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.
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.
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.
Dreams of Strength and Wisdom
For the fourth day of the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge I am giving you a bit about my dreams and views on history and legacy.
Sometimes things seem to align. There is a wisdom brewing. It is an interconnected women’s wisdom.
Many of us writing on the web write from monikers real or imagined, or somewhere in between, somewhre out in cyberspace, that are suggestive of a midpoint, midlife, although I think we all know that the midpoint of our lives is apt to be behind us unless we live to be over 100.
I cannot speak for the other women, but I know that for me I have been thinking about the ending of individual lives and how we personally feed into the human legacy. I realize that I might be a bit young to be thinking about what we leave behind, but I guess I tend to be an outlier in most things. As an anthropologist I am intrigued by what we as individuals add to the nebulous collective of knowledge and structures and rules that we call culture. Recently facing the reality of probably losing another brother in the near future brought the theoretical into the world of personal, practical, nitty-gritty reality.
I am 57. I am an elder of the Late Boomer Cohort within the so-called Baby Boom Generation. Sid Vicious and I were born within a week of each other and I have taken on the comparison as a mantle so as to show that Punks obviously delineated something significant breaking away from our older Hippie brothers and sisters. I try to use female examples wherever possible, but I have not found an easily recognized icon of my own gender that fits the bill as well as Sid does. Patti Smith rose up in the rock world at the same time as Sid, but she is one of the oldest of the Boomer Gen. I guess that shows that women of the Boom couldn’t sneak through the cracks into the new cultural paradigm until a critical mass of change burst through the barriers and opened a new ecosystem, or at least a new niche, defined by a new level of open communication and personal determination.
Women began to really come into their own when reliable birth control allowed larger and larger numbers of women to direct the course of their lives more than at any point in human history. The later born boomers are the women who were just becoming sexually active as Roe v. Wade was decided. The 1970s were where the trends of the 1960s became real in the lives of the culture as a whole. The last half of the Boomer Generation are the first women to have had self-determination for all of their adult lives. We are also the first group of women to have a level of comfort with the interconnectivity that the online world brings with it.
This is a shift of seismic proportions that is still playing out as human culture works this development into the mix. Women who are of an age to become a wise woman, an elder, to sit at the grandmothers’ counsel right now have perspective that was impossible to fathom even a generation ago.
The balance of power is shifting. Let us continue to work toward wisdom, as the women elders we are developing into have more important work in preservation of the world and humanity, as part of that living system, than any generation has faced. We are up to the task. We are finding our way, making our way.
Strength and wisdom guide us.
Boomer Blogging Bog-down
Women have chronicled family history, recorded life events, written diaries, and journaled for all the centuries since writing became feasible through technological advancements. We still do, but for some of us this is just what we do, we write no matter what the limitations of our access to technology, there are lots of options when the muse is cooperative.
My muse has not been cooperative as of late. I am getting back on my feet after being sick for a few weeks. When I am not feeling well I am overly critical of everything I do. I make unfair comparisons of my self with others. I knew I was seeing things askew when I decided I could not read my friends and fellow mid-life bloggers because they made me feel jealous of their achievements. Now that I am getting back my balance and perspective I am wondering why I reacted in such an exclusionary fashion.
Speculation on motivational undercurrents in women’s blogging
The group of women I consider to be my peers in the blogging world are mainly women I have met through the BlogHer blogging network. That is where the similarity ends. We are incredibly diverse in our backgrounds. We all bring distinct elements of what it is to be a successful 21st Century writer to the table. There are many kinds of success.
- Being published on a high circulation site, paid or not, is considered success by some.
- Making money from advertising is considered success by others.
- High number of readers is considered the goal by some.
- Writing sponsored posts for a recognizable national corporation the goal for some.
- Being able to blow your own horn about success can be viewed as being a successful marketer.
- Reaching readers with a message is the pinnacle of achievement for others.
- Being considered a good writer by peer writers is an honor for many.
- Being an expert and blogging may increase the perception of a writer as a subject expert.
- Some blog as a necessity for their business site.
Women’s life situations differ dramatically too
One of my main problems, in addition to battling depression, is that my support network of one, the Hubby, is not all that supportive of anything I do that does not either involve working outside the home for at least 30 hours a week, or making more money than him. He recently told me, “I don’t know why you think you have to be a successful entrepreneur. Can’t you just go get a job?” Scientists are at times distant and diminish the importance of everything other than work similar to their own. I’ve heard this from spouses of both sexes with partners who are scientists.
