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I grew up in Southern California which was jam packed with companies building products for the military industrial complex. Planes. Missiles. Weapons systems. My home town tested the air raid sirens the second Tuesday of every month. Our schools had duck and cover drills every Friday. We were shown cartoons about atomic bombs and we were told to go under the nearest bridge if we saw big glow in the sky. There were yellow signs on the buildings that had bomb shelters. Even the 8-year-old's could figure out there wouldn't be enough room for everyone. There was a Nike nuclear missile site a short bicycle ride from my childhood home.
In October of 1962 we spent 13 days in hellish fear waiting for the Soviets to drop an atomic bomb on our heads. We felt neither safe nor secure. Had it all gone to hell and had Khrushchev actually pushed the button none of the duck and cover drills we practiced so faithfully would have kept us from becoming little piles of radioactive dust.
It was not an innocent time for us. Our innocence was taken away before we ever had it.
I think about those days of duck and cover drills and bomb shelters every time someone talks about how easy the Boomers had it. And how spoiled we were.
Meanwhile....over in Vietnam....
Yes, I was a very quintessential 1950s child. I was a Polio Pioneer, listened to the nightly news from Korea on the radio several years before my family got television, had a hula hoop and a pogo stick (as well as strap-on roller skates, a wagon, and a bicycle), took part in drop-and-cover drills, and remember well the construction of the Berlin Wall, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, followed by the Kennedy assassination little more than one year later. That put paid to the semi-Utopian Baby Boomer Age of Innocence, without a doubt.
The events you cite and I also recall were a good ten years or more after the conclusion of WWII in 1945, however, and the elation and optimism of the immediate post-war era had subsided in fear of what seemed to be a very real, multifaceted threat to the Western World and to democracy.
But previously, despite the Korean War, McCarthyism, and the division of Germany and other early to mid 1950s crises, life in middle class America was pretty good for kids. There were so many of us...marketers took note, certainly, and so did television. During the war years, children, like everyone else in the United States, scrimped and saved, were fed and clothed with rationed food and attire, made do or did without, similarly to the children of the Depression. Now - shortages were over, and a new age of prosperity and peace seemed to be dawning. Kids were everywhere, so of course they received more attention than did the children of the two generations which immediately preceded them.
I stand by my statement that it was a more innocent, more optimistic time in many ways. Perhaps "more idealistic" would be a more accurate description, and good and evil were still seen in very black and white terms then (I do not refer to race).
But being a child of those years does not equate to having been spoiled, or receiving more than our share of the goodies either then or now. It just doesn't work that way. While our childhoods may have had many golden moments, our young adult years certainly lacked them, with urban riots, assassinations, and most of all, Viet Nam. All of these events and experiences, good and bad, left their mark on my generation and our country, and those influences continue to affect both my generation and our country today. Every generation has its joys, its successes, and its difficulties, struggles, and tragedies. Life is that way. Blaming one's predecessors for such problems is not the answer, nor is it just.
Last edited by CraigCreek; 07-11-2016 at 09:33 PM..
Congratulations on your well balanced and thoughtful description and analysis of growing up in the 1950's and perhaps in the early 1960's as well. You did an excellent job of encapsulating the spirit of an era - not an easy job and especially not easy in so few words.
However, I do take issue with your snide characterization of the source of Thingalot's views. Perhaps they are based not on books, magagines, and TV shows as you suggest, but rather on his own direct experiences and observations. It is quite possible, likely even, that people in his neighborhood and the kids he went to school with lived as he described. You could have pointed out that other people had other realities without the insulting suggestion that he is the victim of propaganda.
"Snide"? "Insulting"? Really? Not my intention, and my post and its tone were certainly in keeping with the tenor of many, many other posts by many, many other posters on a wide variety of topics discussed here. If you found it both "well-balanced" and "thoughtful" as well as "snide" and "insulting", I suggest you reread it, as these four adjectives seem both contradictory as well as very much split right down the middle.
My intention was to describe the highly idealized domestic world of 1950s television commercials and magazine advertisements - as others (but not I) noted, 1950s television sitcoms certainly portrayed this same world. I thought I made it clear from my lightly satirical descriptions that such a world never really was completely as portrayed, although elements of it existed in less rarified form.
