Humor – A Boomer’s Story

Humor – A Boomer’s Story: This definitely falls under the category of “A picture is worth a thousand words.” I found this while browsing Flickr; it was uploaded by loungelistener with the name “Al’s Hat.“

Al is our head prop man at the theatre. It seems lately that it’s always one thing after another in his life. Today John (our head carpenter and my best pal) and I had to do a work call at noon. While at lunch, he and I recalled Li’l Abner and the guy Joe Btfsplk, and thought that fit Al lately… one thing led to another, and this hat was born. John helped me round up the parts (and modelled it for this photo with appropriate pout), and I constructed it. Some cardboard, cotton batting, 3M spray adhesive, black & grey spray paint, an old hat, and a coat hanger to hold the cloud up. …oh, and some fishing line for the dangling raindrops too.

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Taken in (See more photos here)

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Boomer Humor? Maybe not…

Yesterday, I received an e-mail newsletter from BOOMERING_jaLouthain that said the following:

A few weeks ago, I was watching an episode of that crazy TV show Boston Legal. The law firm, Crane, Poole & Schmidt, was defending a radio “shock jock”. He wasn’t a very young man, maybe in his late 30s, and he had made a statement on the air that old folks (like Boomers) should “just die” before they cost the nation so much in social security benefits and medical expenses. The radio station had fired him because he offended much of their listening audience which was in the Baby Boomer category. Shirley Schmidt, (aka, Candice Bergen, the quintessential Boomer, born in 1946) defended him and he won, because the radio station hired him to shock and that’s what he’d done.

Despite the fact that I totally believe in freedom of speech, I was shocked–shocked to think that he had a point. Boomers have always been the darlings of society–pampered, educated, admired, envied, even patronized. But now we’re just old folks like every other generation before us.

You audacious Generations Xers, Yers, XXLers, and Zers! Have you so quickly forgotten that we’ve given you the Internet, video games, remarkable health care, excellent working conditions and infinite electronic and satellite capabilities? Now that we’re old and retiring, you just want us gone?

It’s true, we will put a tremendous drain on Social Security and Medicare, there’s no question of that. And don’t expect medical and insurance costs to go down until the last one of us is a flower child in heaven. But have a heart, “Younguns,” we still have feelings, and we hope to have a lot more years to live as your parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. And don’t forget the most important aspect of all this: Someday you TOO will be old.

While this is being said in a tongue-in-cheek way, after the things that I have been reading in cyberspace, the comments here have a sting to them. I’m particularly bothered by the comment of the “things” that we have given as well as the comment that both, Social Security and Medicare will be nearly depleted. In all honesty, I’m not sure what to say or how to react. While a baby boomer will find it funny, the fact that we also brought a lot of pain to our children cannot be dismissed. Many of the articles and blogs that I’ve read speak of the pain caused by broken homes as a result of divorce. Other articles ask what will be left for them after we are done using up Social Security and Medicare and who is going to be left footing the bill.

I think that it is time for the Baby Boomers to look at the Generation X’s square in the face and say “I’m sorry.” Beyond that, I think it is time for the baby boomers to stop and listen to what the Gen. X’es have to say – they are , after all, our children.

Your turn to talk – What do you think?

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Generation Y – Are they really as bad as we say they are?

In my blog A TIME OF PONDERING – A TIME OF RECKONING I comment on the level of resentment towards baby boomers that I’ve found in the blogosphere. In that post I mentioned that I had no clue that generation X’ers as well as Generation Y’ers resented us so. I am fairly intrigued by this and as I dig deeper into these attitudes, I’m finding that the resentment seems to go in both directions. In the blog Generation Y, the author (kfulljames) lays out fairly clearly some of the reasons for the attitudes and beliefs of the “Gen Y’s” and Steve Olson in his article A Message to Baby Boomers and Generation X puts the responsibility of the attitudes of Generation Y squarely in the shoulders of the Baby Boomers and the Generation X.

