There seems to be two general opinions regarding this Baby Boomer Generation of mine. They are both wrong.
The first wrong view is that we were glorious idealists who brought about the end of segregation and ended an evil war.
The second wrong view is that we are and were a bunch of spoiled brats who, in our endlessly selfish quest for new kicks and turn ons and toys and debauched sex and rock & roll, are responsible for everything that is currently wrong with America, including but not limited to AIDS, crack, meth, crack whores, too much sex, too little sex, American Idol, SUVs, wussy foreign imports, The Dixie Chicks, Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, delaying the fall of soviet communism, causing the fall of soviet communism, Clinton's blowjobs, making Reagan look good, making George Bush look good, George W Bush himself, rap, the Christian Right, LaRoucheys, besmirching liberalism, bringing liberalism into being, too much Monty Python on KCTS, Trekkies, and you can't get good weed [pussy / acid / shrooms] anymore, they used it all up between '67 and '71, and now all the weed [pussy / acid /shrooms] smells like burro butt.
A big load of duck drip.
Contrary to everything you've been told, Baby Boomers did not all march with Martin Luther King Jr. They did not become Freedom Fighters en masse. They did not even rally against the Vietnam war to the degree the media at the time portrayed. When Seattle had its Freeway March against the war, the march was well publicized in advance at UW. Five thousand students participated, which the local news played up as if it were a youth revolution in the making. But there were over 30,000 students enrolled at UW at the time. 85% of all UW students sat that one out. 85% OR MORE of all Boomers everywhere in the land sat almost everything out you've read about.
Boomer drug use was no greater than that of the Roaring Twenties, when the drug war really got started, with what was seen through the distortions of the media of that era as an "epidemic" of heroine addiction. The popularity of weed was well known to boomers as having been firmly entrenched among the Beats, who were not Boomers, and the Beats knew they were copying behaviors stereotypic of participants of the Harlem Renaissance. The free sex was definitely more free back then owing to the lack of AIDS, which we did NOT invent or cause, but it was also more free in every earlier generation, as long as no one talked about it. And who talked about it when we did it? The media.
Now I will tell you the real achievement of the Baby Boomer Generation. Every generation before us had been bad mouthed in the media of their day. But none of them before had to grow up in a television age with only 3 or 4 channels, in the middle of an explosion of knowledge about psychological manipulation.
Advertisers used the fact that they could mount focused hot media blitzes on the few channels to reach all of us cheaply. TV was at its utmost effective. It was more immediate than radio. It was less fragmented than now and the internet didn't compete with it. While our own government researched and experimented with psychological operations techniques inspired by the KGB, the Nazi propaganda machine, and Chinese brainwashers, to wage the Cold War, those techniques filtered down to the corporations that collaborated with the government and the military and they deliberately employed them to manipulate the general public.
[Shown: A US Psy Ops insignia adopted in 1967, for the 5th Psychological Operations Battalion.]
The chief tool in all this was the same systematic perversion of
normal human socialization that made the Milgram experiments work. The advertisers told us day after day we had to get our parents to buy us the next thing that ever body is going to have to have. Be the first kid on your block... don't be left out... So I got chaps, and toy six-shooters at one point. At another point I had to have a coon-skin cap like Davy Crockett, or I would be a disgrace. Hula Hoops and Frisbees became necessities. Not knowing the latest hit dance was taboo. Learn the dance, buy the single.
Then the civil rights movement made serious headway, thanks mainly to older heads. About that time growing numbers of Boomers caught on to what was happening all at once. There was already a large literature on the dangers of conformity. But Boomers figured out that something more insidious than mere undirected conformity was happening. It wasn't undirected.There was a common feeling, that emerged over the course the second half of the sixties, that the civil rights movement was all about making the US a place where you could be free to be Black, i.e., a place where you could be free to do what you had no other choice but to do, but that it was remaining a place where, thanks to government meddling & demands of employers and schools & reactionary social pressures bolstered by media in the pocket of corporations, there was barely any freedom to make choices.
The absurdity of the situation first became evident when the same media that brought us the Beatles, also portrayed us as dangerous filthy radical revolutionaries when our guys started copying the Beatles and growing their hair longer. Today it may all seem silly, but remember that we Boomers grew up being told that WWII was fought to make us free. If my freedom is only to wear a crewcut and slacks uniform & if a simple frivolous choice like choosing to grow my hair two inches longer than boot camp style is going to get me branded as an enemy of the state and I'm not going to be able to get a job and my school is going to suspend me, what's going to happen to me if I choose to do something significant that isn't universally approved? I'm only free to do what 100% of America says I can?
So a bunch of us tested that out. And we found out you could get your skull cracked if you did virtually anything out of line. Like for instance oppose a war instead of support it.
The opposition to the Vietnam War was partly about the draft. It was partly about the war itself, that it went on too long and it was pointless. But deep down it was a generation's test of the promise of freedom in this country, and the country failed. "You call this a free country and say we have free speech, but when I take you up on that and exercise my right to speak out against the war, you call up the National Guard." It was a test. It was about an entire generation being told that you're free to be any color you happen to be, but don't let it go to your heads.
So we let it go to our heads. There were excesses, but bear in mind that the excess were all committed by a minority. The only thing the general majority of Boomers had in common was that we all knew how absurd the media's coverage of it all was. That was the glue that held us together.
The sense of the absurdity of the media's manipulation of us coupled with its simultaneous stereotyping around the outcomes of its manipulations, was encapsulated in the ironic phrase, "Stop making sense." The media was trying to make our sense for us. Even people who didn't do drugs, like me, knew what it was the drug use was rebelling against. Everyone was looking for another channel, one that wasn't owned and programmed by the Man.
Then, in the late sixties, Boomers learned how to turn the tables on the corporations and the government and the media, by using the power of the media itself, stealing the show and exploiting the media right back.
Our great achievement was half shaking off the media's grip on us. We didn't completely shake them off. But we made a start. And every generation after us has had it that much easier to see through the media lies about them and to shake off the continuing efforts to manipulate them. Because we created a template of attitudes and tricks to cope.
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