A site for the Real Baby Boom -- Second Wave Boomers, Trailing Edge Boomers, call us what you will, who were the punks, folkies, freaks, and MBAs of the Reagan-era world. Hippies, please use the side door.
My husband and I saw the Rum Diary this past weekend. The critics do not like it, but I do. The movie is based on the first and only Hunter S. Thompson novel, written in the early 1960s, though not published until 1998.
The movie offers a thinly veiled autobiographical peek into the early Thompson's psyche. To any person seeking to understand a bit more about the not yet gonzo journalist while he was still finding his footing as a writer the film will be intriguing. Of course we will never know for sure what aspects of the novel and now film were and were not based on actual experiences of Thompson, but the feel is right at many levels. I have not spent tons of time in Puerto Rico but I spent a month there, and scenes were reminiscent of things I experienced there living on a regular old street in a beach town and on a nearby island and bombing range, Culebra, where I vacationed for a few days while in the area. The bombing range features prominently in the plot although it is never named in the film.
For later born Baby Boomers, of whom I am one, Hunter S. Thompson was an iconic figure as we came of age. And even though the timeline in this novel takes place before some of us were even born, the life and work of Thompson such as Fear and Loathing: on the Campaign Trail 1972 and his regular articles in Rolling Stone during the 1970s framed many of our views on political events and on popular culture.
Late Boomer Johnny Depp (b. June 9, 1963) isn't alone in his belief in the importance of Hunter S. Thompson as a writer and cultural icon to those of us who polishing our world views at the height of Thompson's influence. The proto-gonzo, parts of the male anatomy to the wall, journalist in this film rails against the same nemesis that was enemy to counter culture when Late Boomer political psyches were forming and enemy to the 99% today: greedy and heartless capitalists (not all capitalists fit this description) and complacent media that care more for advertisers and bottom lines than the need to report the truth.
This is not a feel good movie. There is no happy ending. There are cock fights. The pace of the plot mirrors the stifling heavy tropical atmosphere. The film is sooooo Thompson with its short term belief and passion and its long term pessimism. See it. Not a great film but a necessary reminder about a life that shaped a generation.
I was at #BlogHer11 in Sandiego (yes, this is a hashtag to use on Twitter) from August 4 thru 6 then took a week off to figure out a stay sane plan for the coming semester. No, I have not gone back to school. My husband is taking a sabbatical this semester and will be around the old homestead the rest of this year when he isn't on short investigatory trips related to his research area. And (shudder) love my daughter though I do, I do not know how I am going to survive her moving back in with us for last last semester of college with her healthy ego that sees no problem asking that her needs be met and her 100 plus pounds of Dogue de Bordeaux buddy.
Before I get too far off course, which I am wont to do, let me clue you in to a great source of information.
BlogHer11 Virtual Conference is accessible via this link. Not all the Birds of a Feather - BOAF - sessions were live blogged. BUT I was at the Boomer BOAF session at the conference and it was great. I attended a Booming session at BlogHer 2008 hosted by Virginia DeBolt but this one topped even that one. It was hosted by Judi Boomer.
She had a hard time getting us to settle down and "begin" the session of introductions to who we were and what we were doing. We were so happy to see other kindred spirits! (Sigh, I cannot use that phrase, kindred spirits, without thinking of my Mom and her absolute devotion to the notion that life was simpler and actually pastoral at the beginning of the last century. At times I admit to suspending my own disbelief and reveling in the just and bucolic world of Anne and Marilla.) At a conference where one could easily be bowled over by Mommy Bloggers, who probably never heard of Anne of Green Gables or The Girl of the Limberlost, it was refreshing to meet people close to my age and the sentiment seemed reciprocal as business cards were ricocheting around the room almost as fast as the banter.
I will be checking out all the blogs of participants in the session (Judi graciously compiled and distributed the contact information for attendees) and creating a link list for BlogHer Boomers (who buy the way are NOT all women!) that are appropriate for this blog to link to. Stay tuned. I will be following up on this with much more information created by neuronal firings when something said at BlogHer makes a difference to a topic I am moved to write about. BlogHer helps my neurons fire.
ASIDE: Gregory Bateson said "information is any difference that makes a difference." And did you know there is a documentary about this amazing philosopher and seminal (isn't there a word like ovonal or something) thought connecter.