As I read the ‘Generation Y’ article, I can’t help but think that these kids have a point! First, the “loyalty” that we are talking about is very much present in Generation Y – the difference is that they invest their loyalty in those things and people that will be in their lives for the long run. From what I could gather in the articles, it looks like for Generation Y loyalty is given first and foremost to the family. That loyalty extends itself to a very old saying, “to thy own self be true.” In their minds, being true to themselves encompasses the workplace and the value they bring to the business.

Generation Y rightly states that they grew up seeing how the loyalty given to the business institution was rewarded by lay-offs, by sending the jobs over to another country, by raiding the retirement funds and depleting them. In other words, the business institutions expect the individual to be loyal to them but they do not give any loyalty in return beyond the paycheck of the latest pay period. We are the ones that need to understand that Generation Y is the spearhead generation of the information age and the information economy. They are doing what our great-great-grandparents did when the industrial revolution got into full swing – they are creating! Generation Y talks in terms of being a contractor rather than an employee, having multiple income streams rather than one company paycheck; forgive me for pointing out the obvious but, isn’t this what we usually call entrepreneurial spirit?

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WHAT HAPPENED THE YEAR YOU GRADUATED FROM HIGH SCHOOL? – BLOG YOUR DASH PART IV

This is another installment of “BLOG YOUR DASH” – by now I guess I should star calling it a “series” since this is part four and it looks like there may be more to come. If you want to read the other installments of BLOG YOUR DASH, here is the list:

• Blog Your Dash – My School Years
• What happened the year you were born? – Blog Your Dash Part II
• BLOG YOUR DASH – PART III THE ARMY YEARS
• WHAT HAPPENED THE YEAR YOU GRADUATED FROM HIGH SCHOOL? – BLOG YOUR DASH PART IV

To check on the events of any given year, I go to Brainy History and select the year that I want.

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Here is a short list of the things that happened the year I graduated from high school:

1. Roberto Clemente gets his 3,oooth hit
2. 1st scientific hand-held calculator, the HP-35, introduced for $395
3. 1st NBA to score 30,000 points (Wilt Chamberlain in 940 games)
4. 30,000 attend Mar Y Sol rock concert, Vega Baja, Puerto Rico
5. George Wallace shot and left paralyzed by Arthur Bremer in Laurel, Maryland
6. Chile president Allende forms new government
7. Bobby Fischer (U.S.) defeats Boris Spassky (U.S.S.R.) for world chess title
8. Summer Olympics resume in Munich Germany after massacre
9. President Nixon (R) re-elected defeating George McGovern (D)

There’s a lot to talk about here so bear with me. I’m from Puerto Rico so things that happen there or to people from there are important to me.

To this day, Roberto Clemente is a hero in Puerto Rico; he was black as coal, from a poor family and had difficulty speaking English but, he elevated the sport of professional baseball to an art form. I remember him wearing the #21 from the Pittsburgh Pirates making these unbelievable catches and always playing his best when he felt at his worst. Roberto always complained about chronic lower back pain but, the worse he felt, the better he played.

I only vaguely remember his 3,000th hit but, what I remember vividly was the day he died. When he has not playing ball, Roberto was doing charity work and in December, there had been a large and serious earthquake in Managua, Nicaragua. He organized a drive for food, clothes, blankets and such to send there and, from his own pocket, paid for an airplane to take him and the cargo to Nicaragua. On December 31, 1972 the overloaded plane crashed into the sea just after takeoff – Roberto’s body was never found.

The first time I saw the HP-35 was in my first year of college. I had heard about “electronic calculators” but, up to that point, never seen one. What we used to do calculations was our trusty old-timer, the slide rule. The slide rule has always been a ‘best guesstimate’ kind of tool and there were even competitions to see how close to an actual calculation result result you could get. For example, what is the most accurate result of π times e (3.1416 times 2.7182) to 6 decimal places? Then along comes this ‘calculator’ that gives an answer accurate to eight decimal places, all you had to do to get this kind of accuracy was shell out four hundred dollars! To give you an idea of what four hundred dollars meant in 1972, a brand new VW Beetle was $1,845.00.

1972 was the year that the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 and, lucky me, I was going to get to vote for the first time! Of course the local politicos forced me to show my voting registration card, my birth certificate and my parents had to vouch for me because my 18th birthday happened to be on election day. While Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States, it cannot participate in the federal elections; however, we do have local elections on the same date as the U.S. Presidential election.

