My dear fellow Baby
Boomers, are you tired of being told by your kids that you’re older than dirt? Do they listen to
you reminiscing about your youth and just stare at you because they don’t have the foggiest clue what you’re talking
about?
When certain commercials
come on T.V., do they look at you to see if you’re interested in the product? You know which commercials
I’m talking about! The retirement related commercials. The pharmaceutical commercials
that claim to fix what ails you. The ones you hope that you’ll never ever need to pay closer attention
to.
I’ve figured
out how to get them to cut it out. Get some samples of the advertised meds, or the pamphlets of the retirement
stuff advertised, wrap them up in a cute little box, and give it to them on their birthday. When they look
at you like you’ve lost your mind, say, “What? The way you were looking at me during the commercials
for this stuff, I thought you were hinting that this was what you wanted!”
I guarantee you that they will stop hinting at your antiquity and you
will have a good laugh over it. It will also teach them to quit treating you like you already have one
foot in the grave. How quick they’ll realize that you’re going to be around to haunt them for
many years to come!
Okay, back to boomin’.
You aren’t alone in your reflection on the days of yesteryear. In his landmark book, The Big 5-Oh,
Bill Geist sites that a baby boomer turns 50 every eight seconds. Personally, I would prefer to turn 16
every 30 seconds but I get his point.
We’re told that, though we represent 28% of the U.S. population, we control 77% of all the financial assets in the
country. Doesn’t that just make you feel drunk with power?
Wikipedia.org tells us that our generation was greatly influenced by television
and music. I will take that point just a step or two farther and be so bold to say that the “arts”
of our generation, meaning the music, television, and movies of our time (the 60’s and ‘70’s) were some
of the best ever created. That vast body of creative work is still cherished, remembered, quoted, enjoyed
and covered more than any other era of entertainment in the history of mankind.
If there’s any doubt about that, one only has to observe who has
the most successful concert tours or the sales records for DVD sales of movies and T.V. shows. Acts like
The Rolling Stones, The Who, Fleetwood Mac, Eagles and Bruce Springsteen dominate tour earnings records. Also,
T.V. shows like “The Andy Griffith Show”, “Happy Days”, and “M*A*S*H*” are perennial favorites
of viewers of all ages. So are movie classics like “Star Wars”, “Jaws”, “M*A*S*H*”,
“Patton”, “Deliverance”, and “The Sting”, to name just a few.
It is against the background of
those major influences of our generation that I write on Boomerocity.com. No, we can’t go back, nor
should we. However, as the old saying goes, “those who fail to learn from history are destined (or
doomed) to repeat it”.
So, in future articles on this site, we will reach back into our past to view our present and influence
our future. We will have the opportunity to remember and reactivate the lessons of our youth and begin
to practice them with a renewed passion. We can then realize that we’re now standing on the greenest
grass available to us and find it unnecessary to look for other pastures.
We can learn that our today’s are the
things that yesterday’s are made of so we’ll make the most of them. We should then see that
we have great opportunities to use the lessons learned from our experiences to make a positive impact on our family, friends,
and society.
And, while we’re at it, we’ll cancel our reservations at “the home” because we’re not going
to need them for at least another 30 or 40 years . . . if ever! Maybe then it will be “a quarter
to dead” but we won’t know it because we refuse to look at the clock.
In the mean time, we still have a lot of living to do because we're
nowhere near being a quarter to dead!