Other bloggers have supportive and successful partners and spouses who underwrite their efforts with action and moral support, while others have partners who underwrite the costs of professional start-up, networking expenses, and travel.
That said, there are some folks who have come to blogging with perks that are unrelated to writing, per se, after having worked in an industry for years, and they bring their networks or expertise with them.
Still others just have the seemingly innate ability to sell, sell, sell themselves. Marketing is a skill that comes naturally to some.
Why write this?
At times I have to remind myself of all these things, so I thought that someone else might want to see them too.
Our lives and paths are very different. But each of our life situations bring blessings and curses.
I was born a writer. I was also born an anthropologist. Neither are practical occupations though they provide for an interesting life.
I was born poor, my family was not supportive emotionally, and my only mentor in life is a brilliant but eccentric academician.
By the time I was 30 I had learned to trust no one. By the time I was 40 I was so broken that I had to do a complete restart to re-evaluate and rebuild my self. Other than for my daughter, I felt I had nothing but a fair intellect that was positive in life. I wrote about subjects that were important to me, but I did not really write myself into the story.
Then on my 49th birthday I found myself again. Over the course of the 50th year I learned a great deal about who I was coming together as in this rebuilding. I decided to build a network of connections through the Blogging Conference I adopted as my professional conference. It was a good choice.
I think I am talking to all the women writers who face challenges that at times seem insurmountable. Allow yourself time and space, and if necessary even envy when you need to step back and regroup for whatever reason. If you have a talent that can share and a passion to do so, it will come back to you. You may not have money, the perfect support system, or luck, but you have the fire inside you and that burns as long as you live. I am convinced of it. If I can lose my way, get knocked down, become demoralized by comparing myself to others, and then get back up and start all over again, then you can too.
This year I will turn 57, and having been born in 1957, I have decided to consider this a magical point in my life. In the next month, or so, until my birthday, I will write a few personal pieces on what I know about — how to keep going. I am nothing if not tenacious and resilient.
Getting bogged down for a bit isn’t so bad. The bog or swamp goddess told me so. That is one of the reasons she, Nerthus, is my twitter handle. @nerthus.
Early Boomers Feel Misclassified Too
I found a great article this morning! Turns out the early boomers, at least some of them,feel they too were misclassified. I’m primarily interested in the description of musicians who were not boomers being used as iconographic images of the Baby Boom. Most of the musicians associated with the Hippie, free love, free sex, anti-establishment movement in the early days of the Hippie Movement were from the Silent Generation. Yep, it is true – most were born during the war or were pre-war, late Depression era babies. All music “of a generation” tends to be created by folks a bit older than themselves. No surprise there when you stop to think about it. But it is a fact that is often left out of analysis about cohorts that who and what comprises the music of a cohort and the music by a cohort are rarely if ever the same set of music and musicians. The article touches on many other tangents of interest to Late Boomers and anyone perplexed by the steady stream of misinformation that has proliferated since at least the early 1960s about who and what the Late Boomers and thus the Boomers too really are.
Without further ado, here is a reprint of the article.
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I just received a post card from Russell Sage, a Troy, New York women’s college, about the upcoming 40th reunion for our overly written about Class of 1968. In early November 2007, Amazon.com had almost 18,000 (17,810) books with references to Baby Boomers more than four times as many as for Gen Y (4, 236) or Gen X (3,916) and many more than for the “Silent” Generation (1,158).As a marketing researcher, I keep up with such generation information with its often-disconcerting stereotypes and myths. Did all Boomers really act out with sex and drugs at big rock festivals? Even worse, should we all be branded technophobes as in Bill Hendrick’s February 22, 2005 Cox News Service article “High tech intimidates many baby boomers as they move into midlife?” Never mind that Mr. Hendrick’s Simmons Market Research Bureau study of 28,000 adults showed their “tech-shy” segment rose only from 36% among those under 40 to 43% for those 40 and over.
