Once again the Boomers have plenty to talk about; this week the carnival has made its home at This Marriage Thing. Come by to read about graying folkies (true or false), the need for boomer activism, prostate cancer, love, marriage and more.
Category: Baby Boom
BLOGGING BOOMERS CARNIVAL # 85
This week the Blogging Boomers Carnival, number 85, converges upon Ann Harrison at Contemporary Retirement. This week it hits everything from who we are to when to leave a job to Natalie Cole with a touch of fashion and a look at women’s right to vote (still, by the way, not even 100 years old here in the US.)
Blogging Boomer Carnival #84
Well the Blogging Boomers have returned after a Labor Day respite and we are loaded with remarkable new content. It’s all housed over at John Agno’s So Baby Boomer. There are plenty of political links, but also some interesting perspectives on retirements and aging, spiritual retreats,religious belief, marriage and the 5-th birthday of AARP. So don’t miss it.
RETURN OF THE CULTURE WARS – BUT DID THEY EVER LEAVE?
Some very smart analysts, including POLITICO and PressThink founder Jay Rosen, are talking about the current Republican strategy in support of Sarah Palin as a "reigniting of the culture wars." Attacking with all the code words of past anti-"left" vocabularies. And here’s Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal:
I’ll tell you how powerful Mrs. Palin already is: she reignited the
culture wars just by showing up. She scrambled the battle lines, too.
The crustiest old Republican men are shouting "Sexism!" when she’s
slammed. Pro-woman Democrats are saying she must be a 
bad mother to be
all ambitious with kids in the house. Great respect goes to Barack
Obama not only for saying criticism of candidates’ children is out of
bounds in political campaigns, but for making it personal, and
therefore believable. "My mother had me when she was eighteen…" That
was the lovely sound of class in American politics.
When the McCain Summer of Love ad debuted, I wrote this – They Will Campaign Against Us Until We’re Dead, and Maybe After. If you watch CSPAN, especially Washington Journal, you know from the phone calls how much anger still exists; how much hatred of the generation I grew up in. Against our opposition to the war, mischief and outrageousness, and even more, our search – no, demand – for peace. Going after all of us, FORTY YEARS LATER, still works.
I guess that since I’ve been posting quite a lot about that time forty years ago, the memories are long on both sides. But Barack Obama was 7 years old in 1968. It’s not and never was his culture war. It is, however, the never-ending flash-point in the conservative playbook, a safe way to rile folks up and re-ignite the hatred and anger manifested in the 60’s and 70’s and again in the 90’s when that Boomer couple, the Clintons, were in the White House.
I’ve given up trying to figure out how to respond. Most Americans, including us 60’s people, love our country and loved it then. It was the a desire to return the country to its true nature — just as it is today — that drove us. But it’s far more useful to the McCain campaign to taunt us — and Barack Obama; and to divide us, too, with these ancient battles. The tough part is figuring out how to answer.
MUSIC, POLITICS, PATTI SMITH, KRIS KRISTOFFERSON, ROBERT HUNTER AND A LONG WALK
For weeks I’ve been writing about politics here, but today – some personal politics. They say the personal is political, and for me, the personal is music (and political) — and music makes all the difference — through time, sadness, joy, loneliness, political anguish, even spiritual connection.
I’ve started walking every morning – around two miles. Part of the reason is that I never get to listen to music anymore, so on my walks, I pretty much let my iPod take me wherever "shuffle" wants to go. For while we moved from Bruce to Great Big Sea to Juno. Then things got serious – an anthem really, of a time in my life when I valued awareness, aliveness, presence above all else: along came Me and Bobby McGee. Kris Kristofferson wrote it but this is one of the few videos I could find of him performing it – Janis Joplin’s version was the famous one. Still — it was this version, Kristofferson’s, that spoke to me.
A cut-loose road song and a love song too. "Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose." I remember my mother railing against this chorus — claiming that freedom was real and important and much more than "nothin’ left to lose" and she was probably right, but then… Then that road life was one I craved but never had the nerve to undertake and this song was my chance to travel along. Later, on Saturday Night Live, Gilda Radner did a monologue as "Bobby McGee" who had moved home, and whose "mom even kept my room for me." She’d given up. There I sat on our water bed in our Upper West Side apartment in our married, new baby life, and cried. It was way too familiar. Made me face the gap between what I had wished and what I was, that gap we all face as we enter "grown up" lives, with kids and responsibilities.
