Tuesday, August 20, 2024
Nowadays, everything and everyone is labeled, put in some category, some box, that defines us for most of our lives. If those labels do not define who we are, we do our best to try and change them; but usually we fall into some category or the other, and have to live with it, as unfair as it might be. I define myself as an Xennial, but that would make me younger than my children, and doesn’t work. I feel like an Xennial, sometimes I act like one, but one can’t defy age nor time nor labels. I dream young, act young, but I realized that those cargo shorts gave me away. I got rid of those pants, but everyday my body reminds me that I’m ancient. I guess my mind is in conflict with my body. What a ting!
All kidding aside, I’m a proud baby boomer! I believe that we were born at the crossroads between the past—going all the way back to when we started to think and walk upright—that we are the ones that have bridged the past and the present. We were born at a time when the world was renewing itself from senseless world wars, which caused the breaking up of empires, a good thing. When the frenetic cycle of racism began to cool down—that was a temporary respite, because it is still raging worldwide today. We were becoming modern in thought and technology and political warfare and protests and music and medicine. Birth control and women’s movements and major migration worldwide. Religion lost its unfair grip on us, freeing our minds to seek alternatives that suited our wandering minds; we made choices that we were comfortable with, ethical, moral, philosophical and spiritual choices. A good thing, in my opinion.
We boomers were more open to possibilities that were unthinkable just a few years before. We were better educated, thanks to the sacrifices of the greatest generation. We looked up into the skies and asked, why not? Highways and byways and cars and transportation in general were improved and increased at a rate unimaginable before. We became more mobile after centuries of sedentary living. We moved on and up. Not everyone did; some were left behind, the price of progress. No matter how hard we try, not everyone can succeed. Maybe it’s one of the laws of nature; I don’t know.
Baby boomers have lived through extraordinary times, and that’s not hyperbole; it’s a fact! Culture, science, technology, music, medicine. Extraordinary achievements in almost every sphere of life! We can’t take the credit for all; the later generations have been kicking ass. But we picked up where the greatest generation left off and put it all into hyperdrive!
Now we are the elders; we are disappearing from this earth, aging and dying at unenviable rates. There is a sadness there, but not for growing old and eventually going into the unknown, but a sadness for not being able to have the chance to see how it will all turn out. To see AI taking over and doing our jobs, changing the lives of my children and grandchildren, taking the world in a different direction, for better or worse. To see a world that will be unrecognizable in a couple decades, for the better, hopefully.
Ok, all this reminiscing is killing me. I think I’ll go recover those cargo shorts and sandals, find an old cassette, light up a spliff, and lose myself in thoughts of yesterday. Muttering and shuffling and talking to myself, but always remembering how great it all was!
“Yet ev’n these bones from insult to protect,
Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck’d,
Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.” — Thomas Gray
Glen