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A TIME OF PONDERING – A TIME OF RECKONING

Dennis Prager, one of America’s most respected thinkers, wrote wrote an article in Jewish World Review titled Baby Boomers owe America’s young people an apology. This article is a group apology for what we Baby Boomers have put the younger generation(s) – our children – through. In his blog, Dennis Prager, Baby Boomers, and the Signpost to Hell, Ben Bateman adds divorce to the list of things that we should apologize for. To be sure, both articles make for interesting reading and gives much food for thought. I admit that I am fairly new to blogging and when I surf the web for ideas to blog about, I am amazed at the amount of resentment I see towards the baby boomers by the younger generations.

You can see an example of this resentment in Boomers set to retire; the rest of us set to hear about it. Check out the reformated art on the AARP magazine cover and, what is most telling – the ‘Filed under’ categories (Filed under:Baby Boomers, We’re so sick of you, please die). At first, I thought that I had just stumbled upon a small group of disaffected youngsters but, as I have continued to surf about Baby Boomers, it is clear that this feeling is quite pervasive and I am sorry to say that I had no clue at all! As I ask myself what does all this mean to me, I realize that I have children in their twenties and thirties and I don’t really know if they resent me for being a baby boomer. Even if it is right, it is still a very sobering thought to realize that your whole generation is resented and blamed for many of the social problems we have today.

I’m a guy, and as a guy, my brain is screaming “What do I do?! I gotta fix it! How do I fix it?!” The truth is, the more I think about this, the more it resonates within me. My sense is that more than being selfish, immature and not wanting to grow up; the resentment speaks to something deeper and more fundamental. Each generation has a duty and a responsibility to pass on a legacy to the next generation; more than just a legacy, it is a covenant between generations, between parents and children. The resentment may very well be the younger generation’s way of trying to tell us that they feel that we have broken covenant with them and left them to fend for themselves.

If this is the case, we owe them more than just an apology, we owe them the relationship that they had a right to expect from us and we never gave them. We owe them the moral plumb-line that we were supposed to be for them and they never had or never saw in us. We owe them the love they had a right to expect simply for being our children and the next generation. In one word, we owe them ourselves.

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BLOG YOUR DASH – PART III THE ARMY YEARS

I guess I just can’t stop with the “Blog your Dash” theme which I first saw in Lorelle’s blog Lorelle on WordPress.  Here are the other ‘Blog your Dash’ blogs:

• Blog Your Dash – My School Years
• What happened the year you were born? – Blog Your Dash Part II
• BLOG YOUR DASH – PART III THE ARMY YEARS
• WHAT HAPPENED THE YEAR YOU GRADUATED FROM HIGH SCHOOL? – BLOG YOUR DASH PART IV

As with many young men that have gone into the U.S. Army, this was only the second time in my life that I was leaving home on my own to leave the island (Puerto Rico). The first time I was fourteen years old when I flew to New York City to visit my grandparents. This time, however, the trip was much longer even though I was only going to South Carolina. Since the Army was paying for the tickets, they went with the cheapest fare which meant three layovers. A group of us new recruits left San Juan at noon and arrived at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, at three o’clock in the morning! We were exhausted, hungry and very cold – up until that day, the coldest temperature I had ever seen was 70° F (21° C).
The first two or three days were spent in the processing center, I remember thinking “hey, this is alright!”, boy was I naïve! After being processed in, we were bussed to our training barracks – and life as I know it changed forever! “YOU HAVE FIFTEEN SECONDS TO GET OFF THIS BUS – MOVE IT!” The yelling did not stop for the next 9 weeks – it went on right up to graduation!

Of all the things that I did in Basic Training, the one that, to this day, I absolutely hate was having to do KP (Kitchen Police). Kitchen Police is a glorified name for ‘kitchen aide’; the kitchen aide is the one who cleans the pots and pans, washes the dishes, peels the potatoes, cleans the floor and does all the menial kitchen work. The menial work includes cleaning (Yeech!) all the grease traps. As if this were not enough, when you do KP, you start at 4:30 AM and end at 11:30 PM – a very long day! Of course, since I hated KP so, I was stuck doing it twice during Basic!

