BabyBoomer Nest

One day you’ll be driving down the street listening to a radio station and "I love you yeah, yeah, yeah, I love you yeah, yeah, yeah" will croon from your radio Or, "stop, in the name of love, before you break my heart -- think it o-over" 

It could be a Beatles song or a Bob Dylan song or the Temptations that will  take you on a trip back to the days when your hair was long or  when you stood in front of your college’s admin building singing songs of protest.

Or you may have have marched  down some street and shouted “down with the establishment” or yelled “make love not war.”
Songs never die, they live on and on, wafting on the winds of time.

Yet these songs always seem to come back to remind us of how music has the power to change the landscape of culture or a lifestyle.

During the 60s:

The Beatles hit America and had girls screaming and tearing at their hair because “it’s been a long days night."

Bob Dylan knew that: “the answer my friend was blowin’ in the wind” 

Alice White knew that we had to : ”keep your eyes on the prize”

Charles Tindley knew that “we shall over come, some day”

More Protest Music

My fondest music memory was the Motown Sound. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. The Supremes, The Temptations, The Four Tops –- I could go on. They always sang about that one special person that they loved or wanted to love. Their songs seemed to make the listeners get all dreamy eyed and their hearts filled with hope.

More 60's Rock & Roll

But, today in this new millennium, the song that’s chasing it's tail through my mind: Edwin Star’s War -- “what is it good for, absolutely nothing, say it again!”

How well this still rings true.

**I feel like marchin'"**

...were you associated with.


The 60s were the Boomer's Activist hay day. Boomers made the establishment listen to what many of the "silent generation" were afraid to say.  

Woodstock was a 3 day festival of peace and music. Where many musicians and artists performed. At that time most of the music played were protests against the Viet Nam War and social injustice protests.

The Black Panthers and the Black Muslims were very vocal and active for civil rights. Many thought both groups were home grown terrorists

The Yippies: The Youth International Party. Yippies were more radicalized than the Hippies. They were covert with their actions.

Yippies created absurdist political manifestos suggesting incredible acts of civil disobedience .Like making the suggestion to put LSD into city water systems.


The Hippies: Where the flower children. They were 60s version of the beatniks. They believed in the Peace Love and Happiness motto. The Flower Children who believed in free love for everyone. They were more peaceful than the yippies but still rejected mainstream society.




Some of us, like me, were too young to be activists. We were still under the thumbs of the "silent generation"   You know, that meek generation whose motto was "take what you get, don't buck the system" 

Yes, I remember in 1968, I was 12. It was a Sunday morning and we were doing our usual Sunday thing,  going to see my Grandparents.

We lived in Akron, Ohio at the time. My grandparents lived down in the tiny burg of Waynesburg.

We had to go down Wooster Avenue, the then hot spot of the city, to get to where we were going.


The Civil Rights movement was in full swing. I remember as the car crawled down the avenue,  looking out of the car window and seeing buildings smoldering, cars turned over on their hoods, people hurling bricks at the police, who were out in full force. And how the police kept pushing the crowds back away from traffic.

I remember thinking what's all the fuss. Why are people so upset. My parents never spoke to my brother and me about politics and civil rights, they just kept quiet and went with the flow.

Then I remembered hearing about a man who had been shot and killed. A famous Black man by the name of Martin Luther King Jr. who only wanted for everyone in this country to get along.

It wasn't until I was up at Kent State that I heard he famous "I have a dream" speech. Oh, and what a speech it was. I still get chills when I hear it.   

In my child-like mind, I remembered thinking, "hurling bricks and turning over cars doesn't seem to peaceful to me."

That's one picture I vividly remember seeing in the 60s.

Years later when I understood about the 60s and knew that I was a baby boomer.  I grasped how the boomers just 4 or 5 years older than I, changed the face of America.

Some justice was  brought through civil disobedience, some through peaceful means. However it was done -- Student Boomers rocked America to her core and made changes for all her citizens better.

