I live in a nation I no longer recognize.
Simply hearing those words, without a glimpse at the uncolored gray in my curls, you know. We all know that a perpetually glorified, generationally narcissistic “Boomer” speaks.
We will know - that without a single requirement for actual accomplishment - each of us born in the fifteen years of incredible prosperity following WWII saw our birthdays heralded on the cover of Time magazine and our whims and opinions catered to by corporate America. All this attention was owed to the singular fact of our birth numbers - a fact to which we contributed not at all. We were born. And ever after we were celebrated. Hence, I am forever a Baby Boomer.
It is no mind-twisting puzzler to imagine why the “Millennials” (our children) and subsequent generations groan audibly at our complaints. At our inability to get it – the “it” being the reality of their lives. We affirm their disgust with every, “I live in a nation I no longer recognize.” They see us, at the very least, as unwittingly culpable.
The culpability for me is not the issue here. The ability to recognize, well into our geriatric years, the living reality of our children and grandchildren’s world is central.
We – all of us - spend our childhood and youth in history-shaping times. We’re not the creators of those times, simply the occupants. We carry the imprint of those years, and yes, they define us for life - though it neither excuses nor prohibits choice.
Hence, the Vietnam War is, for me, formative, not history. And news papers were my career, not just my preference.
After qualifying for social security, it’s almost inescapable to not live in a world unlike the one we knew in college. How could it be otherwise? I could neither have foreseen the rise of American fascism nor the roadblocks to hard-working, two-paycheck couples affording a starter home, than I could have imagined millions of citizens shunning life-saving vaccinations.
Nope, none of that was – nor could have been – within my ability to prophesize. I assume that my grandmother never fathomed a laptop. My mother insisted with some regularity that “I could be anything” I wanted. But unquestionably, her experience of “anything” did not begin to encompass my possibilities. My actual choices challenged that poor woman. It is a foregone conclusion that if we live long enough (another diminishing reality in our modern America’s healthcare system), we will live in a nation that we do not recognize.
Every time that I say (and I admit to saying it too often) - “When I was a Capitol Hill reporter. it was not like this!” - I feel less a warm wave of nostalgia than a tsunami of aging angst. Maybe it’s the very phrase, “It was not like this” - a statement of betrayal of the fixity of the comfortable Boomer life as lived in my “heyday” - that makes younger ears curdle.
That fixity of optimistic expectation is quite irrelevant to the bulk of the nation’s population - to virtually anyone too young to have celebrated the election of our first Boomer president, Bill Clinton. To younger ears those words shout: “I don’t accept the validity of your experience.”
Hence, we are claiming only the one “reality,” the one we lived when we were in the bloom of youth - and then, the subsequent betrayal of that reality.
Yeah, I get it. That might sound just a tad bit parochial - and ring more than a little selfish.