This post is cross-posted from my blog, Build Peace, which is participating in a blog carnival today organized by two Hoosier-based blogs, What Tami Said and Shakesville in support of Planned Parenthood which, as you know, is under siege from Right Wing extremists. Check out the Blog Carnival here.
My story of interaction with Planned Parenthood is not all that special. Every woman's life story is unique. Planned Parenthood allows women to have unique, self-guided lives. That is a very good thing.
I live in a city in Arizona where Margaret Sanger spent much of the later part of her life. I grew up a few miles from a country town in Indiana where good but poor girls died from septicemia or blood loss from botched back alley abortions and wealthy girls traveled to "see an Auntie" who lived somewhere that a skilled physician performed abortions for a hefty fee and silence in a clean medical office after hours. It was a very big deal. I grew up hearing my Mom's stories of good women who died young from back alley abortions. Her take. Nasty business, but sometime necessary, and it should be legal. Apparently at least one of her friends died because of lack of access to medical care and the butchery of an illegal abortion.
"The pill" was developed around the time I was born, with persistence it could be obtained in the 1960s when I was a child, and by the time I was a teenager it was widely prescribed to mature adult women, but teenagers needed to have their parents permission and that was a rarity. I knew one girl who had a mother who actually helped her get on the pill.
It was not easy to get access to the services Planned Parenthood now offers. The Fort Wayne branch, founded in 1977, did not exist the first time I went to a women's clinic in Fort Wayne. The county of my official residence at that time had no dedicated women's services. You had to lie to say you lived in Allen County and give the address of a friend or relative if you wanted to get birth control. If you did not want to take your chances and go to a male physician who might or might not lecture you, refuse to help you, or who simply was so old school that he (physicians back then seemed to all be male) didn't understand the basics of the types and risks of different contraceptive options.
Then I began to attend Purdue University and had some not so good experiences with the campus Medical Center, again largely because at that time you did not know what type of person the physician you might see was and whether you would get a lecture, good information, or help. That is when I began to use Planned Parenthood for annual check-ups. The Lafayette branch opened in 1975.
For the next ten years all my annual check ups were done there. I paid the highest price on the sliding scale after I was out of college and continued to use PP because I felt it was important to support the only facility within an hour and a half drive where women without support systems could turn for information about contraception, annual check ups, and referrals to more specialized services. I remember interns rotating through the clinic getting experience that was not easy to arrange in Indiana back then.
I am fortunate to have faced no unwanted pregnancies and to have had no abortions. Until I was with my husband (in my thirties) I never faced an unplanned pregnancy. In my twenties when I was unmarried and living with a man with whom I knew I did not want to have children, I was the birth control Goddess. It was a bad situation and I didn't realize the gravity of it until I tried to leave him and experienced "spousal" rape, stalking, and threats of violence. I could not safely use the pill but had a couple different models of IUD, and used a diaphragm religiously. I had made the decision that if I became pregnant I would immediately go to Planned Parenthood and seek a referral for terminating the pregnancy. I now understand that this determination to never have a child with this guy signaled the problems in the relationship long before I consciously admitted them to myself. Prevention, prevention, prevention was also my mantra because growing up as an unwanted and unplanned child myself, I swore I would never expose a child to the resentment I had experienced because I was not wanted. I am still haunted by the memory of my mother, when I was no more than 9, when in an angry outburst she voiced, with utter contempt of having to deal with a preteen, that she had not planned for nor wanted me to be. It stays with me to this day.
My daughter was unplanned but dearly wanted and born in another state than Indiana. I will never tell another woman what she should do in a given situation. I just want all the options within our current human tool kit to be available to that woman. I dearly and passionately want every child born to be a wanted and loved child. That is the bottom line for me. I will never forget stopping at a Planned Parenthood booth during a street fair when I was very preggers just about 3 weeks before I had my daughter to sign a petition to keep abortion safe and legal and the wonderment that even the women working the booth showed that a pregnant woman would support abortion. It was then that I realized that I would be fighting this fight to keep all our options open for the rest of my life because ingrained attitudes and stereotypes do not go away easily or in one generation.
