologist  interested in semiotics and marketing, the perspective and knowledge base I bring to all things Late Boomer is difficult to match. 

Demographics can be a fun topic when illustrated with iconic persons and events, and general cultural commentary are all things I blog about.  I will try to separate entries with meaningful tags and category labels. 

If you have questions, do ask!  I may have the same ones and write about them.  I also speak on the topic and do business consulting.  Feel free to contact me. 

Just Don't Call Me Late for Dinner

The ramblings of long ago about what to call us, we later born baby boomers, have lead to no concensus about what to call us.  But there is an us.  Wes convinced me that I was on the right track when he found enough value in the Late Boomer group to be a regular poster on the subject of our identity as defined by our music.  Late Boomers isn't a term that I would have chosen to use had there been another good solution for reference to us.  Baby Boom had injected itself into the English language and common vernacular by the time I began to write on the subject.   

Another person was working very hard to create a name for us.  But reference to that group name seems to be listed, without fail, as Jonathan Pontell's Generation Jones.  A generation does not belong to any one person.  A generation is also a much longer time period than the late-50s to the early-60s.  I also didn't think we were anonymous as the word Jones alluded to, but that we were suppressed.  

Also my training in anthropology, linguistics, and demographics guided me to description of the group rather than an attempt to brand the group with a trademarked name.  The inclusion of the word boomers in the name is a pragmatic one.   The demographic phenomena that came to be known as the Baby Boom was originally just a phrase - babies of the post-WWII baby boom.   The rise in birth rates for the U.S. began in 1946 and actually continued above prior and WWII levels until 1968.  The U.S. Government chose to cut off the boom for official use and reference with the year 1964. 

My initial and primary purpose for talking to other LBers and writing about us was simply to bring awareness of the distinct cohort that we compromised to the forefront of the American consciousness so we would not continue to be ignored, as we had been all our lives.  I felt that utilizing our power as a group was only going to be possible if we recognized that we were a distinct group and one that actually out-numbered the Early Boomers. The name was just not as important as concept for my purposes.

Re-reading Pre-blog Era Blog Posts

As I re-post blog entries that were written almost 10 years ago, I am struck by how I still agree with myself.  LOL.  I researched the heck out of my early web writings on Late Boomers.  Blogs now tend to be opinion pieces, and my early writings certainly contained opinions, but before the word blog came into common use and patterns of practice became standardized, I simply thought that I should back up my assertions with references to supporting documents and publications. I thought about the original Late Boomers net presence a lot.  There were many and varied components that I tried out.  There were e-lists and groups that migrated from one host or provider to others, there were newsletters that were sent out to the egroups and were also collected together on websites that came and went with success and failure of many dot com start-ups much to my consternation, and there was a website on the Webseed network. In my mind Late Boomers was an electronic 'zine.  

I began research and writing in this area in the late 1990s when at the same time I starting working at home so I could keep a close eye on my pre-teen,  My income dropped dramatically so I tried to get as much for free as possible.  I wasn't terribly fond of coding anything. In retrospect another course of action might have been prudent such as shifting to a blog platform early on but even by 2004 it wasn't clear where blogging would lead.  I created a website after Webseed closed, but incompetent hosts lost my domain for me.  At some point I just got tired of trying to navigate the wonderful world of Dreamweaver while trying to stop a war.   Wikipedia documents the evolution of blogs thusly:

Early blogs were simply manually updated components of common Web sites. However, the evolution of tools to facilitate the production and maintenance of Web articles posted in reverse chronological order made the publishing process feasible to a much larger, less technical, population. Ultimately, this resulted in the distinct class of online publishing that produces blogs we recognize today. For instance, the use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of "blogging". Blogs can be hosted by dedicated blog hosting services, or they can be run using blog software, or on regular web hosting services.     ---    from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog on 5/15/2011.

So I have conceded that Late Boomers was originally a blog with a separate forum.  The forum can still be found on Yahoo Groups.  I'm migrating the blog posts that hang together for me, even after 10 years, over to this blog because I am my own toughest critic and if I find them valuable, perhaps you will too.  I no longer have much of an opinion on whether these pieces were first published on a blog, zine, or online publication.  They are blog posts now.

Late Boomers Regrouping

Hiyo fellow LBers!   I'm back with Late Boomers!  Whoop it up.  We're on the offensive again! 

I got more and more distracted over the last decade with war, idiocy, and capitalist plots to bring down America. My distraction began with the plane attacks on the WTC and Pentagon in September and continued until two weeks ago when President Obama announced the results of the attack on the bin Laden compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.   You can read about my realizations and decisions over the last couple of weeks on my Build Peace blog here and here . 

I'm rather p.o.ed at myself as, while I did not succumb to the fear factor games the Bush/Cheney crew imposed on the American people, I did become distracted, from the Late Boomer research that hit on so many of the trends that erupted like angry sores by the end of the Bush years, and that is almost as bad. 

But as things often do, a collection of unlinked but synchronous events motivated me to revive this site, blog, net presence.  Death of bin Laden was actually event two, event one was the Republican  call for Late Boomers to be shut out of the Social Security and Medicare system.  I don't know about you but I'm not one to obey when someone says bend over.  And I'm certainly not going to say, "how far?"  Event three was my search of the term Late Boomer on the internet.  32,000 results.  That seems to be enough to say that my initial purpose in creating a late boomer site in 2000 and elist & newsletter even earlier in the late 1990s has been successful in breaking open the carefully packaged misconception that Boomers are hippies and that "our" time is over.  People seem to know that we are a distinct cohort now. 

So it is time for phase two.  Retribution.  Heheheheh.   I'm joking, okay?  Geesh.  Phase two actually came into being with the election of Late Boomer Barack Obama.   Starting to see my drift?  It is time for us to use our considerable numbers to stop the hijacking of America by capitalist plots.  Not communist plots as was the buzz phrase when we were born, but capitalist (read corporatist) plots intended to keep us from exerting our power to continue building the American Dream of democracy and freedom and wrest control from the corporations that have screwed us at every bend in the road since we have been born. 

Are you ready?  All right!   Let's roll!!!