This is some information about the month and year of my birth and anyone else born March of 1956:

• Chinese Monkey sign
•  Pisces Sun sign
• Elvis recorded "Heartbreak Hotel"
• "My Fair Lady" opened in New York
• Soaps "As The World Turns" and "The Edge of Night" first aired.
• Grace Kelly marries Prince Rainier III of Monaco
• Jonas Salk's Polio vaccine was made public
• Elvis first appeared on Ed Sullivan
• Yankees Pitcher Don Larsen pitched the first and only perfect game during a World Series
• The Wizard of Oz was first shown on television

American Economics

• Inflation -- 1.52%
• Cost of a new house: $11,700.00 :o
• Average monthly rent: $88.00 :o
• Average yearly wages: $4,450.00
• Price of of $0.22 cents a GALLON!
• Price of a new car $2,050.00
• Price of Coffee $0.85lb

Popular Films

• Guys and Dolls
• The King and I
• Trapeze 
• High Society
• Around the World in Eighty Days

Popular Musicians

• Elvis Presley
• Bill Haley and the Comets
• Chuck Berry
• Jerry Lee Lewis
• Dean Martin
• Johnny Cash
• Ella Fitzgerald

Technology

• First hard disk was invented by IBM
• Black and White portable T.V hits the market
• Transatlantic Telephone Cable goes into operation
• First videotape recorder from APEX goes on sale
• Oral Vaccine developed by by Albert Sabin
• Tefal starts producing non-stick frying pans

Politics

• Dwight D Eisenhower (R)  defeated Adelai Stevenson (D) for United States Presidency

This is just a partial list of some facts I found interesting. No information on world events was added, but there was plenty going on.

Unfortunately, I know where mine is and wish I didn't.

Don't get me wrong I love my child, but come on!

He still stands outside the bathroom door [along with the dog and the cat] insisting on having conversations at the most inopportune moments.

And if some of yours are like mine, they camp out on your couch snoring at 12:00 in the afternoon. Or, they're down in our basements or in the bedroom that you "had"  planned to convert into a computer room -- blasting their and your eardrums with what they call music or, they're in our refrigerators -- eating everything that doesn't have anything greenish and hairy growing on its surface.

Now here I go with the "when I was" inane platitude: when I was their age I was either at school or at work or most importantly, living in my own home at this time of day.

Yet, there's an segment of today's society that has labeled these walking, talking, fertilized boomer eggs [our sweet and cuddly little boomettes] as "Echo-Boomers" 

Can you believe that! Echo-Boomers!

Just because they're our genetic and demographic off-spring. Sure they've got our genes and yes, quite a few of them are demographically and geographically close -- we just can't get rid of them.

They seem to be that damn piece of gum stuck on the bottom of a favorite shoe and refuses to come off.

60 Minutes says that our little Millennials, also known as Generation Y   are the most studied generations [ by sociologists, marketers, demographers]  in history. Why, because they're the ones who grew up in the information age and we  made life easy for our little munch-skins that's why.

60 Minutes went on to say:

Echo boomers are a reflection of the sweeping changes in American life over the past 20 years. They are the first to grow up with computers at home, in a 500-channel TV universe. They are multi-taskers with cell phones, music downloads, and Instant Messaging on the Internet. They are totally plugged- in citizens of a worldwide community.  READ MORE

500 -- channel TV universe! Are they serious! There are those of us who can't afford cable let alone any other contraption  -- what's with the 500 channels! That's unheard of in my house.


I'll reiterate -- they've probably only surveyed/studied upper echelon segment of Boomer society.  The segment that's:

• White
• Professional
• Lives in Suburbia
• Has 2 plus cars in their driveways
  
• Had 2.5 children and a dog
• Goes on vacation twice a year
  
• Income level: 100K or more a year

These people and these surveys/studies are not representative of the whole of Boomer culture. What! Are the rest of us -- chopped liver!


Even so, the rest of us are just as guilty of making life easier for our kids. So easy in fact, that our Echo-Boomers [sometimes even their  progeny] can't and won't get off the bottom of our shoes.



Is it me, or can anyone else see how each generation's progress just might  be considered -- a tad bit sticky.



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