Long ago at the turn of the century several people started to realize that there was something amiss in our culture with how people of our age – people born in the late 1950s and early 1960s – were perceived.
I started a list at that time called late boomers and shortly after that started a website called late-boomers hosted as a .com account. This gave rise to a newsletter that I would post on site and send out. No matter what the format was, there was a community and some sort of a publication focused on defining the cohort or global age-grade that comprised the last “half” of the baby boom and as a consequence, define the first half as well rather than compressing two very different groups into something government demographers once described as the post-WWII baby boomer and that in the late 1970s began to be called Baby Boomers.
I’m continuing this ‘net place here on This Later Boom site as a place to write about the unique perspective that developed within our cohort from being raised and developing in an incredibly unique time of dramatic change. We were too young for Woodstock or The Draft or military service in Vietnam. Our early psyches were shaped by the assassination of leaders, the promise of equality, near instantaneous world wide information exchange, environmental depletion, species extinction, moon landings, and war broadcast into our living rooms. These are very very different circumstances than were experienced even by our siblings who are only a few years older than us.