Okay, we got it - a lot of babies were born in the decade after World War II ended. Here's what I don't understand: all these millions of babies were born, and then the birth rate dropped; and all those babies that were born in that 1946 - 1964 period are known as the Baby Boom generation. If the kids had kept coming, would we be talking about a Baby Boom that extended from 1946 to 1972, or 1975? And if so, would we keep defining the whole blinking generation by the trends and events that shaped maybe the first ten percent of them? I was born on December 31, 1959. I have exactly nothing more or less in common with the stereotypical Baby Boomer than with any other human being on the planet. I don't know from Howdy Doody. Ed Sullivan is a dim memory, already a caricature by the time I was old enough to pay attention. I can't remember Father Knows Best. Annette Funicello? Give me a break. My older brother went to Woodstock, one of the younger attendees at age 15 (and got his sleeping bag stolen); I was at home with the younger siblings, watching the moon landing. All of the signal events associated with the Baby Boom are my older siblings' experiences, not mine. I don't remember JFK's asassination. Hippies were slightly exotic when I was six or seven years old, and then really boring. I have my own set of reference points. My poor brother Pete, an even further-out-on-the-curve Baby Boomer than I, born in March of 1964, wouldn't even remember the few Boomer references that register for me. How can we all be lumped in one group together? Could any set of people born over any 18-year period be expected to have that much in common? We just don't. Ask a real Boomer, a 1946-through-1956 Boomer, how he felt the first time he heard the B-52s. Whaaa? We heard "Rock Lobster" and had to call 15 people and say "Wait until you hear this, it's random, it's the greatest thing." Un-boom me, now. I insist. I could give a damn about the Summer of Love. I never trusted anyone over 30 any less than anyone else. When I started going to concerts in high school, it was (briefly) 70's rock bands, and then (avidly) Tuff Darts and Blondie at Irving Plaza. If anything, my contemporaries are the Tickets Generation - it was "can you get tickets to Zappa at the Beacon? What about Ian Dury at Max's Kansas City?" I was at the Blondie concert on the pier at Asbury Park when Debbie Harry got booed for singing "Heart of Glass" (disco sucks, remember?). I remember Son of Sam and dancing to Rick James and the New Year's Eve fire on my 19th birthday at the Ipanema Club near Times Square. I remember when Sid Vicious died, like it was yesterday. I read Go Ask Alice when it was assigned to us in tenth-grade English class, and related to it the same way I would do a novel set in ancient Greece. There's nothing wrong with all that Flower Power stuff, but it isn't my experience. Set us free, release us from the Baby Boomer group - we want to go off on our own. The tired "I did the wild drugs and peace and freedom bit, now I'm going to get rich" doesn't fit even one of my contemporaries. Think about it. We didn't grow up in Ike's fifties and react to that upbringing by inventing pot parties. We grew up with Vietnam on the evening news, watching RFK and MLK and Malcolm get shot down, and then saw Watergate, the icing on the cake, around the time we entered high school. Of course we became punk rockers! What would anyone do? In our twenties, half our gay friends died of AIDS, sometimes two weeks after the first symptom appeared. In our thirties, we began to have children - the Boomer experience of kids in college and beyond isn't ours, either. Of my high school graduating class of 1978, only one friend (Dave) has a 15-year-old (and Dave was always more responsible than the rest of us). My youngest is three; John has a two-year-old. Steve the former ticket scalper (a master sign painter/"letter-head" in Berkeley) has a one-year-old. Honestly, when I think of the boomer stereotype, I think of my old boss, Marty. Only ten years older than me, the guy seemed like a fossil, culturally: he didn't know jack about anything that he didn't read in Customer Service Management Today magazine. He would bring new-car brochures to work and show them to me. I could not relate, because I was sleep-deprived after having danced all night and coming into work directly from Medusa, the after-hours club. One day, when we were finshing up a project together on a Saturday, Marty said "You really like music, don't you? Who's that on your Walkman - Gruppo Sportivo?" That's right, I said. I also had the Roches and Ben Sidron and the Gap Band and Joan Armatrading and Fear and the Palominos on there. And Marty said, "Yeah, I'm into Iron Butterfly." I just stared at him. "Um, are they still recording?" I asked. Un-bundle us, un-boom us, we opt out. Have a happy sixtieth birthday, Boomers, and be well: just leave us out of the club, because we are a whole 'nother thing. |