Kids did play outside a lot more than is now the case. Moms did wear aprons and cook dinner most nights. Dads did come home from the office, and many of them habitually wore suits. But this pretty, peaceful little domestic world was not quite as sanitized as portrayed.
Kids wore jeans or other playclothes, often grimy and tattered from play, not Sunday School attire. Mom didn't accessorize her apron with heels and pearls. Dad wasn't always energetic, cheerful and ready to play with the kids after kissing Mom on the cheek and complimenting dinner. Yet this was the stereotype and the ideal towards which families were to aspire. To accept such a view of family life in the 1950s as accurate and entire would be a mistake. Despite the best efforts of Madison Avenue and Hollywood, it was much more nuanced than that stereotype. Yet parts of that stereotype were based in commonalities of that era, and that should not be overlooked.
No insults or snideness are intended here or in my previous post. Clarification and description of what I remember as a child of the 1950s, and comparisons of the idealized domestic version of those times with
the actual family life experienced by many of the Baby Boomers were what my previous post was striving towards.
Sorry I seem to have missed the mark for some readers.
The real reason to blame the Boomers is their lousy birthrate. If they'd maintained a high enough birth rate, there would be plenty of Millennials entering their prime earning years to fund the 30% gap in Social Security cash flow.
The United States actually looks pretty good compared to northern Europe and Japan/South Korea where they're seeing declining populations. Social Security is only a 30% gap, not the debacle many of the other rapidly aging first world countries are experiencing.
There would be no 30% gap in Social Security cash flow if the wealthy were forced to pay their share. The wealthy pay SS tax on earned income up to just under $120,000. They pay NO social security tax on any income earned above that amount. Most Americans must pay a SS tax on all earned income, so why shouldn't the wealthy have to pay all all their earned income, as well? It is profoundly unjust and undemocratic. And very few people know about this.
While the original post of this thread is reasonable, sensible, and entirely void of invective, it is interesting how intense the feelings can get when it comes to generational discussions. In fact the word "hatred" would not be too strong. Right here in the Retirement Forum, there was a fairly recent thread in which one poster ended several different posts with this statement directed to Boomers: "Thanks for destroying America". The Economics Forum has two stickies, the first one of which is entitled "Generation wars will not be permitted". Having read a few of the "generation wars" there over the years, I was stunned by the extreme hatred directed against us Baby Boomers.
It's amazing how Americans are willfully blind to the documented fact that the destruction of the American economy is the direct result of the abandonment of the American worker by American business, which created "globalization" out of unadulterated greed and now whines about how they have to stay global in order to stay competitive. Utter lies. We need to bring the manufacturing back home and severely penalize any corporation that offshores American jobs. Walmart has completely wiped out thousands of small American businesses and turned small towns into wastelands of unemployed people who have no choice but to shop at Walmart. It's like some kind of bizarre dystopia. Put the blame on those who deserve it: the American multinational corporation and the American Congress who sold out its own people. Americans need to wake up.
I disagree. The parents of the boomers had it so rough they made sure their children, the boomers, had everything they needed and a lot of things they wanted.
I think that looking at the Boomers, or any modern generation, through the lens of their parents' experiences makes sense. My parents were working young adults when the stock market crashed in 1929 and experienced the great depression and their families' struggles in a meaningful way. They barely got through high school. They benefited from the New Deal. They were city people living and helping out at home. They used public transportation most of the time. They married in 1941 in time to be separated for several years by WW II. After the war we were a family of 4 living in one room in my grandmother's house until I was 5 years old....there was a shortage of housing for returning soldiers and their families. We finally bought a newly built 2 bedroom house in the suburbs in 1953.
My dad drove to work downtown on newly built highways -- that made suburban living possible. Mom worked off and on or took in sewing. We walked to school a mile away and had classes with as many as 43 kids to one teacher. We, of course, had polio scares, A-bomb drills and tornado drills. Our school burned down in 2nd grade so classes were held in local church basements for three years. My dad found time to be the little league baseball team manager and part-time scout leader. My mom was a Den Mother in Cub Scouts. Our Boy Scout troop had almost 200 kids and over 100 went to summer camp each year. We did everything in large groups. I finally saved enough to get a Schwinn bike by age 14. My brother and I did not get an allowance. We got what we needed but not much more than that and were happy with what we got. My family took road trips every couple of years for vacations visiting relatives. We got through high school and then small public colleges. I got my first car after college. My older brother was drafted but I wasn't. That was about it... no frills.
