Changes


Reading time – 46 seconds  .  .  .

I was sitting in a comfortable chair on my patio surrounded by garden flowers and trees on a quiet Saturday morning reading David McCullough’s Truman and sipping my thick, rich, dark roast coffee. Then neighbors diagonally across the back yard turned on their music and the quiet was interrupted by some ’80s rock and roll I couldn’t identify.

Which made me think about Boomers.

We taught the world to wear jeans. No, young ones, before the ’60s jeans weren’t “fashion” or even acceptable attire except for cowboys and workers in manufacturing shops. And pretty much nobody ate pizza before then, certainly not as a food of choice on Saturday night. And the Boomers made rock and roll an enduring painting on the cave wall of man’s existence. Indeed, the music of the ’50s ’60s and ’70s is still being played and Beatles albums are still hot sellers, even though the band broke up at the end of 1970.

Boomers changed the world politically, as well. Young people in the ’60s and ’70s made the American establishment end the war in Viet Nam. They made them lower the voting age to 18 through a Constitutional amendment and made them end the military draft, too.

Enduring changes all, considered on a quiet summer morning, sipping coffee on my patio.

Now, somebody has to explain to me how some from the very same generation of rock and roll, jeans and Saturday night pizza are bizarrely devoted to further enriching the rich, impoverishing everyone else and paralyzing our nation.

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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue. Please help by offering your comments, as well as by passing this along and encouraging others to subscribe and do the same.  Thanks.  JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
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4 Responses to Changes

  1. Dylan August 17, 2014 Reply

    Capitalism. Plain and simple

  2. Jim Altschuler August 17, 2014 Reply

    If I had a clue I would share the answer with you … but I’m just as clueless as you.

    Enjoy the coffee and the peace-and-quiet if and when you get them back.

  3. Frank Levy August 17, 2014 Reply

    I am not sure there is a more important, or more perplexing question that can be asked in the 1st quarter of the 21st century. It is the question that keeps me up far too many nights.

    I would never have imagined that on the 50th anniversary of so many changes so many of us fought previous generations to bring about (civil rights, voting rights, abortion rights, school desegregation, the end of a war, marriage equality, legislation to end poverty, and others) that we would be fighting fellow Boomers to preserve.

    What went wrong?

  4. KenS August 17, 2014 Reply

    I’ve wondered the same thing myself. How did we go from wanting to get back to Mother Nature to using billions of plastic water bottles a year? I feel like we failed the generations to come.