You Might Not Be A Baby Boomer If…

Comment-section gadfly gadflea gadmite gadamecium RickDFL wrote:

On behalf of the younger generation can I just say that watching all you old baby boomers re-fight the war protests of your youth, only this time without the cool soundtrack and hot women, is really boring.

I pointed out that I’ve banned people for less than calling me a baby boomer. His response:

From wikipedia, “There is little agreement as to the exact beginning and end dates of the baby boom, but it is commonly identified as starting in 1946 and ending in 1964.” So, if you were 38 on 9/11 2001, you were born at the tail end of the baby boom. Hate to break it to you.

Well. Wikipedia says so. I guess that settles it!

Rick – didja catch that whole “there is little agreement” bit at the beginning of your pullquote? Slapping an arbitrary date on something that subjective is inherently unclear and lazy.

Fortunately, that’s why I’m here.

Baby boomers were the children of the World War II generation. While they largely started having their kids nine months after VJ day, and kept right on breeding into the early sixties, their Boomerhood was a factor of being children of the “Greatest Generation”.

On VJ day, my dad was nine and my mom was five. They might have been old enough to fight in the Volkssturm, but not for the US. Demographically, socially and morally, I am not a baby boomer. Never have been, never will be.

But – and again, with apologies to Jeff Foxworthy – here’s a little quiz to help you decide what generation you really belong to.

You Might Not Be A Baby Boomer If…: you have more Clash, Springsteen and Sex Pistols than Beatles and Stones in your music collection.

You Might Not Be A Baby Boomer If…: you have never used the term “Camelot” unironically to refer to anything after the 13th Century. Or if the word “Camelot” to you means dancing knights who push the pram a lot, rather than Jackie Onassis.

You Might Not Be A Baby Boomer If…: the Teheran Hostage Crisis is more prominent in your memory than Kent State.

You Might Not Be A Baby Boomer If…: you think Dennis Miller was a better Weekend Update host than Chevy Chase.

You Might Not Be A Baby Boomer If…: “Quadrophonic” and “Eight Track” mean the same thing as “Edsel”.

You Might Not Be A Baby Boomer If…: “Woodstock” was a bird.

Carry on.

21 thoughts on “You Might Not Be A Baby Boomer If…

  1. I’m around two years older than you, Mitch. I think I fall right on the cusp.
    Dennis Miller WAS a better W.U. host than Chevy Chase. He had a personality and more glib in his little finger than Clark Grisold has in his whole body.

  2. Mitch the 1964 date was not chose arbitrarily, “If the gross number of births were the indicator, births began to decline from the peak in 1957 (4,300,000) but fluctuated or did not decline by much more than 40,000 (1959-1960) to 60,000 (1962-1963) until a sharp decline from 1964 (4,027,490) to 1965 (3,760,358). This makes 1964 a good year to mark the end of the baby boom in the U.S.”

    As a cultural acid test, I think “Start Me Up” by the Rolling Stones in 1981 provides the best test. If your response was ‘cool song, who are these guys’ or ‘my parents actually buy decent music’ – you are not a boomer. If your response was ‘the Stones are back’ or ‘how do I get tour tickets’ – you are a Baby Boomer.

  3. As a cultural acid test, I think “Start Me Up” by the Rolling Stones in 1981 provides the best test. If your response was ‘cool song, who are these guys’ or ‘my parents actually buy decent music’ – you are not a boomer.

    Swing and a miss, based on the deeply-myopic notion that there are only two generations – “Boomers” and whatever came next (“X”?). And basing cultural acid tests on music – whose effects on people are thoroughly subjective and emotion-driven – is pretty meaningless.

    My standard is empirical, black and white, testable – in short, perfect. Parents were of childbearing age on or around VJ day? Boomer.

    The case, as they say, is closed.

  4. But dating things by pop culture references is the ultimate expression of the baby boomer generation!
    I hereby propose a new definition. If you were born during the Truman or Eisenhower presidencies, you are a baby boomer.
    Which, sad to say, puts me in the boomer generation by around eight weeks.
    On the other hand, it also makes me one of a very small number of American men who have never had to register for the draft.

  5. Mitch – your the one who proposed a cultural test.

    “My standard is empirical, black and white, testable – in short, perfect. Parents were of childbearing age on or around VJ day? Boomer.”

