For the Time being: OK Boomer! Part 2
Talking about my Generation: We Baby Boomers have a reputation for shaping the second half of the twentieth century by breaking away from the old values of previous generations. On reflection, that’s not quite how it was.
Prelude: The Killing of George Floyd
The article below was taking shape over the last few weeks and was just about ready to publish, as the events surrounding the death of George Floyd on 25 May began to unfold in the USA and Europe. I almost pulled it. Why? Because it now feels very lightweight, frivolous even. In place of a feeling of mild satisfaction at my attempt to take a personal look at the baby boomer generation I now feel the need to tackle other, more pressing emotions: Shame — that I take my white privilege for granted too much of the time. Anger — that successive governments in all developed countries have colluded in perpetuating what Peggy McIntosh calls the “invisible package of unearned assets” available to white people and denied to black people. Disappointment — that as a student in the 1960s I felt part of something big, new, world-changing, and now in old age I see that my generation changed nothing much at all. Indeed, collectively we have squandered our unearned advantage as white people by our tacit acceptance of the status quo.
In the end, I have decided to publish and be damned. This is a sequel to OK Boomer! Part 1 and as such may give you insight into who we baby boomers are, or think we are, or think we were. I wish we could go back and do things differently….
Please read, and tell me what you think.
Changing the World?
What are the myths and realities behind the labels slapped on the Boomer generation? In this article I want to take a personal view, recalling how it felt to come of age in the 1960s and to be instrumental in shaping the modern world. Because that’s what we did, right?
Before reflecting on whether we were the game-changers we like to think we were, let me briefly examine whether we are the “me generation” that other people say we are. Let’s begin with this notion that we boomers are a self-centred generation; the story goes that as teenagers we wore flowers in our hair, in our twenties we benefited from a relatively cheap and liberal education. As grown-ups we went all out to acquire the family home and materially spoil our children, and in retirement we continue to feather our now empty nests. In my last article I argued that the much-flaunted view of the baby boomers as an affluent generation ignores a striking dichotomy between those who thrived and those who did not, busting the myth that boomers en masse are affluent consumers. On a personal level I have been fortunate in being employed for 40 years, with disposable income for much of that time, and I have enjoyed spending it. Does that make me self-centred? In the context of the generations before us, probably. In the context of those that followed, no more so than any other generation. (But see Footnote). Speculation about the generations below me is definitely for another day. Right now I want to go back to my teenage years and suggest to you that as a generation we may well have appeared to ‘live in the moment’ for a brief time in the ’60s and ’70s, but at the same time we were a politically aware generation and were vocal with it. I will leave you to draw your own conclusions about whether that makes us an individualistic generation.
Growing up in the post-war era
Those of us fortunate enough to be born in the first world since the second world war have been relatively unscathed by political and economic disaster. We came of age in the post-war economic boom and we have lived our lives during the longest period of peace in the history of the western world. That is not to underestimate the impact on the lives of many, in the USA especially, of the Korean War and the Vietnam War, the numerous other conflicts that have blighted lives and economies. In eastern Europe the Berlin Wall was a stark symbol of oppressive soviet regimes, the Irish ‘troubles’ wrought fear and heartbreak in Eire and the UK, and the deep emotional and economic harm inflicted by the events of 9/11 can never be underestimated. Of course, history affects everyone who lives through it, whatever generation they belong to. I want to return in a future article to a discussion about when in our lives we are most vulnerable to the influence of external events and most likely to be deeply affected by them, but here I want to posit that those of us who came of age in the decade between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s are unique in one respect: we were menaced by the long shadow cast by the Cold War and the threat of nuclear attack.
The red button
In 1962 we held our breath during the Cuban missile crisis and in the years that followed our TV screens gave us public information films on how to survive a nuclear attack. On both sides of the Atlantic government pamphlets dropped through our letterboxes informing us of how to protect ourselves from the initial blast, then gave us useful advice on coping with radiation sickness and a nuclear winter. We were not fooled. We were going to die, for sure, and we were haunted by a world that felt out of control of its own destiny: by upheaval in the Middle East, race riots and the escalating Vietnam war. We were, as the song puts it, on the eve of destruction. No wonder we talked of living for the moment, making the most of what clearly was going to be a very short life. It is no coincidence that alongside the nuclear threat we lived through the Summer of Love (1967) and Woodstock (1969) or whatever local equivalent we could identify with. We were the hippies: the generation into hallucinogenic drugs and the contraceptive pill; we broke down social and sexual taboos. We gained a reputation for creating the generation gap by breaking ranks with our hardworking parents — our parents who went to church and believed in the authority and integrity of our political leaders. So yes, maybe we displayed self-centred tendencies in the ’60s. But isn’t that what all teenagers do? Didn’t we mature into something else? Didn’t we put the cynicism born from the threat of annihilism to good use?
Awakening political awareness
In fact, we made ‘isms’ a thing by identifying the wrongs of society and putting our back into righting them; we exposed racism and sexism and we stood up for feminism. Isn’t that right? After all, Bob Dylan defined our generation in his song “The Times They Are A-changin’”. But wait. Dylan was born in 1941. Not quite a baby boomer himself then, more a boomer influencer. And there are so many more. So that gets me thinking on a personal level, rather than a generational level, about who and what shaped my thinking as I came of age in the 1960s.
