OK, Boomer

It’s time for that annual looking back at the past year and reminiscing. I am going back even farther. I have been encouraged to go back farther because apparently Millenials and younger people have been disparaging my generation, Baby Boomers. They are blaming us for leaving them a world in terrible shape.  Some of that is justified, but my generation is responsible for a lot of good things too!

Yesterday I watched CBS Sunday Morning. They did their annual look back at noteworthy people who left our world in 2019.  Diahann Carrol was pictured. She was famous because she was the first female black star of a TV series.  Yes, really.  Hard to believe, right? But there were so many changes in the ’60s. Think back to before that.

Lucy and Desi slept in twin beds! So did Rob and Laura Petrie.  Bridget Loves Bernie was a groundbreaking TV comedy about a Jewish man and a Catholic girl getting married. Oh, the horror!  How about the controversy about the sound of a flushing toilet in All in the Family? I am pretty sure people have been pooping for generations.  There was much ado about Mary Tyler Moore (as Mary Richards) sleeping overnight at her boyfriend’s house. Mary was a successful professional woman. Why shouldn’t she?

When I started elementary school, we were forced to read the Bible every day, out loud to the rest of the class.  The girls in high school business classes were taught to tie ties for their future male bosses.  At the same time, girls were forced to wear skirts or dresses, even in the dead of winter. In the South, when I was a child, black people had to drink from different fountains and sit in different sections of movie theaters and, most famously, at the back of the bus. Now we have had a black president!  Being homosexual, back then, was something to be hidden and ashamed of. Today, homosexuals can legally marry.

My generation, I believe, started all of these changes. It was the boomers who challenged the status quo. It was us who said we don’t have to do it the way it has always been done.  We changed music. We changed fashion. Hey, we even stopped a war!

Were we perfect? Of course not. Have things that we started gone too far? Maybe. Personally, I don’t like the coarseness of society today. It’s one thing to have the freedom to throw around f-bombs in public. The consequence is that families with small children have to hear it all around them. The Lehigh Valley Mall on a Friday night!

So there you have it! As The Who said “Talkin’ Bout My Generation!”  So the next time I hear someone condescendingly say “Ok, Boomer”, I will just smile to myself and think yes…we are OK!