Partial thoughts on the Boomer Thing...

I think I thought I was a boomer until I was in my mid-twenties.(Not literally, being that I was a baby during Watergate) but my disability meant that my parents and their subculture probably left a longer shadow than it would for more mobile teens.I like their movies, the music, and I still wonder what it might have been like to protest when that was seen as a new and novel tactic.my favorite sub-genre of women’s fiction still remains the kind where the innocent freshman changes after hitting Berkeley in 1968 or whatever, which was a harmless pleasure aside from the fact that I went into college expecting to be transformed and was grievously disappointed. Every experience palls when you expect it to be life-altering, which is probably something more average kids learned playing team sports or singing in the school talent show, but I didn’t.  I think I identified with their movements because it was dawning on me that I was in a fight that most of my classmates were not because they were abled and it would take years to start to get through my family’s emotional denial about disability. I didn’t have to slack, and I wasn’t yet in a position to turn my back on a system that I was hoping to be perfect and get in.(occasionally, a fatherly “free-market’ enthusiast will hope to rekindle that enthusiasm almost as much as his wife will want to hype me on a healing supplement or the  restoring power of the white picket fence and a lid for every pot.) Still, it did get old going to feminist events and being asked about “the youth” while being asked to hand out programs or something. Again.

I really do think that life is slightly simpler when you know nobody has a naked picture of you, and that people under thirty are too confused by wrong numbers.  I think these kinds of generational differences should be more like horoscopes or something—fun facts about the way you grew up that clearly don’t tell the full story about anyone, but if I had to take a side in this case, it would have to be the kids.  Too many  Baby Boomers seem to think about what they could buy in 1974 without realizing that a lot of the supports that got them through school might not have existed for subsequent generations.  Rents and tuition are both too high, the climate is in an emergency and the way big employers deal with frequent turnover is to work people until they drop.