I ventured to Washington, D.C. in April of 2004 to participate in the March for Women's Lives. That was one of the largest marches, some say the largest ever marches on D.C. The official count was 1.4 million in attendance. I volunteered to help direct people arriving in 1000 buses that parked at RFK Stadium to transportation to the National Mall. It was amazing. I will never forget the school bus filled with Junior High girls from Pennsylvania, a Quaker School I believe, that had raised funds to attend. After the bus parking, I "rushed" to the mall as fast as the packed metro would take me. I marched with Arizona Planned Parenthood. I wanted to march with my friends in CODEPINK, but I felt it was far more important to show that even "conservative" states such as AZ have large numbers of people willing to spend time, money, and effort to be a part of a national statement by women, and men, about our commitment to the preservation of women as agents of control over their own lives.
My hope is that one day Planned Parenthood will no longer be the needed, vital service it is today. Good top notch healthcare needs to be available to everyone. Someday it will be. Perhaps then we will stop segregating, and thus stigmatizing health care for women, and we will be able to offer all services under the same roof as immunizations, back to school check ups, and routine visits with your physician, and with that all surgical procedures will then done in multi-specialty clinics or hospitals without the stigma of separation of services, and the denial of privacy from which specialized clinics suffer and to which their clients are unconstitutionally subjected.
"Boomer volunteerism has increased during the past few decades. The volunteer rate for young boomers, ages 46 to 57, is 30.9 percent, significantly higher than the 25.3 percent recorded by the same age group in 1974 and the 23.2 percent recorded in 1989."
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.
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.
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.
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Aging Baby Boomers Myths vs. Needed Gov't Elder Policies
Ijust received a post card from Russell Sage, a Troy, New York women’s college, about the upcoming 40th 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
When I had my webseed site everything was good. Then I transfered the hosting of it to insider hosting. It went ok for a year. Then they didn’t renew the domain name after I paid them to do it. I lost the domain and it was snapped up by a domain guzzling bleepedy bleep. When I tried to get it back from him for a reasonable amount he banned the wayback machine from listing its archived versions of the site when it was mine. I have lots of the posts on a storage drive somewhere in my office. I will find it and move as many of these posts as seems appropriate to this new site.
A later born baby boomer is creating this site in order to further the understanding of the distinct group that is the later portion of the baby boom – born during or between 1955-1964. Check out the Evolution of a Concept page for basic information about the later portion of the baby boom.
Long ago at the turn of the century several people started to realize that there was something amiss in our culture with how people of our age – people born in the late 1950s and early 1960s – were perceived.
I started a list at that time called late boomers and shortly after that started a website called late-boomers hosted as a .com account. This gave rise to a newsletter that I would post on site and send out. No matter what the format was, there was a community and some sort of a publication focused on defining the cohort or global age-grade that comprised the last “half” of the baby boom and as a consequence, define the first half as well rather than compressing two very different groups into something government demographers once described as the post-WWII baby boomer and that in the late 1970s began to be called Baby Boomers.
I’m continuing this ‘net place here on This Later Boom site as a place to write about the unique perspective that developed within our cohort from being raised and developing in an incredibly unique time of dramatic change. We were too young for Woodstock or The Draft or military service in Vietnam. Our early psyches were shaped by the assassination of leaders, the promise of equality, near instantaneous world wide information exchange, environmental depletion, species extinction, moon landings, and war broadcast into our living rooms. These are very very different circumstances than were experienced even by our siblings who are only a few years older than us.
Fahrenheit 9/11 is propaganda. But that’s okay. It definitely propagates a view. Propaganda is centuries old. For one powerful group to accuse another powerful group of using propaganda is a non sequitor. It is logically inconsistent for one group to accuse another of something it also does. That would be to invite scrutiny of its own faults. Not smart. It is unfortunate that such divisiveness has become de rigor, but left leaning propaganda is a most pragmatic approach for the Democratic supporters to employ.
There does seem to be a group of people including the likes of Kenneth Starr and Donald Rumsfeld who have an ideological agenda that is orthogonal to essential ideals within The Constitution of the United States and The Bill of Rights. That ideology happens to mesh with certain international corporate agendas. Push ahead with the agenda at all costs, no matter whether it is supported by the people, consistent with our governmental and justice system, or even a viable agenda. In this approach, these “leaders” waged an intense propaganda battle and the US media supported these men by widely and repetitively disseminating their views. Unfortunately… success of such behaviors tends to escalate those same behaviors. Essentially “The Right” is getting a taste of its own medicine from the Moore movie.