Then, around the time my walk reached Georgia Avenue, I traveled to London’s Grosvenor Square, and Scarlet Begonias. The Robert Hunter/Grateful Dead song included this description: "Wind in the willows playin’ tea for two; The sky was yellow and the sun was blue, Strangers stoppin’ strangers just to shake their hand, Everybody”s playing in the heart of gold band." It sounds comical now, I suppose, and it was really about Dead concerts, but I remember so many marches where people passed food around, each taking what they needed, and driving on the turnpikes on the way as we gave M&Ms to each tollbooth operator along with our quarters and even, at the first Clinton inauguration, being hugged by some guy I’d never met as I stood alone, close to tears (again) when Bob Dylan came out and surprised everyone.
Continue reading MUSIC, POLITICS, PATTI SMITH, KRIS KRISTOFFERSON, ROBERT HUNTER AND A LONG WALK
MARTIN LUTHER KING AND BARACK OBAMA: ANOTHER COSMIC ANNIVERSARY
I was about to be a senior in high school that summer, with my family on vacation in Provincetown, MA, at the tip of Cape Cod. All I really wanted to do was find Edna St. Vincent Millay’s summer hangout and the theater used by Eugene O’Neill and the Provincetown Players. Those were gone; instead, I tripped over a future that quickly ended my quest for the past.
Walking by a restaurant, we passed a TV sitting on the sidewalk, on a milk crate so everyone could watch. On the air: the March on Washington and the speech by Dr. Martin Luther King. I was transfixed. Living in a little town outside Pittsburgh, I hadn’t really paid much attention. Until that moment. It was August 28, 1963, and it launched the next phase of my life. As I watched, I knew that I belonged there – where there was purpose – in the middle of history. It was a profound thing to listen to this man, to see the sea of people around him, watch the individual interviews, hear the music. When people wonder how we became a generation of activists, I know that this was one of the moments that drove us forward, if we weren’t there already.
How beautiful then that EXACTLY 45 years later, Barack Obama will accept the nomination of his party to be the Democratic candidate for President of the United States. I heard Rep. John Lewis, so badly beaten in the 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, tell an interviewer that he wasn’t sure he could make it through his own speech — that if anyone had told him that 45 years after that Selma march he’d watch an African-American man accept the presidential nomination, he would have told them they were crazy. Obama adviser and friend Valerie Jarrett, describing what it would mean to her parents in an interview with our own Erin Kotckei Vest, struggled to contain her own tears. This is important.
Continue reading MARTIN LUTHER KING AND BARACK OBAMA: ANOTHER COSMIC ANNIVERSARY
BLOGGING BOOMERS #83: FROM
OK I’m sorry. I got so caught up in the convention that I forgot to post this. The wonderful Janet Wendy Spiegel of GenPlus is this week’s host of the Blogging Boomers. Take a look; you’re bound to find something — work, immigration, fashion, history or politics — that interests you – boomer or otherwise.
1968-2008 FORTY YEARS SINCE THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION IN CHICAGO AND I WAS THERE
I wonder if you can imagine what it felt like to be 22 years old, totally idealistic and what they call “a true believer” and to see policemen behave like that. To see Chicago Mayor Richard Daley call the first Jewish Senator, Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, a “kike” (you had to read his lips – there was no audio but it was pretty clear) and to see your friends, and colleagues, and some-time beloveds with black eyes and bleeding scalps. To be dragged by a Secret Service agent from your place next to Senator McCarthy by the collar of your dress as he addressed the demonstrators, battered, bruised and angry. To see everything you’d worked for and believed in decimated in the class, generational and political warfare.
