Baby Boomers Are No Longer Young, But Very Old
Considering the number of web sites that give statistics and discuss details down to the number who are dieing per hour, one might say that the Baby Boomers industry is still alive and well. Sadly though, this is despite the fact that the ranks are thinned every few seconds. Death is inescapable and imminent.
Perhaps, when all are dead the phenomenon will finally die too, and become history. Until that time in the not too distant future the issue is still alive and more in the news now that it was in the days when boomers were bawling in cots, or playing with toys now considered illegal.
This is because of current problems caused by huge numbers of retirements, pensions, applications for medical help and funerals. Now near the end of their game, dismissed as irrelevant by younger generations they are making late calls on the attention of the world. Demography is in a dither.
There are those who believe that the phenomenon began in 1946, in America. Such is not the case because World War 11 was indeed a world wide war, and even before America joined the war family disruptions and political conflicts had stimulated rapid acceleration in the numbers of conceptions and births right across the world. A generation was being born that would be required to adapt to more changes in the course of their lives than any generation before them.
A baby born in London, or Berlin, in 1943 would almost certainly be bombed. Its diet would be seriously curtailed by rationing and its mother would, in most cases be temporarily a single working mother, since her husband would be away involved in harsh military conditions.
The baby would be one of many, probably born not as a result of artificial insemination, but of a hastily grasped opportunity for passionate embraces. Though the infant would be carefully nurtured it would not be the central focus of a worried couple, but a child expected to fit in with other pressing concerns facing its parents.
Soon the tables would be turned. The infants, now post modern young adults, would turn upon their parents, accusing them of war mongering. In America teenagers wandered off bare footed to music festivals and collected their clothes from downtown charity stalls. In China, Red Guards marched their parents off to re-education camps.
The post modern era was defined as one in which long held beliefs and values were up-ended. Taboos were no longer sins, but rights. Cherished ideals were ridiculed or vilified. Most of what happened behind the Iron and Bamboo curtains was obscured for Westerners. They got on with being well off, eventually cutting their hair as they took advantage of enormous opportunities for wealth created by population growth.
Sea changes in the nineteen nineties brought yet more dramatic changes. Feminism had brought down gender barriers, and on a smaller scale the Berlin wall was down, the Soviet Union disintegrated. Globalization had become a buzz word. Economic power was shifting rapidly from the West to The East as Indians and Chinese worked much harder for much less.
Most dramatic of all, telephones attached to walls, still evident in some movies, appear obsolete and in 1991 the Internet changed everything, for good. Many baby boomers try valiantly to cope with the latest gadgets, but soon it will be over for them. Life has gone by in a wink. Nanotechnology has altered the human perspective. Yet they remain a generation that has wrought immeasurable change on the Planet, very largely for good.
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