Moore spins like mad, but he spins from fact, he insinuates from a stable groundwork to a very specific viewpoint that has an agenda: get Bush out of office before he destroys America and everything we Americans still believe it stands for. Welcome to the Democratic version of propaganda. Call off your Rumsfelds, Starr’s and Buchanan’s and stop Bush and Cheney from lying and employing liars, and the left will then consider reigning in Mike.
Had the media been more journalistic and less pabulum-spewing in the last few years, Moore’s movies would have received little attention. But Moore is a very talented film-maker and an effective counterpoint in the point / counterpoint argument that began long ago… “Jane, you ignorant….”
But this isn’t Saturday Night Live and the laughter is ending… there have been more than enough “anomalies” pointing to:
made by or within the Bush administration to warrant independent council and congressional investigations.
I personally can’t stand the divisive partisan crap that has become business as usual… but I understand why various groups have arisen to do the dirty work that the namby pamby Democratic Party would not do. The slander machine that the Republican Party has employed for well over a decade is reaping its reward. Its technique is now ubiquitous.
I personally am neither Right, Left, nor Centrist. My views don't map onto the normative models. In my view, escalation in hostility, violence, and propaganda is not the answer. I personally don’t think any extant strategy will solve the problem. Intelligent, compassionate people are so drawn into this particular mode of thinking that they forget there are other equally valid world views that we could construct. So… all I can say is that we need to work from entirely different perspective. I still encourage moving toward an ethically (not religiously) grounded egalitarian transformation. Mr. Moore isn’t helping us directly move toward such a place. But we need to live long enough to begin this transformative process. We have a better chance of do that if we get Bush out and begin dismantling his works.
We people who were kids who grew up to the background music of the Age of Aquarius might have enough people with an alternative view of what could be, to make a difference and nudge the trajectory off its current truly DEADend path.
So, I encourage you to act: Vote -- that is essential. Figure out how to motivate others to vote. Don’t let elected officials get away with business as usual. Demand an inquiry into the charges made in Fahrenheit 9/11. Refuse to be quiet.
Ask questions. Demand answers. Asking questions is patriotic. Being timid isn’t.
What conflicts of interest exist in the President's Family's relationship with the Saudi Royal Family,
as well as in the Vice President's continuing relationship with Haliburtan.
Has the Bush administration consciously and maliciously lied to the American people?
Did the administration obstruct justice or allow obstruction of justice when they spirited the Bin Laden family out of the United States before they could be questioned?
And just for good measure... how about an investigation of the Jim Crow activity in Florida?
We aren’t sheep. We’re primates. Primates sling dung.
I know, I know... I shoulda blogged yesterday... but I was too busy getting back to Tucson... It'll be nice to not have to spell Tucson for hotel/motel staff now that I'm back in the land of c before s. That's tuck -sahn. Yes, I arrived safe and sound. And much enriched by stopping in Santa Fe my last night on the road. Was at the O'Keeffe Museum within minutes of its opening Thursday a.m. to see the current rotating exhibit Georgia O'Keeffe and New Mexico: A Sense of Place -- June 11–September 12, 2004 It is the best collection of her landscapes you will ever see. The video is quite well done, informative, unless you yourself are a biographer of her life. The audio tour only made up a few non-words--horizontality--that jolted me away from the information and into critic mode.
I haven't officially ended my "on the road" time as I haven't done my summary labyrinth walk. Got back last night at about 9:30 p.m. local time so as to briefly overlap with my husband before he took off for the Phoenix airport at 4:30 this a.m. to fly back to Northern Indiana to attend a 50th birthday celebration several of his high school buddies are throwing for themselves and their buds at a go cart track. Rented it for the whole day. 50! Not really a Late Boomer although he likes to consider himself such.
So I'm back into Mom mode. I'm at a wired coffee house, It's A Grind ( check out their history of coffee) while waiting to pick up my daughter from a teen night at a Water Park. Its speedtest follows:
2004-06-19 01:30:01 EST: 1046 / 672
Your download speed : 1072064 bps, or 1046 kbps.
A 130.8 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 688909 bps, or 672 kbps.
Figured I might as well post a blog.