My wife had a somewhat harder go of it as her mom died when she was 14 and her dad had more of a struggle as a single parent. We married late and had one daughter who, I guess, is a 'millennial'. She had the benefit of two educated and working parents, a comfortable home, good schools, gymnastics and dance classes, girl scouts, and a healthy small town upbringing. She has a Masters degree and a good job and does not seem to feel that she was somehow short-changed or owed something by earlier generations.
I am a Boomer who grew up in the 60s and whose families grew up poor in the Great Depression. My father was a career military man and my mother worked off and on for Civil Service. We had a basic house, one car, and took a yearly vacation. We never could not pay our bills or buy groceries. If a person wanted to work there was no problem finding a job. We did not own one credit card. The only things bought on credit were the house and the car. We paid cash for everything else. No one in my family went without medical care or dental care if they needed it.
Our wants never outstripped our needs. It wasn't until the '80s that people started accumulating credit cards. The tv show, ''Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous'' became popular and soon everyone seemed to constantly want way more than they needed.
Insatiable need was fed by easy credit and soon everyone was living beyond their means, strapped in debt, depressed and stressed, and barely surviving.
This, in my opinion, is where Baby Boomers went wrong and raised a generation of spoiled, self-entitled, lazy offspring who ''expect'' a life of ease and privilege without working for it. So they blame the Boomers for all this economic woe and the world economy has revolved and collapsed around borrowing and living beyond what basic things people need to survive in this world, much less flourish.
It's BS and I, as a Boomer, am sick of it!
There would be no 30% gap in Social Security cash flow if the wealthy were forced to pay their share. The wealthy pay SS tax on earned income up to just under $120,000. They pay NO social security tax on any income earned above that amount. Most Americans must pay a SS tax on all earned income, so why shouldn't the wealthy have to pay all all their earned income, as well?
Because the cap is on benefits as well. Only the first $120,000 earned is used to calculate Social Security benefits. Someone who earned $300,000 a year before retirement receives exactly the same monthly Social Security benefit as someone who earned $120,000 a year, despite having had a considerably higher income.
The real reason to blame the Boomers is their lousy birthrate. If they'd maintained a high enough birth rate, there would be plenty of Millennials entering their prime earning years to fund the 30% gap in Social Security cash flow.
Around 1958 is when 99% effective birth control (the Pill) was starting to become available (widely available by 1960-62). If it'd been available sooner, there probably wouldn't be such a large population of Baby Boomers
The big difference I see with Millennials is that they are not given the opportunity to earn their own money when they are kids. I was in the fields picking berries and beans by the time I was 8, and got my first hourly summer job at the age of 12. I never needed an allowance because I had my own money. If I wanted an ice cream cone or a book, I could buy it myself. By the time I was 16 I had work experience of working for a week at a time with no supervision and getting the job done. Kids to day have no clue how to do that. They have to be supervised every minute. My wife hired a teen intern to do some filing, and the kid didn't even know to alphabetize the files. She just stuffed them in wherever they fit. At least she showed up. I hired a kid to feed and water my animals while I was gone for a long weekend, and returned to find starving animals with no water.
We have written a bunch of regulations to protect kids and we have protected them out of all usefulness. It's no wonder they can't find a job. I wouldn't hire one if you paid me.
We grew up watching 3 or 4 TV channels, TV went off late evening so it was not 24/7.
There seemed to be more family time.
People had more in common because we didn't have over 100 channels or whatever.
Remember Dallas in 1981? That's all anyone could talk about. Who shot JR?
My own parents who swore they would never watch a soap opera type show were glued to Dallas and the like. We all used to laugh.
Our life was kind of like the movie SandLot. You went out to play and were told to come back for dinner.
It's sad it's so different today. This was in the 60's - 70's.
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Also - this may some stupid but....