First and foremost, my parents, they of the Silent Generation: my Mum, who came of age during the second world war, whose 21st birthday celebrations did not include a party, or a cake, or the young men with whom she went to school, some of whom never returned after D-Day. My Dad, who came of age in colonial Africa and saw examples of global inequality at every level. From them I learned that every life matters, and that one life does not matter more than any another.
Second, my education. Not so much the formal side, through which I gained the ticket to university and a professional career, but the informal aspects. In my last article I argued that TV commercials helped to turn the Baby Boomers into a generation of consumers. But that little box in the corner taught us to wonder about much more than where the yellow went. We sat glued to news broadcasts and documentaries. The devastating effects of the Biafran civil war were brought home to us through graphic images of fly-ridden, pot-bellied, starving infants. The civil rights movement was seeping into our consciousness from the USA through the likes of Malcolm X (born 1925) and Martin Luther King (born 1929). Footage of the Vietnam war was juxtaposed with short films from Armand and Michaela Denis — pioneers of wild life programmes — on safari in Africa. All this gave us our first sense of being part of something much bigger, although no-one used the word ‘globalisation’ then.
Closer to home, I remember to this day the seminal TV drama Cathy Come Home, televised in 1966 and written by Ken Loach (born 1936) about homelessness and the inflexibility of the welfare system, and my eyes were open to the inequalities on our doorstep. We debated these issues in school, alongside other subjects that had previously been taboo, notably the decriminalisation of male homosexuality, sex before marriage and the growing issues around racism as the children of the Windrush generation came into our largely white classrooms. We did not discover sex, heterosexual or otherwise, but we were the first generation for whom it was acceptable to discuss it freely, and thanks to the contraceptive pill we were the first generation to practise it without the prospect of a shotgun wedding hanging over us. As young women, we were taking control of our own destiny, and embracing feminism.
As a student of French in the 1960s I studied Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. The ensuing tutorial discussions spilled over into late-night discussions in the student union bar. We were, in our young, innocent eyes, the first generation of feminists. Yet The Second Sex was first published in 1949, and although Betty Friedan’s highly influential “The Feminine Mystique” was published in 1963, Friedan herself was born in 1921. Again, our parents’ generation.
The third influence was undoubtedly popular culture. By 1963 I was a teenager with a bit of cash from my Saturday job at Woolworth’s. I bought records. Oh, how I loved the Rolling Stones and the Beatles! I swooned at their concerts, and bopped to their rhythms. To me, they were so groovy –worlds apart from “A Nightingale Sang in Barclay Square” and other songs that my parents danced round the kitchen to. But if Jagger strutted on stage like a chicken, it was because the egg had come first. Before my pop heroes there was Rhythm and Blues, and there was Rock and Roll, Little Richard and Buddy Holly. Nothing comes from nothing. Not one of the influencers I mention above made it, by dint of their year of birth, into the Baby Boomer generation.
My relationship with the visual arts tells a similar story. For example, Andy Warhol (born 1928), himself fascinated by mass media and the consumerist society, stunned me with his portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s Soup Cans: the very sight of these art works made me glad to be alive in this, the most exciting, dramatic of times. I guess I felt a kind of temporal bonding — as if somehow Andy and I were at the same, big, psychedelic party, inventing and depicting a new world side by side. Yet he was at that party before I was born. I was like the latecomer who arrives when everything is in full swing, and hangs out unnoticed in the kitchen.
Not the movers and shakers we think we were?
When did it dawn on me that my generation had embraced but not invented the 1960s? I think it was when I started to bring up GenX (my daughter was born in 1980, my son in 1982) that I understood that we don’t so much shape the generation into which we are born, as start out as a product of it, and progress to influencing the generation that follows us. In 2019, Louis Menand wrote in the New Yorker of the misconceptions surrounding the baby boomer generation, putting paid to any lingering delusions that we changed anything much:
“If you were born during the baby boom, you can call yourself a sixties person. You can even be a sixties person. Just don’t pretend that any of it was your idea”.
That’s me told then. But I do feel like a child of the sixties. I do look back with gratitude at the formal and informal opportunities that opened my mind and my heart, the technology, limited though it was to a 15 inch black and white TV screen, that enabled me to see myself within a wider geo-political context.
All this reflection leads me to two conclusions: first, that marketing companies will continue to distill the characteristics of my generation — every generation — into a set of easy sound bites. But we cannot simply describe the behaviours of a generation. We need to understand those behaviours through reference to the people and the external events that influenced them. Second, the influence of the generation above us is not to be underestimated; the writers, politicians, artists, film-makers and song writers who help to shape our formative years and make us who we are, almost always have at least ten years on us. I feel fortunate that there were so many of them around in my formative years.
And now? Before I grow too old to dream, I will remember how amazing it felt to see the world through new eyes and to believe that I was a part of something transformative. And I will observe my grandchildren doing the same with a touch of envy.
Footnote
Not just envy, but admiration. My children and grandchildren, always very socially and politically aware, are actively engaged in learning more about their white privilege and about how they can contribute positively to Black Lives Matter. Yes, my generation did indeed see the world ‘through new eyes’, but we were swept up in a wave of post-war optimism that blinkered our vision to many of the realities that now confront us. The generations that follow us are better informed, more realistic and more determined to shape a fairer, more ethical, more sustainable world. There is, for example, growing evidence of this in the spending patterns of those millennials who have disposable income.
