Why I Started This Blog….
Gotta love progress and embrace the unknown so, here’s my contribution to the vast and endless landscape making up the new frontier of online communication. I am 69 years old this year so I guess that qualifies me in some way to spread my wise and sage advice about anything in general to the world of the unseeing and uncaring of what I have to say. Therein lies the success of blogging on the net… you write something and post it online and by sheer numbers at least one other person will read it (other than Aunt Edna), maybe comment on it, and if you are lucky this someone might want to read more from you in the future. Hence, what I write has value to someone. What power! Go figure that I had to wait until my advance into the pre-golden years to realize power in this magnitude (although, I have a ten year window to do this cause once I reach 70 anything I have to say will be presumed to be the meanderings of a possible Alzheimer’s patient or echoes from another epoch in history).
Okay.. so why not start a blog about basket weaving, gas well drilling, or a how-to on Amish buggy making? Well, for one thing, I don’t know anything about those subjects. But I do know about living life as a Baby Boomer and I am sure there’s a few more like me in the world who might wish to read a few of my thoughts and reflections, and maybe contribute some of their own for the greater readership. So.. before I begin I suppose we need to define what exactly a baby boomer is and how “boomers” think and act that might be different from the rest of humanity.
For those who have been asleep for the last 50 years, baby boomers are an (official? unofficial?) age classification of a segment of the population. Our venerable United States Census Bureau says that anyone born between the years of 1946 and 1964 is a “baby boomer”. Why that moniker? Well, births took a jump upwards as our G.I.’s returned from winning the war (that’s the WW2 war, for you young readers out there). For many social reasons, from relationship-starved women at home (cause most the boys were overseas), to relationship-starved G.I.’s (most not wishing to return to rural farming), babies were born at alarming rates creating a population boom. As these children of Depression Era children aged it created a swelling social juggernaut of change, innovation, and huge market demands. You might remember the huge popularity and demand in Mickey Mouse and Walt Disney products in the 50’s (remember Davey Crockett’s coonskin cap and Mouseketeer ears?) … and now that same bunch o’folks (us) is knocking at the door for better MediCare. A simplistic comparison, to say the least. But it does illustrate an entire lifetime of change… rock & roll, the anti-war movement, civil rights, political involvement, the space race, and huge purchasing power that inspired innovation and lifestyles across the board.
Recently I ran across a subset to the “boomer” classification called “Generation Jones“. This class, acording to Wiki, was inspired by consultant, Jonathan Pontell, to represent the birth years inside the boomers years of 1954 to 1965. The idea is that during this time children of age were bombarded with images of trying to “keep up with the Joneses”. Right about the time TV became popular. “Be the first in your neighborhood to own a ___!”
Well, whatever your boomer year of birth is, we carry a lifetime of memories of things our parents never even dreamed of back during the Depression. Maybe in this blog we can share a few thoughts and compare our lives… and maybe comment on the current things in life in a perspective that only comes from those of us who experienced Elvis, Viet Nam, and Tang… “the drink that went to the moon with the astronauts”.