I saw how I too had been influenced by Boomer media myths October 30, 2007 during the 1967 portion of an XM Satellite radio “IT: The History of Pop Music”. In the middle of its “Summer of Love Motown Magic,” XM-6 included a news reminder of that year’s nationwide race riots. My Internet search discovered Detroit riots that summer of 1967 precipitated Motown’s later move to Los Angeles and that was the year most Connecticut county seat cities experienced their late 1960’s riots. So there I was spinning the “16 Big Hits Volume 5–The Motown Sound” album in my parents’ one-acre eight room Hamden, Connecticut home while riots shattered the economic spine in nearby New Haven where I live now. I now schlep out to Hamden and other suburban malls even for doctors’ appointments where I notice inner city bus riders’ risky walks across vast thoroughfares, green buffers and parking lots to their Wal-Mart and fast food jobs.The Monkees’ kvetching about the comforts of our “Pleasant Valley Sunday” suburbs brought back my after graduation plans for a charming old brownstone Manhattan apartment or one in a modern high rise like my cousin’s. Then again, my Upper West Side brownstone lacked heat between nine and five despite calls to the City’s complaint line and I have struggled for years in tiny Le Corbusier “Radiant City Towers” kitchens including the one my cousin passed onto me. I also so wish we could burn charcoal for just one more family gathering in that big comfy home my mother just sold.When I wasn’t thinking of leaving “Pleasant Valley” for Manhattan that “Summer of Love”, I was envying affluent peers’ joining Scott McKenzie’s gentle people in San Francisco while I waitressed at Friendly’s. Yet PBS’s April 23, 2007 “American Experience: Summer of Love” s
hows as many run-away ragged young teens as sophisticated collegians. At the Monterey Pop Festival, they would have more been jolted by the Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, Canned Heat, Jimi Hendrix, The Who and Eric Burdon than mellowed out Simon and Garfunkle and The Mamas and Papas.Nor would my fellow Boomers have seen many rockers their age at rock or folk concerts in San Francisco or anywhere else for that matter. Only one Boomer, The Who’s late Keith Moon, was in the 1968 Film “Monterey Pop.” Throughout 1967, only thirteen other Boomers were rock stars–Stevie Wonder, Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees, Peter Noon of Herman’s Hermits, Howard Kaylan of the Turtles, John Hayward of the Moody Blues, Jim Messina of the Buffalo Springfield, Tommy James, Janis Ian, Donovan, Arlo Guthrie, LuLu, Robert Hall Weir of the Grateful Dead and Leslie Gore “blast from the past. “Wikipedia’s” well-documented birth dates reveal most 60’s rockers and folkies were pre-1946 “Silent” Generation members as were anti-war and feminist movement leaders.Later that day, after Boomer Linda Ronstadt’s 1968 feminist anthem “Different Drum,” my computer’s freeze returned me to present realities. I have more worries about my future than Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin in “The Graduate” of that year.One worry is how Baby Boomer myths affect government and other policymakers. Will they or anyone for that matter seek representative sample research and accurately report its information for decisions about us Boomers? For example, will prospective employers’ beliefs that we cannot learn computer programs shut out Boomers who continue working to offset pension losses? Turning around statistics in the previously mentioned 2005 Simmons Market Research Bureau Study, a majority of us, 57%, are not “tech-shy.” Conversely, will federal administrators for a senior job program at which I sought a part-time cash flow continue to see Boomer seniors with our expensive academic and technical training as qualifying only for minimum wage unskilled jobs? I was sent for a file clerk position at a home care agency when I wrote a marketing audit and plan for a similar agency earlier in my career. The Census American Community Study’s age and income statistics for Boomers of 2001—then 35-54—show 59% have had some type of formal post-high school education compared to 43% for those 55 and over. Those statistics would not have counted in all the continuing ed computer programs courses I’ve taken with other Boomers.While our income security decreases, gentrification in many central cities and inner–ring suburbs keeps increasing Boomer property taxes and rents along with increased health care costs. Will politicians continue to focus on tax and other incentives to developers of luxury units in rural 55+ enclaves where many of us will to be driven about at some point or in this century’s first city redevelopment program condo towers that many of us cannot afford. A Chadwick, Martin Bailey-Arnold Worldwide study of one thousand Boomers (reported in the February 2007 Quirks Marketing Research*) discovered that in our highly segmented group, only 26% are primarily classified as the materialistic “Status Seekers” more likely targets for these high amenity communities. Instead will they preserve property tax breaks for city Boomer homeowners? Will they develop new creative tax incentives, mortgage financing packages and grants for new and refurbished affordable central city senior-only rental complexes—for less well-off Boomers and middle class Boomers–with nearby transit and retail amenities as in the 1960’s.When I look around New Haven for more affordable options, none will work for me as a non-driver. Connecticut central city government-run lower income senior income/asset-limited housing now includes disabled people, some of whom are drug addicts not in recovery. One of my grandmother’s friends was attacked in her lower income senior apartment by such a neighbor. All middle class senior affordable housing built with government tax incentives requires long walks or bus rides to pharmacies and supermarkets.Putting all these worries about my future aside, as one of the “usual suspects,” I look forward to joining the Sage 1968 reunion among the many that never tried LSD—thank goodness or I could not cope with such problems facing me. However, do not expect me to further describe my classmates with their varied graduate education, professions, family experiences, achievements and political leanings! I do know, however, all will well-understand my report about starting a class web page on MySpace or Facebook.*Pages 70-71I am now a market research freelance analytical manager with a July 2007 Marketing Research Association Expert Professional Research Certification. I lobby for transit service and pedestrian safety improvements with a 2002 M.S. in Urban Studies/Planning from Southern CT State University.
