Craig Bennett Claims "I AM: Proud" to Be a Boomer

by Craig Bennett

We Baby Boomers have been receiving a lot of bad press in recent times; and, unfortunately, much of it is richly deserved. But I happen to be rather proud of belonging to that generation, even though I was born just a little ahead of its official beginning. Ours was the generation that came to maturity during the nineteen-sixties, a notorious decade with many similarities to the one in which we find ourselves at present. We are the children of what has been called “the Greatest Generation”—the generation that passed from childhood into young adulthood during the Great Depression, only to be confronted at that point by the outbreak of World War Two. Our mother was Rosie the Riveter, and our father, G.I Joe; and they’re a tough act to follow.

But our own young ladies took up the cause that their mothers had worked to advance when the war was over and, as they graduated from high school, went to work at many different occupations besides nurse, teacher, secretary, or typist. Our young men went off to college in unprecedented numbers, supplying the nation with many of the scientists and engineers that our governmental leaders were crying for after the Soviets beat us into space with the launching of Sputnik. And those who didn’t often wound up, willingly or otherwise, fighting a war in Southeast Asia that split the nation even more than the Civil Rights movement had done and was still doing.

Because we were also the generation that joined Black students at lunch counters for the sit-ins, quietly and passively hoping for nothing more than that both we and they would have our orders taken and filled as if there were no visible difference between us. We rode the Freedom Buses through the Deep South and helped to register Black people to vote who had been systematically prevented from doing so for their entire adult lives to date. And a few of us died while doing so.

And we were the generation that dared to question the wisdom, the morality, and the incalculable cost of the war in Vietnam to not only our own young men, but the entire civilian population of both North and South Vietnam. We were criticized for it—even physically attacked, reviled, excoriated, and jailed. But, in the long run of history, it looks as if we were not entirely in the wrong. If we had “won” the war (which was not really ours to win, but that of whichever South Vietnamese regime had succeeded in fomenting the most recent coup), Vietnam could have become one more source of cheap labor for Corporate America. However, we (and the South Vietnamese) were not victorious, and now Vietnam is just one more source of cheap labor for Corporate America.

But I’m not speaking here of all the sons of G.I. Joe. There were plenty who went off to put their lives on the line for someone else’s country for the same kind of reasons their fathers went off to fight the “good war” in the early nineteen-forties. It was their patriotic duty. Their country called, and they were obliged to answer. They genuinely wanted to keep the world safe from godless Communism and prevent the Domino Theory from achieving fulfillment. And if we ever encounter again such events and conditions as those that prompted President Franklin Roosevelt to ask Congress for a declaration of war, we’ll need people like that. Lots of them.

And there was our music—music that transformed popular culture in ways not seen since the advent of jazz back in the nineteen-twenties. With the popularity of the roundly condemned performing style of Elvis Presley, the door was pried open for the “British Invasion,” led by the Beatles and eventually including a host of more aggressively radical groups like the Rolling Stones. And there was also the folk revival: Peter, Paul, and Mary; the Kingston Trio, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and a host of others. It was we who bought their records, flocked to their concerts, and committed so many of their lyrics to heart. Popular music was never quite the same after the sixties.

Then there’s the so-called “sexual revolution,” finally made possible by the Pill, which eliminated the possibility of unwanted pregnancy. Young men and women could finally do what comes naturally without fear of having the rest of their lives commandeered by an unanticipated pregnancy, necessitating early marriage, probable abandonment of educational and career ambitions, and parenthood well before either party was psychologically, emotionally, socially, or economically prepared for it. And the ways in which this transformed relations between the sexes—particularly in young people—has been heartening.

I see teen-age couples, threesomes, and other groups of mixed gender that appear completely at ease with the opposite sex in ways that would have been unknown to me and my contemporaries. The stiffness and formality are no longer there. The goals, such as they were in adolescent relationships, seem to have shifted away from “scoring” or hooking a status-lending boyfriend and toward relationships founded on mutual respect and honest, spontaneous affection. Things appear to be enviably informal and casual among today’s young men and women. And, to a very great extent, they can thank us Boomers for finally scrapping so much of what was the product of a far more fearful, repressive, straightlaced, and largely artificial culture when it came to relations between the sexes during adolescence.

And there’s much more that I could enumerate; much more. But each generation leaves its mark upon the society of which it is a part. Ultimately, and in many different ways, we Boomers adapted. We fell in love, married, went to work, bought houses, had kids, and the whole shooting match. But somewhere underneath, a great many of us never really lost the feeling that better things were possible and that American society could live up to its own promise to a greater extent than it has managed to do so far… while a great many others of us have developed a very different conception of what that promise is, should have been, or ought to be. And each faction is still struggling—or perhaps struggling again—in the hope that that fulfillment might finally come about.

Sometimes, when I think back on those days when the possibilities seemed unlimited, all goals seemed achievable, and the world and humanity were both much more easily divided into good and bad, right and wrong, positive and negative, I become almost haunted by the eerily evocative refrain recurring throughout Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel: “O lost! O lost and by the wind grieved ghost… come back again!” But which ghost, I have to wonder. Which of those long-remembered, nebulous spirits of that time, surely misshapen and severely altered by the passage of years, would I actually like to see return? One? The other? Or perhaps, really… neither?

-Craig H. Bennett, author of Nights on the Mountain and More Things in Heaven and Earth, available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and the Firefly Bookstore in Kutztown,
PA

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