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What happened the year you were born? – Blog Your Dash Part II

This is part of the “Blog Your Dash” series that I have been writing.  Below is a list of the other blogs in the series:

• Blog Your Dash – My School Years
• What happened the year you were born? – Blog Your Dash Part II
• BLOG YOUR DASH – PART III THE ARMY YEARS
• WHAT HAPPENED THE YEAR YOU GRADUATED FROM HIGH SCHOOL? – BLOG YOUR DASH PART IV

If you want to know what happened the year you were born, go to Brainy History and select your birth year.

Here is a short list of the events that happened the year I was born:

1. 4 Puerto Ricans open fire in U.S. House of Representatives injuring 5 representatives
2. TV Dinner was 1st put on sale by Swanson and Sons
3. Robert Oppenheimer accused of being a communist
4. School desegregation law, Brown vs. Board of education
5. President Eisenhower put forward a plan for an interstate highway system
6. Air Force One, 1st U.S. Presidential airplane, christened
7. Ellis Island, immigration station in New York Harbor, closed
8. Nobel prize for literature awarded to Ernest Hemingway

Being Puerto Rican, the event that clearly sticks out is the assault on the house of representatives. The plan was, at the same time the assault was taking place on the house of representatives, other members of the group would assault Puerto Rico’s governor mansion and take it over. Unfortunately, the Puerto Rico part of the plan never came to fruition because one of the members ran a red light.

As cliché as it sounds – it is very much true! The members of the group that were going to do the assault in Puerto Rico were moving the weapons by car and it ran a red light. The police stopped them and, upon inspecting the car, found the stash of weapons. Although Puerto Rico is a territory of the United states and anyone born there is a U.S. citizen, this one event threw the local government into a panic and they proceeded to implement one of the strictest (if not the strictest) gun control laws in the nation. To this day, if you want to legally purchase a handgun in Puerto Rico, it requires a license that can take up to three years to obtain. If you want to be able to carry the gun, that is another license that can take another three years to get.

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I suppose that a lot of people would have found the decision on ‘Brown vs Board of Education’ a more memorable event but, we never had segregation in Puerto Rico so this just was not an issue for us. The races had been mixing in Latin America since the arrival of the Spaniards 500 years before so, by the year I was born, and to this day, you literally cannot tell what is the race of a Puerto Rican.

I’m a boomer – what do I aspire to?

I love the title Angela used to talk about aspirations (Ok, As a Boomer, My New Aspiration for the Future Is…)! Even though her blog is very light- hearted and humorous, it got me thinking about what I want to aspire to now that I’m a boomer.

The more I think about this the more I come back to the one thing that did not finish, the one thing that was very important but, life got in the way. I never finished college; in fact, I had just barely started when I left for the army. Now that my kids are grown up, I keep hearing this voice saying “unaccomplished, unaccomplished!” like an itch that I just have to scratch.

The logical part of me says “are you out of your mind?!”; how are you going to pay for it? For that matter, what are you going to do once you finish? You’ll be almost sixty by the time you finish, what are you going to do? What if you can’t find a job that can pay the expenses of the college loans?

My gut, however, keeps gnawing at me saying, “take the chance, take the risk, you don’t know what you can find at the other end…” And it just keeps itching, and itching, and itching…..

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What do you think?
Are you thinking about going back to school again?
How would you feel being among all those youngsters?
Would you “go for it?” 

What happened to privacy – Part II

Here are some additional thoughts concerning privacy, you can read the first part “What happened to privacy?” and you can check the blog from Elias Bizannes that inspired my own blogs “Define Privacy – what does it mean to you?“

Part of the discussion concerning privacy is not so much what privacy is but, how is it achieved. Before the advent of the electronic age and before the Internet, penetrating the privacy of something or someone required a great deal of effort. Before, to do this, you had go to where the information was.

Back then, you had to be fairly motivated to want to go to where the repository of information was physically located. There was a geographical separation between you and the information you wanted. Once you arrived where the information was, you had to be willing to spend hours, days and even months wading through mounds of documents to get what you wanted.