The article reprinted here is by Lynne D.Shapiro is: and is
Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Seeking Truths About My Generation November 12, 2007
the document is listed as
/LShapiroBabyBoomerMy%232EB200.doc
and may be downloaded from: http://www.archive.org/details/BabyBoomerMythsDebunked
The Prototypic Baby Boomer Toots Her Own Horn
I’m reclaiming my authority on this topic. (Yes, you are allowed to have Cartman echoing in your head, “Respect my authority!”) The last half of the baby boom needs me. Well they wanted to call us the “me generation” so I might as well act like I have a super huge ego.
Seriously, I ranted and raved about how the baby boom was not one group, how it was at least two distinct cohorts, how the government seemed to decide on a course of action for our lives rather early on when the boom was arbitrarily cut off at the 1964 year rather than waiting for the demographic trend to taper off to pre-1946 levels (which it did by 1968.) I ragged on this topic from 1998 until 2002-2003 when my personal life got complicated and I joined with other women across the country and around the globe to try to provide some karmic balance balance to the lies that were being pumped into the U.S. bloodstream via fear, the media, and silence. I pumped the word Late Boomer into the media however I could using what would now be called a social media strategy. The term was picked up and is in fairly common use. That was all I wanted. Similarly I feel my energies given to peace work since 2003, and to my family have also been successful. But the mis-identification and targeting of Late Boomers is still problematic. Time for “super Late Boomette to the rescue!”
But now it is time for me to take up the reigns again and remind my cohort that we are powerful and have much to do to counteract the negativity and misdirection that transpired in the first part of this last decade.
So much of what I do as an individual is partially influenced by my generational identity. I am the prototypical baby boomer. I was born in 1957, the height of the baby boom, I’m female, and females outnumber males at all , and as a cultural anthropologist interested in semiotics and marketing, the perspective and knowledge base I bring to all things Late Boomer is difficult to match.
Demographics can be a fun topic when illustrated with iconic persons and events, and general cultural commentary are all things I blog about. I will try to separate entries with meaningful tags and category labels.
If you have questions, do ask! I may have the same ones and write about them. I also speak on the topic and do business consulting. Feel free to contact me.
Art, Angst & Zeitgeist
Our fearless, or perhaps foolish, editor once again manages to rant about interconnections among the strangest things. Kurosawa, current political zeitgeist and neurobiology. There’s no explaining it. Just read it.
One shift in perspective, one single act, can change everything. Many folks apparently found this out for the first time on September 11th, 2001. Nothing I’m going to say here is meant with any disrespect for the country of the United States of America and the constitution which is embodiment of the noble concepts behind it. I however have no loyalty to an emblem like a flag nor to appointed or elected individuals. I do not have an American flag on my car. I have a sticker of Betty Page on it though. God Bless our Freedoms! Let’s try to preserve them. Homeland Security. Shades of Orwell if you ask me. Nor do I think that because a bunch of religious extremists happened to attack the US that that in any way justifies any sort of religious response. In fact, it should illustrate the danger of intermingling politics with religion. Seems like once again, our founding fathers had something to say about this. I don’t like the compromises the masses (baaaaaa) are apparently willing to accept. I know what you are thinking, and I am NOT a godless commie! Those are fighting words. I could join the DAR if I wanted to. The most recent branch of my family arrived long before the Statue of Liberty welcomed any huddled masses. I am a patriot. I don’t think anyone should tell me what to believe in my heart and soul. Let’s see, how else can I say this… if you are offended by what I write, go elsewhere. Okay, now that I’ve established the ground rules, let’s take a rambling late boomer look at shifts in perspective from a vantage point of cinema. Maybe there are many ways of perceiving any given event.
