Scourge of the Baby Boomers: Genesis of the Generation

The baby boomers are the children and grandchildren of the "Greatest Generation", the one that had to struggle through two world wars and a major economic depression. They were born to parents who had the intestinal fortitude and courage to not only survive those hardships but to go on and selflessly ensure that their children (we, the boomers) would have better lives than they had had. For these previous generations marriage was looked at through the prism of duty, obligation, and sacrifice. The welfare of their children was the highest priority and after overcoming such dire times they assumed the responsibilities of adulthood, marriage and family at an early age. And once you got married it meant forever for most of them anyway. There was no easy way out. It's probably difficult to believe now but society then considered marriage to be sacred and almost inviolable. Divorce should only be considered in the most extreme circumstances. Unlike today, saner heads understood that the breaking up of a family not only damaged the individuals involved, especially the children, but also was destructive of society at large. Consequently divorce laws made it very difficult to sue unless you had "grounds". People were still held responsible for their actions and to "judge" someone was not yet a politically incorrect crime. As a result the divorce rate in 1950 was an unbelievable 19% as compared to the 70's and 80's when it soared to about 50% where it pretty much still stands today. And no, not all those marriages were blissfully happy. But unless one of the parties was guilty of conduct that made going on with the marriage impossible, such as adultery, or mental or physical cruelty, you sucked it up and did your best. Our parents didn't have the time nor the inclination to look for their "soul mates". They were busy working and raising their children. And in spite of not searching for and finding their own personal "bliss" and "self-actualization", they still managed to keep the spousal murder rate to a minimum. Whereas if you open the newspaper today you are sure to find a story about murder in the family somewhere. In the 50's and 60's and even 70's familial murder was so uncommon that it still had the power to shock. Long gone are the days when you could let your young child go to school by himself (and of course herself) or go into a public washroom unsupervised without fearing that some child sexual killer will be lurking in the shadows.

And into this (compared to today) veritable nirvana were the baby boomers born. Most of us weren't rich but post war North America was affluent compared to what our parent's and grandparents had to lived through. We didn't have to worry about a roof over our head,or where our next meal was coming from. And until Vietnam there was no real war threatening the boomers. Certainly there was always the possibility of a nuclear attack from Russia but probably because I grew up in Canada it seemed pretty far fetched. No one I knew actually built a fall out shelter. And the only time I felt real fear was after seeing the movie "Fail Safe". So lucky were we that thanks to the miracles of modern medicine we were safe from the ravages of all those childhood diseases that previous generations had suffered from. Thanks to Jonas Salk we no longer had to fear getting polio and spending our lives in one of those horrible iron lungs. Medical advances also kept our parents living longer. I can't think of anyone who had to quit school to go to work and help support his/her family if a parent died. If truth be told our lives were pretty cushy and stress free. We didn't have to deal with step-mothers or step-fathers, step-brothers or step-sisters, mom's boyfriend of the month, dad's new girlfriend. Mom never wanted to go bar hopping with me (not that I went bar hopping)and though I wore a mini in my early twenties my mother never did, even though she probably would have looked good in one. She was my mother not my friend.

We had very little to worry about so we spent most of the time thinking about ourselves and about what was wrong with society and how we were going to fix it. In their university days boomers decided that society needed a revolution to throw off the shackles of their parent's generation. There would be an end to war, poverty, the enslavement of women, the subjugation of the black man, sexual expression would no longer have any rules constraining it and if the pill didn't work or you forgot to take it, abortion would be on demand. It would be about "self-actualization" in other words it would be about ME! ME! ME! Ours would be a "brave new world" aided and abetted by all those advances in science and technology, and forever young. Who could have imagined that it would turn out the way it did?