My Generation

While in Effingham, I gave a presentation to a group of business owners about employing people with disabilities. It was complete with cutting-edge technology, graphics, and high-tech media devices -- that is, I showed a Pepsi commercial.) At one point, there was a chart indicating that the baby-boomers were those people born between 1947 and 1964.

I’m a baby-boomer?

I always thought baby-boomers resulted from World War II soldiers coming home and having lots of sex. My parents were little kids during that time and barely remember The War. (Hell, they were practically children when they had me in 1959).

I always thought baby-boomers were the Hippies in the late Sixties. They wore flowers in their hair, sang on hillsides about giving the world a Coke, protested the war in Vietnam and dropped enough acid to kill a yak.

Meanwhile, I was watching Lost in Space in my PJs while dropping Coco-Puffs.

The baby-boomers had super-cool music to listen to: The Beatles, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, The Doors. . .

When I was a teenager, we had Captain and Tennille, John Denver, and The Partridge Family. How can that possibly qualify me as a baby-boomer?

They had far-out clothes and hair down to their knees.

We had feathered, Breck-smelling hair and wore leisure suits.

They came of age during the race-riots, assassinations, civil rights marches during the tumultuous Johnston administration.

We came of age during the Ford and Carter years. Remember those?

I didn’t think so.

Me, a baby-boomer?

Hardly.