While the current US zeitgeist and angst revolving on all things Arab, might be more reflected by that late 50s movie in which they dipped Tony Curtis in shoe polish to play a the Son of Ali Baba there is a scene worth remembering in the film. The beautifully done scene has a knife held up by Curtis and the fires in the den of theives casts shadow of a multifaced reflections and shadows illustrating that only those capable of seeing in all directions through looking out for each other and drawing upon the insight and perspective of others are capable of acting from a well informed perspective. Only in drawing upon what we all see, perceive and understand can there be security.
The classic film that deals with this subject is, of course, is Rashmon. This remains must see cinema. If you haven’t seen it, oh say, since college, go out and rent the classic Kurasawa film tonight. No other film comes as close to coherently presenting the notion (some might say fact) that the reality of any two people never overlaps more than a fractional amount. Everything is perspective, literally. No two people ever see the same event in the same way as each person brings a different motive for interpretation, a different historical filter through which we interpret present events as they occur.
And speaking of historical filters, last week I attended a lecture at the University of Arizona by Dr. Kandel, a noble laureate in medicine (2000) and it seems that neuroscience investigators are now getting to the point where they are finding some of the actual pathways and mechanisms for information storage and retrieval in the brain. Most of the talk went right over my head (zip, whiz, zoom), I did manage to glean a reference for a very interesting bit of information about the fragility of memory. We can change the past, or at least our perceptions of it. Seems that experiences can be channeled into short term or long term memory. Short term is discarded. Long term is restored for much later recall. When a memory is recalled it then goes through that sorting process again and the new version or interpretation may or may not make it into long term memory. When a recalled memory is re-stored it has been filtered through and linked with events that happened long after the time when the original event with the memory occured. This view of memory is, of course, is nothing new. (Kandel, E. “The long and short of long-term memory.” Nature, 322, 419-422, 1986.) At least two decades of work has taken place since the concept of the biochemical basis of the fragility of memory has been bantered about but it is still a popular topic.
And what does this have to do with art angst and Zeitgeist, you ask? Lots. The spirit of the times, Zeitgeist for you non-german speaking, non post modernist types, radically shifted in the western world recently. Even those countries that have lived with internal and external terrorists strikes for decades were shocked that the Islamic Fundamentalists in support of Jihad had gotten ballsy enough to attack the Big Guy. The governments of the world have spent centuries creating a semblance of a governmental structure in the world that has some order and sense of ethics to it (whether the order and ethics promoted is good is debatable) so that most peoples (not necessarily individuals) can interact in a civil fashion. Truly civilized interaction is such a recent and tenuous endeavor, the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations, is still less than 100 years old. The infant state of truly global cooperation is in danger of dissolving before our very eyes. Not just from terrorism, but from reaction to that terrorism. We have control over our zeitgeist. It is a cumulative cultural construct. (What great illiteration if I do say so myself!)
Anyway, I propose that we late boomers rewatch some of the films we’ve loved so much over the years (a side bar of them is included) as well as taking the time to watch some films dealing with the nature of good and evil such as the recent Tolkein film, The Fellowship of the Ring.and get our brains thinking again about how there may be real good and evil out there in the cosmos, how there is no one right way of seeing doing, or knowing (no matter what our current US president, a man of intellect far below that of a Rhodes Scholar, might tell us).
The editor content manager zealot behind this site has yet to learn you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar, I find this punk reference and postering site to be quite thought provoking as it reminds us that cinema is not the only visual form of expression that needs protecting.
The Zeitgeist that allowed Sept 11 events to unfold was the one that allowed corporations and governments to look the other way full well knowing of the atrocities committed by the Taliban against women and humanity. And before you spin off in a tizzy, remember, I’m just a frumpy, middle aged house-wife. (That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.) And get that phrase, “They dress like housewives, they dress like students, or in a coat and a tie.” out of your mind right now.
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