Boomers were not called Boomers until the late 1970s. And the truth is that there are at least two primary groups of Boomers. The first half of the population bump that happened between 1946 and 1964 were the people too young to be beatniks, but old enough to be cannon fodder for the war in Vietnam and those who resisted the war and fed many other trends as well, the Hippies. But the second group born at or after the peak of the bell curve of the demographic bump actually outnumbered the first group.
In the late 1990s I began calling this later portion of the Boomers, Late Boomers. There are significant differences between the groups because the information and change that feeds society had already begun to accelerate change in technology and communication at a pace that individuals could observe in a single lifetime.
My mother remembered going to school in a horse-drawn wagon that served as a school bus. When I was a child, we watched the first lunar landing together. That is a whole lot of change in a short amount of time.
Brothers and sisters: Donald, Cora, Carolyn, Elene, Jean, and Maralee Hill, as they prepare to board the school bus. Kosciusko County, Indiana, circa 1930
Cultural wisdom may not even have time to develop and respond to significant changes and emergent properties in material and behavioral culture by incorporating or rejecting these developments before those technologies and human actions have branched, several times, into totally novel items and actions.
Boomers have gone from party line telephones to mobile phones with more computing power than a room of main frame computers had when the first mobile phones came to market.
Colossus codebreaking computer in operation. 1943.
Cultural wisdom was stored in the information networks of those who birthed, raised up, and educated the next generations, thus passing on the information. But that stability and continuity is being sabotaged by escalating change.
So Boomer women, the BoomHers as I call them, are the generation to whom the monumentous task of being the wise women of their communities currently falls.
A Grandmother’s Council is sorely needed. But unlike other generations of wise women we have instantaneous global access to hundreds of millions of other wise women. Surely we can generate enough strategies and tactics so that some will be successful so as to keep the world from warming beyond conditions we can tolerate, for dealing with fundamentalist patriarchal resurgences who wish to re-exert domination over women, and to keep the immature boys in charge of nuclear arsenals from destroying life on Earth as we know it.
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