Talkin bout my generation

Dick, Jane and Spot go to school


The redneck,is a boomers, people born between 1946 and the late 1950's.   We are called boomers because our parents had lots of kids, so they named us the baby boom.  Now that we are senior citizens the baby part was dropped.   An interesting thing about being a boomer is that apparently no one saw us coming, despite  census data that would have revealed that we were not sneaking up on anyone.  

The most memorable thing about my school years is that every school I went to was under construction. Every one of my schools also  had 'portables' trailer park classrooms planted in the schoolyard.   One of my schools was so short of teachers it was staffed with old warhorses who should have been retired decades ago.  My grade 5 teacher used to fall asleep like clockwork every day, right after morning recess, he had to be at least 70 years old.

When we got to College, it was the same as our school days.  Suburban 'community colleges' sprang up like mushrooms.

Investment tip for you millennials, crematoriums.

We were the first TV generation, Howdy Doody, Captain Kangaroo, the Lone Ranger.  
TV shut down every night between 11 PM or about 2 or 3 AM on Friday night if there was a late show. After that ended there was nothing on but test patterns until the morning. 

When we hit our teens we became consumers.  We bought records and blue jeans mostly.  We made the Beatles and Levis, they did not make us.

We discovered protest, drugs, dropping out and tuning in.

We changed convention, if we did not want to get married we lived together.  If the women wanted babies they had them with or without a husband.  We considered and concluded there was no reason to discriminate for skin color, ethnicity, gender or sexual preference.

As we progressed down our mortal coil we got blamed for lots of stuff.  When USian boomers questioned the need to serve their country by dying in Viet Nam, previous generations accused boomers of lacking the right stuff.  Angry little brothers and sisters, aka "Generation X" accused boomers of hogging all the jobs, houses, etc., they felt they were entitled to.  Truth was  Generation X, born between about 1960 and 1970 was an even larger demographic than the boomers, there was less for them because there were more of them.  As time wore on the boomers became a rather ordinary and not particularly impressive demographic other than their size.  Pragmatism eventually displaced idealism, today's aging boomers look very much like their predecessors.  But it sure was fun for a while.




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