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Fairytales for a Practical Princess - 2008-11-30
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2:05 p.m. - 2003-08-12
Before Trinity accidentally maimed herself (do drop by her place and offer hugs, it's a bad 'un) her previous entry made mention of the technical definition of a Baby Boomer. Yes, it's true, statistically I am included in the biggest bulge of birthin' this country has ever seen, but I've never FELT like a Boomer nor do I think of myself and those around my age as part of the Post-WWII Nookie and Baby Fest. Basically we stragglers (1958-1966) are a generation without a label. We followed the pig through the python all our lives. Neither Boomers nor X-ers, we are here, voiceless, unsung, and completely without the eye-catching style of those who bracket us and define pop culture with their antics and fads. Frankly, I think we got a crappy deal. What are the markers and milestones of our youth and young adulthood? The Energy Crisis? Watergate? The Second Stock Market Crash? Nobody ever gets misty eyed when John Dean or every other day gas rationing come into the conversation. The Recession was just a nasty slog through several years of un- and under-employment, spiraling interest rates, and union busting desperation. Unlike the Great Depression, we who muddled through the Recession had no grand works of literature or searing photographs to limn our misery. Steinbeck wrote no "Grapes of Wrath-1979". Margaret Bourke-White never shot bleak black and whites of us standing in line at the Unemployment Office or of third shift 7-11 workers with Master's Degrees. Who ARE we? And what did we get from our draw in the timeline? The Boomers had Free Love. We had Herpes and AIDS. The X-ers had Grunge. We had skinny ties and Sassoon jeans. The Boomers had Janice and Jimi, the Stones and the Beatles. We had Marshall Tucker, Air Supply, and Rick Dees singing "Disco Duck". The X-ers had "Friends", "Seinfeld", and MTV. We had Kotter's Sweathogs and the Fonz. Is the great and lasting contribution of our generation to be "H R Puffinstuff"? We went to worn down schools and were taught by burnt-out teachers, both the buildings and the educators were exhausted from the mighty Boomers. Teaching methods were sloppy and half hearted. The Boomers had rebelled against the status quo and demanded more from school than the 3 R’s, but they had been and gone before a lot of that junk could be implemented and instead it was us who got it in the teeth. Remember New Math and Phonetic Spelling? We lived fractured lives of divorced parents, confused gender roles, and tired cynicism. Even the houses we lived in reflected our displacement and lack of definition. What is a split-level but a home which cannot make up its mind? As soon as you walked in the door you had to choose; either ascend to something not lofty enough to be called a second floor, a space with “areas” rather than rooms (ie: the dining area, the living area) or you slunk downstairs to be half buried in a rec room which got neither light nor air from the wee ground level windows near the ceiling. Like the Whoos in Whooville I think it’s time for us stragglers to band together and lift our voices. To demand we be heard as people in our own right and not just the change-of-life accident children tacked onto the Boomers for lack of a better place to put us. Yes, stragglers sing with me now... “We are here! We are here!” And we could use a name. ~LA Today’s Pick: “Somewhere in America” by Survivor
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