boomers

 When I think of boomers the first image that comes to mind is a Davy Crockett hat.  When you went down to the Kresge toy aisle there was a Davy Crockett section that took up half the aisle. As a huge Davy Crockett fan this made me feel, well kind of powerful.

The thing was, this is how I heard it explained, before us boomers, kids got whatever their parents got them.  If you wanted to sell your toys you advertised to the parents.  But in the fifties you had this huge bulge of kids coming down the pike, and having won the war the USA was fat and generous so there was a lot of money to made in selling toys.  And then you had that new sensation that was sweeping the nation, TV!  

And now you could take your message straight to the kids without having to appeal to the parents. You had to appeal to the kids, you had to figure out what they were thinking,  You had to pay attention to them, and there is nothing a boomer likes better than attention.  

The music of our parents was, let's face it, sappy, and kind of a mish mash, big band, crooners, ballads, the stuff of Snooky Lanson and Giselle McKenzie on the Lucky Strike Hit Parade,  And then suddenly there was Elvis Presley, bigger than even Davy Crockett.  

And then there was rock 'n roll, and then there were drugs, and then there was the unpopular war.  It was all about us.  This whole stupid corrupt world of our parents had to be swept away and replaced with oh, hippie paradise.  Had not one of those silly pledges in the Mickey Mouse Club spoken of the leaders of tomorrow?  Did not the bible say, A child shall lead them?  We were young and unblemished our vision unencumbered by the hypocrisy of the past.  We were something. 

Well we sort of ended the war, we brought in beards and long hair and got rid of a lot of suits and ties, we loosened the sexual mores, we brought in rock and roll which is still listened to by our great grandkids, marijuana is legal most everywhere.

But other than that we sort of became like everybody else after we hit our thirties, just going to work, raising kids, watching tv, getting old.  We broke for Trump 55 to45. though Trump, in a way, had kind of a sixties vibe.

But anyway we were a swell in the population growing older and people realized that there would be a problem for everybody when we started retiring.  We would no longer be paying into social security, we would be taking out of it.  We would no longer be working in hospitals.  We would, and have, become, a problem.

I've simplified a lot of stuff and I realize that a lot of boomers were not doing all that hippie crap, but I guess those of us who were got most of the ink (I can see a gen x, y, or z, or a millennial asking, Ink?  What do tats have to do with it?).  We did a lot of talking.  Like I said, we love attention.

Never before have such a large number of retirements and almost zero growth in the working-age population happened before.

Gee  I wonder where we could find people to fill that working-age population gap?  I wonder where they might be,