That’s how it was. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, of course, on this momentous anniversary – when hopefully another, happier landmark will emerge in the extraordinary nomination of Senator Obama. I’ve been to every Convention from 1968 until this year. It’s kind of sad to break the chain after 40 years but I think I’m ready. I did a workshop on convention coverage at the BlogHer conference to pass the torch; I’m so excited for all the women who are going. Just as Senator Obama is a generation behind me – in his 40s to my 60s – a little kid when we faced billy clubs and tear gas in his home town, so are many of the bloggers credentialed to cover the week. I know it will be great for them and that they’ll make certain we know – in twitteriffic detail, what’s going on.
I know too that, 40 years from now, it will still be a milestone
memory in their lives. I started to write “hopefully, a happier one”
but despite all the agony of those terrible days in 1968, I’m embarrassed to tell you that I wouldn’t trade the memory. It’s so deep in my soul and so much a part of my understanding of myself and who I’ve become that despite the horrors within it, I cherish its presence. So, what I wish my sisters in Denver (and Minnesota) is to have conventions — happy or not — as important to their lives, sense of history and purpose and political values as Chicago was to mine. Along with, of course, the fervent hope that this time, there will be something closer to a happy ending.
HER BAD MOTHER AND THE STORY OF THE LOST BOY
Read this. Right now. The stunningly gifted Catherine Connor (that’s her photo) also known as Her Bad Mother, has shared a remarkable, heart-breaking story. Although, sadly, it’s not uncommon, it’s one you will NOT want to miss. So get out of here — go read this post.
DON’T MISS IT: BLOGGING BOOMERS CARNIVAL #81
The fabulous Blogging Boomer Carnival – the 81st in fact – has
landed here at Don’t Gel Too Soon. And a real feast it is.
As the Baby Boomer generation approaches retirement age, over 7.7 million business
owners will exit their businesses over the next 10-15 years. John Agno at
So Baby Boomer says this demonstrates a tremendous need for exit planning.
And while we’re talking money, two more posts this week.
This comes from Janet Wendy at Gen Plus: If, like
much of America, you are sick of watching your dollar shrinking, Janet Wendy at
Gen Plus, points you to an eye-opening post on what banks are NOT doing with your money. Oh…and be
careful. You might bust a seam laughing.
And this from Ann Harrison at Contemporary Retirement: Although
we’ve always been told that money can’t buy happiness, an increasing number of
studies show that, if you know the right way to spend it, money just may be
able to buy you happiness after all… Find
out how at Contemporary Retirement:
Boomer Chronicles has noticed something interesting about this
year’s Olympics: "A number of athletes in the Beijing
Olympics are older than the usual crop." She’s profiled some of
them. In the Northwest Arkansas area where
I make my home, that was the case with every community. Unfortunately, it is
also the case that every one of them has closed.
If you’re looking for someone
else to fix things, Laurel Lee at Midlife Crisis Queen says
"Cut it out." No one else can change your life for you, no matter how
much you pay them."
“Spiritual work is not something you can copy from someone else’s
homework…."
One of those things you have to do for yourself is keep a marriage going. Dina at This Marriage Thing says: "Counselors say marriages are
strengthened by honest talking. But when was the last time you
really communicated with your spouse? Here are a couple of
questions that might do the trick."
If that doesn’t work, and you’re facing the end of a marriage, Wesley Hein at
LifeTwo offers an important consideration: In a divorce, who gets custody of mutual
friends? This moral dilemma is discussed
in "The
Post-Divorce Custody Battle for Mutual Friends". Make no mistake about
it, in divorce every aspect of your life changes–including friendships.
On a lighter note, no matter what the status of the rest of your life, you can fix your hair. If you color your hair, then you know how the blazing summer sun and chlorine
pools can really fade and damage your hair. Is there anything you can do about
it, short of wearing a hat? Check out what the Glam Gals have to say about it at Fabulous after 40.
Our friends over at Vaboomers have an interesting offering too – a
kind of online mall they call "viosks"
–sort of online kiosks offering art, music, cookies — lots. As they put
it: "Vaboomer is excited to announce the Grand Opening of Vaboomer Viosks on Aug 8; A Suite of
“Viosks" with the best of Boomer reFiree’s original art, books, music and
education."
pensive one – about a Jewish holiday with a huge emotional punch.