I hadn't read The Lovely Bones, the audio book I listened to yesterday and the day before, but I now understand why it was a best seller. It is an enchanting tale though based in tragedy and violence. I didn't realize that "Susie" the narrator and murder victim was a Late-Boomer and that much of the book was set in the 70s. Highly recommended. Sebold knows how to write.
All this talk of bones makes me think of how dangerous this time of year is to the desperate people who try to cross into the U.S. and who often end up dead, abandoned by the Coyotes without water, sometimes still locked in vehicles... Just a quick look at Border News shows how much danger these folks are in. High speed chases, horribly crowded filthy conditions... and those are the "lucky" ones who make it through the desert. Ah... yes, I'm back home in the Primeria Alta, that fragile but stunning beautiful land that I'm so lucky to know as home. This trip has juxtaposed so many unexpected and wonderful elements, the geographies of deserts and swamps will stand iconic in my memory as summing up this mid-life trip... there is wonder everywhere in this here and now that is all we ever know.
Hey Ho. Writing from Oklahoma City… Wednesday a.m. from a Panera. No internet connection last night. Lucky I found a place to sleep... third try was a charm. I wanted to go west to Pueblo CO and walk a labyrinth there and drop down again, but I can’t risk the weather and time that could be involved… so I compromised and walked an 11-Circuit Chartres style labyrinth near Kansas City at Unity Village… and then dropped down through KS and OK… I find the more complex 11 circuit labyrinths to be conducive to far better walking meditations for me than the shorter 7 circuit classic style. I got a late start yesterday as I had to find an internet connection and determine the route I would take and which stops I could still make and which I’d have to drop. Finished listening to Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake yesterday. The language in the book is exquisite. The story is compelling. All the soul deep questions one asks in a lifetime are there. Her voices are so real.
Today I drive I40. Tomorrow I hope to stop and see the new rotation of O'Keeffe paintings at the gallery in Santa Fe. I would love to roll into Tucson tomorrow night and see my husband for a few minutes (overlap with him as I told a friend *wicked grin*) before he flies out Friday a.m. But I may not make it all that way.
Today I will listen to Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones.
I have much to report and little time to report it. My head is filled with ideas and I've been heavily thinking about cycles, friends, discoveries, omissions, endings, beginnings, connections of the heart, family, wings, labyrinths, purpose, inspiration, synchronicity... haven't yet blogged about Ray Charles and Joan Osborne's Spider Web so read the No Georgia On My Mind No Morereview on the Relish page instead.
The trip to Indiana was great... only a couple minor bumps. Great research and great connections made. More later on that.
Oh yes, haven't commented on Ronnie Raygun's passing either... perhaps that in and of itself is a comment.
Time to move on. Oh... almost forgot...
2004-06-16 12:11:21 EST: 757 / 201
Your download speed : 775365 bps, or 757 kbps.
A 94.6 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 206010 bps, or 201 kbps.
This download from the Panera on the NW Expressway in OK City.
I'm sitting under a tree on a green space just off SR 15 in No. Indiana... at Goshen College. I'm hoping it is a campus wireless that I hooked into. Oh well.... I'm on anyway. Imagine my surprise at finding a wireless connection at a Mennonite College... just a hop, skip and a jump from Amish Acres Tourist Trap as well as the thriving metropolis of Elkhart-- I decided I'd just do some clutter clean up on my laptop while I ate lunch and waited until the appointed time to pick up my mother from her friends house. My mom is almost 90, doesn't drive, and keeps my brothers hoppin' with her needs for groceries and routine errands as they live near her. Me being 1500 miles away makes me think I need to make sure she gets to do other stuff when I'm here and can haul her around. So today I dropped her off at the appartment of a friend she went to High School with in Etna in the 1920s. There are very few people she knew well back then who are still alive. I was glad she could still make the trip. The aging parents thing is a different sort of process than I ever really anticipated. I think it is because I didn't think a parent would still be living at age 90. Modern health practices have changed all our lives profoundly. Of course our "refusal to accept aging" that we are so often accused of is a product of this change as well. No one is yelling at the "Greatest Generation" for living so long!
Ah well... back to work.
Whatever network I'm on has the following info (for you techies)
2004-06-07 14:04:11 EST: 278 / 1100
Your download speed : 285456 bps, or 278 kbps.
A 34.8 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed is much faster than down.. have you tweaked?