A great deal of the privacy that we enjoyed was achieved by the sheer physical and mental effort it took to get to the relevant data. What the electronic age has done is to take all that away. There is no longer effort or sacrifice needed to get the information you are looking for.

Parallel to privacy concerns, another thing that is of concern is the veracity of the information you are acquiring or divulging. With the deluge of easy information has come the deluge of false information and outright dis-information. Where before, the repository of information in physical form, whether implicitly or explicitly, gave a measure of weight as to the veracity of the data, today that is being lost by leaps and bounds.

So the questions become, how do we protect ourselves and those whom we care about from invasion of privacy and false information? In an environment where information no longer has a physical shape or a geographical location, in an environment where the information may be completely false, how do we protect ourselves?

One of the things that we are going to have to review and revise is our attitude towards information. Because of how information was gathered and divulged in the past, we have tended to give it a lot of credibility. Consider the newspaper and newscasts of old; whatever Walter Cronkite said was the truth, whatever the New York Times said, was the truth.

We need to develop what I call a “healthy skepticism” towards information today. We need to develop and internalize some level of skepticism about how the information was gathered, by whom it was gathered and how it is being vetted or confirmed. Doing that will go a long way to curb the explosion of “trash” information that is floating all over cyberspace.

Blog Your Dash – My School Years

I found this article (Blog Challenge: Blog Your Dash « Lorelle on WordPress) browsing WordPress and it sounded like a rather interesting challenge. When you go to a cemetery, the headstones usually read “Born date” – “Died date“. The dash “-” is everything that you did between “Born” and “Died.” The challenge is to blog “your dash” or, what have you done with your life?

As I think about it, I’m amazed at how I can organize my life in my mind!

From birth to the 60’s – these are my school years. What I remember of this time was the outrageous clothing, the awesome music and those things that were happening in the mainland. I was raised in the Caribbean so, issues concerning the races were pretty much alien to me. Some events that really stood out and I still remember were:

1. The Cuban missile crisis – Although I was a little kid when this happened, I still remember the sheer terror I saw in the faces of the adults (all of them) around me. At the time, everyone really thought that we were going to go to war, a nuclear war.

2. The Kennedy Assassination – I clearly remember that Sunday afternoon. I was playing on a mound in front of my house when I saw our next-door neighbor run out of her house calling my mother at the top of her lungs. “They killed Kennedy, they killed Kennedy!” she kept saying over and over again. At first it did not register but, by the time I got home and turned on the local TV, I started feeling this sad heavy feeling as if a part of the weight of the world had just been placed on my shoulders.

3. The Prep School – I went to a Jesuit prep school from 7th to 12th grades back in the days of having to wear a tie every single day for six consecutive years. This in a place where the temperature fluctuates between 75 and 95 degrees F (24 to 35 C) and a dry day was 70% humidity. Did I mention, no air conditioning in the classrooms?

4. The Music – These were the years of The Beatles, The Doors, Motown, Aerosmith, The Rolling Stones, Etc. These were the years of music like hasn’t been heard before or since. The kicker for me is that, being Hispanic, I was also enjoying the music and the new sounds in Spanish!

5. The Clothes – The bell bottoms! Those miniskirts! Those micro skirts! The bikinis! The advantages of living in a tropical island in the Caribbean! Nuff’ said !!

6. – 1968 – What a defining year! The TET offensive in Viet Nam, Martin Luther King is assassinated, the riots all over the country (The Watts riots), Robert Kennedy is assassinated, Czechoslovakia is invaded by the Soviet Union, Richard Nixon wins the Presidential Election. By then, I was old enough to understand what was going on and I remember thinking that the whole world had gone out of its mind.

7. 1969 – We land on the Moon! For a space geek like me (Yes, I admit it, I was a trekker), it was an incredible experience. When you think about it, what was even more incredible was that the whole world was watching it on television in real-time.

8. 1972 – Nixon wins the elections by a landslide… Then the real trouble began….

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What do you think?What has your “dash” been like?
What about your school / formative years?
Were you a geek or a dweeb in school?
If you were to blog your dash – what would your blog title be?