The Baby Boomers – 40 Years On

Rosie Millard has something to say about the baby boomers in Last Sunday’s Sunday Times. That is, those of us born between 1945 and 1963:

“By their Wranglers you shall know them. And by their lines of coke after Sunday lunch. The baby boomers, a socio-economic group so strong they have their own version of Trivial Pursuit, have been reassessed and found wanting.”

Ouch!

Of course, journalists like nice easy stereotypes, don’t they?

“At the same time a new book, Boomergeddon, by Mike Males, a California-based academic, says that the popular view of the boomers – born between 1945 and 1963 – as the happy, prosperous product of the post-war economic boom, is off the mark.The boomers, he says, have carried their wayward, irresponsible ways into adulthood. In California they present the state’s fastest growing age group for petty felony and the biggest demographic for HIV/Aids. But most damaging is some boomers’ casual enthusiasm for drugs. Today’s California drug addict is more likely to be 45 than 20. “No one wants to hear it,” says Males, “but we’ve got a problem with the middle-aged.””

Dear, oh dear, oh dear. AIDS/HIV was discovered in the 1980s, at the time the baby boomers were at the height of their sexual activity. The disease was only just being discovered and its cause identified. For crying out loud! Even an imbecile could figure out that this generation is most likely to be the highest sufferer – subsequent generations will have the benefit of the lessons learned. As for petty felonies – ours is an ageing population, so it figures that the demographics of any group will similarly age. So what?

While it’s true, I do wear jeans (Levis rather than Wranglers, but I guess that’s a minor point), I wasn’t aware that there was an age at which jeans became “verboten” and pipe and slippers became de rigueur. That’s the trouble with these people; their disapproving faces stuck in a permanent just-sucked-a-lemon pout, are puritanical and disapproving of anyone who dares to contradict their idea of what is normal.

At forty seven, I still wear jeans – oh, yes, I mentioned that already. Well, I figured I’d mention it again, just to be sure. I’m not bald; I have a headful of dark hair that I wear long as I did in my twenties. Oh, of course, being middle aged, I suppose I should cut it off – as I hadn’t the good grace to lose it all by the time I hit forty. I don’t have a paunch – indeed, I’m reasonably fit, slim and healthy. Add to that, I’ve never seen a line of coke, nor, for that matter come across anyone who has, to my knowledge. Oh, wait a minute, I do recall a party in the late seventies where someone was smoking a joint. Perhaps I went to the wrong sort of parties… I do appreciate, though, that I am somewhat at the other side of the norm in that I have never tried any form of mind altering narcotic – nor wanted to; apart from a brief flirtation with alcohol in my late teens. This might, in part have something to do with wanting to remain upright on my motorcycle. Oh, damn! There we go again; a middle aged man riding a motorcycle, just as I did in my twenties; how irresponsible is that? Why don’t I just grow up and buy a nice 4×4 like I’m supposed to at my age?

I see my contemporaries on a daily basis and, as am I, they are busy working to maintain their mortgages, keep their kids in university and planning their retirement. Indeed, they are much like the generations before them and the ones to follow; a mixture of the sensible and the reprobate, the monogamous and the libertine; the puritan and the libertarian, the junkie and the abstemious. Like all generations we have our share of workhorses and layabouts; such is the complex nature of humanity. At least, it is in the real world that you and I inhabit, unlike the parallel universe where journalists seek out their silly stories. The examples in Rosie Millard’s piece are not representative of ordinary people that you and I meet in our daily lives, but then, “Baby Boomers Pretty Much Like Everyone Else” doesn’t make much of a headline, does it?

Journalists; what a bunch of self-aggrandising, self-righteous, self-satisfied, self-serving, poisonous twats. How’s that for a sweeping generalisation?