It's Only a Name

My sister Catherine writes a very nice blog about being a baby-boomer http://observationsofababy-boomer.blogspot.com/and after reading a few of her stories it got me thinking about my generation’s name or, lack thereof.

The date range for boomers is 1947 to about 1966, give or take a few years. So technically, I too, am a boomer—and yet I’m not. All the history of the boomers is just a squelch off for me, about a ten year squelch. I don’t remember the Beatles on Ed Sullivan as I was six and probably in bed at the time. Vietnam was something that happened to someone else’s older brother. I definitely missed out on the hippy movement since I wasn’t allowed to stay up past 8 p.m. I knew that something important happened when MLK Jr. and the Kennedys were assassinated because the adults around me were upset but I didn’t really know why at the time. I didn’t know about the riots, sit-ins and other disturbances of the 60s because I wasn’t allowed to watch the news. I was at the age where I was told to leave the room if anything “adult” happened.

So, what were we—the children born in the later end of the 1950s? I also read that we were part of the MTV Generation or Gen X but that doesn’t quite fit either since I was in my early 20s when MTV started. (Quick, what was the first song played on MTV? Answer: Video Killed the Radio Star. That I do remember.) My generation was in the middle of everything and nothing. We’re the Jan to the Boomer Marsha and Gen X Cindy; forever jealous of Marsha, Marsha, Marsha and tired of cute Cindy.

There are a couple of titles I could think of:

Generation Hand-Me-Down. Most of us tended to be the baby of the brood with three or four siblings ahead of us so, we got a lot of hand-me-downs or leftovers. We didn’t have the Beetles, instead we had Ringo and the All Star Band, Wings, and John and Yoko. Jim, Janis, and Jimmy were all gone before we had the chance to discover them. They got Camelot we got Nixon. They got Ozzie and Harriet, we got divorcing parents.

Or, better still, we could be called Generation Reap; as in reap-all-the-rewards-of-the-hard-working-boomers.

When I started high school I took a woodshop class. My sister commented at the time she wished she had that option when she was in high school. Instead, she had to take secretarial classes. For women, my generation was the first to start having options. I may have been the only girl in that woodshop but I was there by the Grace of God and the entire bra-burning older sister society before me!

The boomers had to fight for all their rights and then we came in and—just did it. We were the first generation that didn’t have to worry about unwanted pregnancies. This is a fact: The pill was unavailable to single women until 1972. It had been made available to married women about five years earlier but the single boomer sisterhood were denied the pill until they were in their 20s. Imagine that, a prescription regulated by your marital status! No wonder they were all pissed. The pill became available to me right when I discovered boys. How convenient.

The boomers certainly led the fight for wage equality, reproductive rights, the women’s movement, etc., but it was a long haul and many of these rights were not established until the boomers were in their late 20s and 30s. My generation just waltzed into it right out of high school after the boomers had done all the hard work. I worked in a “man’s world” in the Navy, slinging cargo and driving boats. The women before me were forced into secretary roles and were forced out if they got pregnant, whereas I had more options on the type of job I wanted and whether I wanted to stay if I got pregnant. I really didn’t have to deal with sexual harassment or the old boy’s network.

Parenting styles were definitely much more lax than with the boomer. I think our parents were just too exhausted to care what we did or too dazed after trying to raise the boomers through the 60s, after all they were the ones pushing the boundaries. And, being older, our parents slept sounder and didn’t hear us going out the window. But most of all, we didn’t have younger sisters who squealed on us when we went out the window…sorry Catherine.

We definitely were more hedonistic. We were right in the middle of the sexual revolution of the 70s. Because there wasn’t a threat of pregnancy women were questioning the double-standards of the day and having sex on their own terms. No, waiting for whatever numbered date it was that you were supposed to do this, or that; no rules, no trying to “catch” a guy. Of course the generation before has sex, probably lots of it, and in their teens as well; but there was always the threat of getting a “reputation” over their heads. My generation didn’t really care about reputations and to the horror of my mother; we called the boys on the phone if we wanted to go out on a date. Many of us didn’t get married until we were older, unlike our boomer sisters who married out of high school, so that whole “saving it for marriage” wasn’t really working for us. Ours was the one-night-stand generation and we loved it.

It wasn’t all rosy. Yes there was LSD and other heavy drugs in the 60s, most boomers in college only smoked weed. But my generation did more than pot and at an earlier age. Drugs like mescaline, speed, black beauties, and quaaludes were rampant in high schools in the 70s and very much out in the open. We paid for all the drug use and promiscuity with the AIDS epidemic in the 80s.

And don’t look to us for fashion sense. We were the first idiots to break our necks on platform shoes, (both men and women) and 30” wide bell bottoms. And yes, we invented the hip huggers I’m sorry to say. We all looked like pimps and hookers all decked out in 100% polyester.

But the best thing we invented—good guitar riffed, drum bashing Rock & Roll. All the good classic rock was created in the 70s. Bands that started in the 60s like Led Zep, The Stones, The Who all hit their peak in the 70s. We’re the generation of kick-ass Southern rockers like Lynyrd Skynyrd; hard rockers like AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Aerosmith and Deep Purple. We had bands like Boston, Supertramp, and ELO; funk musicians, Sly and the Family Stones, Ohio Players, and Earth, Wind and Fire. Then there were the glitter, glam and freaky rockers like Kiss, Elton John, Queen (we miss you Freddie), David Bowie and Alice Cooper. And when we got tired of it all, we stripped it down and invented New Wave and Punk.

So why in God’s name could a generation who came up with such amazing music also invent Disco?