LEGACY BOOMERS LEARN TO TELL TIME AND TURN BACK CLOCK

Legacy boomers showed up early. They were the first wave of kids when Johnny marched home after WWII.

Families started between 1946-1952 produced future hippies and draft dodgers and leaders. Those are the people referred to when millennials drag baby boomers with “Ok Boomer.”

So the rest of us get a pass? Uh, no. And here’s why:

The Sixties had a slogan, Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty. Maybe you’ve heard it, said it, felt it?

Twenty-nine was the deadline. Thirty-one was a sneaky age, or was thirty just a convenient milepost?

Nineteen year olds turning twenty were cool, but twenty-nine turning thirty was the end. Thirty years old was ancient to the youth who disagreed with The Man.

Legacy Boomers vs The Man

Who exactly was this person? Who was The Man who sparked protest and change? Here’s a take you have my permission to repeat: The Man worked on the local draft board signing kids up for Vietnam.

They were the guys in the grey flannel suits in the fifties walking lockstep toward a future that promised to fulfill the dreams they had had aboard troop transports; the same dreams they had chugging toward a new beach aboard a Higgins Boat.

Instead of a sniper’s bullet capping their short life in France or Iwo Jima, they survived and got a second chance to make a better world than the blood-soaked sphere they were in.

Some of them were better at it than others. Hardcore guys knew how to lend a hand; Softcore guys learned how to lend someone else’s hand, skills they learned as a REMF pushing paper instead of bullets.

The problem grew when the rear-echelon people accepted hero status along with the shooters. If you didn’t know the difference, they were all the same.

The frightened twenty year olds in 1945 became the salty forty year olds in 1965; he was The Man people like Bob Dylan wrote songs of warning about.

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’

Kids in the Sixties felt the time change. Guys grew enough hair to call it a freak flag, and they waved it. Women learned they were more than wife material to lock down and produce children they would resent for stealing their youth.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’

The backlash of freedom started with guilt. WWII guys in Italy and France saw a different way of life once the killing moved on. They met French and Italian women like none they knew back home.

Ladies in countries once occupied by Nazis knew the drill. They were desperate and traumatized by war and death and covered it by being friendly.

Soldiers came home to women who were not desperate and traumatized and didn’t do the same things that passed for normal in a war zone. Everyone learned to toe a new line.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside
And it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’

Imagine the shock and resentment the WWII guys must have felt when they saw their kids get together and act like they just liberated Paris. Rootless kids celebrated life together by being together. From communes, to marches, to sit-ins, youth culture roasted the old guard.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’

Children of the Sixties are legacy boomers, the Old Guard today. Flower children like Guru Master and Moonbeam reverted back to Harold and Cynthia, got jobs, bought houses in the suburbs, and turned into responsible citizens.

Their adult children see them as a burden to the world, a resource sucking generation who can’t see the damage they’re doing by living a cushy life.

Is it really a surprise that the group who fought The Man to a standstill in the Sixties and Seventies, the segment of the population drenched in patchouli oil, would turn on their own kids?

What happened to legacy boomers, the freedom loving, Nixon hating, youth who turned into fans of The Man in 2016, and maybe in 2020? Who convinced the hippies and rebels to choose a leader with the sort of profile they despised in their youth?

“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” is worth repeating.

If that phrase resonates with you in any way, define Problem, then define Solution, and vote accordingly. Legacy boomers can either mail it in, or sound off. They need to wake up to the idea of time moving on, and lay the groundwork for a future that includes clean air, clean water, and a helping hand to those in need.

The American Dream isn’t limited to country clubs, executive suites, and power lunches.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin’
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’

It’s been written:

 “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Therefore, it is.

Dear Millennials, send this post to legacy boomers, to your parents.