Your upload speed : 1127404 bps, or 1100 kbps.
I'm sitting in a Panera Bread at Jefferson Point in Fort Wayne, IN. Connect info at the bottom.
Wrote the following at an ISM Historic Site earlier today:
"I am sitting quietly, alone, looking into the garden of the Gene Stratton Porter Historic Site, a garden Gene started and was recreated under the last curator’s hard work and guidance. Too late in the year for wildflowers and the songbirds have to compete with motors on boats racing around Sylvan Lake. But the air is still a peaceful one. Clouds in the sky but blue shows through the fluff and even sunshine breaks through for a few moments at a time. My laptop is on a concrete patio table behind the Wildflower Wood Cabin that Gene had built after her Limberlost dried up to the point she could no longer study wetland birds and moths. Chipmunks are scurrying around behind me, and a young rabbit is nibbling away to my left. At least 5 species of birds can be heard in the canopy above…. Most are at mid-level canopy, though as I walked down from the parking lot, past the grave site of Gene and her daughter Jeannette, hawk startled and shot up from the ground to the high canopy.
I’m here because of family. Families motivate individuals within them. In my case they have and continue to motivate me to move on. After only an hour or so today I felt compelled to come to the quiet and heavenly scented place that a woman from a hundred years ago who intrigues me carved from the woods by this lake, albeit a man made lake."
Okay back to the present at the coffee shop. My older boomer brother was the one I had the argument with... amazing how the kid inside us can pop out so easily. It just takes the right trigger. My brother wanted me to defer to him as I would have as a kid unless I wanted "pounded." But as a woman in her late forties no way, no how I'm deferring to anyone! Especially not my stupid fart faced brother. (Sorry guess I'm not acting very mature either.) Anyway... childhood wounds can so easily surface at times. I wonder what our wounds our "cohort" shares and which trips our angry switch in a lot of us. Certainly not the selfish classification that I don't think we deserve. Nor the refusing to grow old with grace crap. Where do they get this stuff? I guess the whole society is just so competitive that many folks have bought into the we have to war with each other mentality. If we are busy fighting with each other we can't put that energy to work positively and concretely. For example... a late-boomer friend, Wes, who runs the Austin group turned me on to Freecycle. Check it out. It is the posted link for this entry. Won't make an entry tomorrow, maybe Monday.
Speed test for wireless (download isn't too shabby):
2004-06-05 19:51:24 EST: 1182 / 355
Your download speed : 1211356 bps, or 1182 kbps.
A 147.8 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 363886 bps, or 355 kbps.
I'm at The Village Coffee House in West Lafayette, IN and it is a slow connection (see below), but a most tolerable environment... And the coffee is good. Purdue is wireless but I'm not sure that I will be here long enough to make it worthwhile to register as a guest and get a passworded account.
2004-06-03 11:49:30 EST: 81 / 99
Your download speed : 83043 bps, or 81 kbps.
A 10.1 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 101852 bps, or 99 kbps.
I'm here at the heart of my journey. I'm writing a book on Gene Stratton Porter an Indiana writer who worked one hundred years ago. As is so often the case society makes images of people conform to expectations rather than reality and that is certainly what happened with her. She's known as a racist curmudgeon, and unfortunately she did write some things that were not at all appreciative of diversity... but we all reflect the culture we are indoctrinated into and "Heavens to Betsy" (I'm practicing my covert blending techniques) give her a break this was the midwest of 100 years ago... KKK country -- compared to her neighbors she was absolutely enlightened. Anyway I am intrigued by her business strategies, her natural history studies documentation of then disappearing (now gone) wetlands, and her influence on the environmental movement so I am "back home again in Indiana" and busy making contacts with curators, archivists, and editors as well as visiting friends and family... and writing up a storm. Not sure where I will head next... depends who is home and where I can find a free place to crash. I'm currently staying with the woman I studied with in graduate school... a wonderfully eclectic woman named Myrdene. Her most recent edited volume is linked above. She is one of the best minds on the planet. I encourage anyone who can read such intensely rich text to read her work, if you can't make it through that though, read volumes she has edited.
My husband and I saw the Rum Diary this past weekend. The critics do not like it, but I do. The movie is based on the first and only Hunter S. Thompson novel, written in the early 1960s, though not published until 1998.