    So someone born the exact same day as you were born but who has parents who where 18 in 1945 is a boomer but you are not because your parents age was different? Is a child born in 1955 to parents who were 8 years old in 1945 not a Baby Boomer?

  6. “There is little agreement as to the exact beginning and end dates of the baby boom, but it is commonly identified as starting in 1946 and ending in 1964.”

    Boy, I can muddy the waters here.

    I’m a year younger than Mitch, but my father was serving in the Pacific Theatre during VJ Day. Does that alone make me a boomer? Consider this:

    One one hand: I don’t remember Kent State, but I do remember Teheran.

    On the other: Anytime I see Sally Field, I immediately think “The Flying Nun.”

    On one hand: Woodstock was a bird…

    On the other: …until I started listening to the old KDWB “60’s at Lunch” show from 12 noon – 1 pm.

  7. I was born in 1966, two years after the boom. I hate the baby boomers even though mom (1947) technically is one. I also had little in common with the slacker Gen X. The broad demographics really only apply to the self indulgent residents of the coasts.

    Culturally defining events are really few and far between, VJ day, Kennedy assignation and 9-11 come to mind.

    My home town is roughly the size of Fargo, so trends arrive late there, if they arrive at all. As for music and TV, if you had any curiousity, you know about the Stones, Springsteen, the Beatles and U2, it’s a wash.

    Now, if you remember episodes of Gunsmoke, you’re old!

  8. I fit into both described “boomer” categories here – born in 1964 and my parents both served in WWII, although mom never left the states. You grow up with a different view of the world when raised by parents of that generation. The majority of the kids I grew up with went to see Santa at the department; we went to the VFW to see Santa. It’s tough to put into words, but you get a different set of values when you have family members that served during that time. I lean towards Mitch’s defintion more than the chronological definition of what qualifies as a boomer – you’re shaped by your parents, and my parents were shaped by WWII.

  9. Lori:

    There is already a perfectly good term for people like you. It is not “baby boomer”, it is “child of a WWII vet”. Why confuse the two?

  10. September 10 1964. I’m not a boomer and not a Gen-x’er. I don’t expect to get social security, and if I do get it, it will be so de-valued it will just be gravy. I live within my means, I save and invest. Besides a small mortgage payment, I have no debt. I plan on having to work the rest of my life because I figure the “boomers” who are getting old, vote, and want someone else to pay for everything will tax me to the max and not give a sh- – about anyone but themselves.

  11. So someone born the exact same day as you were born but who has parents who where 18 in 1945 is a boomer but you are not because your parents age was different? Is a child born in 1955 to parents who were 8 years old in 1945 not a Baby Boomer?

    Let me try a different tack on this.

    I don’t think the characteristics of a generation are defined by the time they were born; I think it’s more accurate (and interesting) to define them by their social context; their background, the expectations they grow up with.

    Being the child of WWII veterans is very different from being the child of the next generation older or younger.

    So no. In terms of social context, a child born to an 18 year old in 1955 wouldn’t be a baby boomer. Oh, they’d be part of the same time frame – they’d have gone to school in the schools built for the baby boomers, they’ll be drawing social security with the rest of ’em. But the social, cultural and moral constructs they grew up in would have been different. As they were for me – I’m neither a boomer nor whatever they called the succeeding generation (X?). I grew up with none of the expectations the boomers did – Jimmy Carter’s “Malaise” speech, rather than Kennedy’s “To the Moon!” , was one of the defining public statements of my childhood.

    Sorry Rick. You can not win this one.

  12. Mitch:

    Like any good baby boomer you want to twist and alter a perfectly decent social convention without regard to its impact on other people simply to satisfy your own personal desires.

    There was a period of very high birth rates in the U.S. that lasted from 1946-1964. To talk about this phenomenon most of us use the term ‘baby boom’. What do you want to call it?

    We also need a word to refer to all of the children born during this period. Most of us use the term ‘baby boomers’. What do you want to call them?

  13. Like any good baby boomer you want to twist and alter a perfectly decent social convention without regard to its impact on other people simply to satisfy your own personal desires.

    And like any DFLer, you sanctify arbitrary decisions made with dubious logic, and jam people into big, arbitrary groups (the better to exploit them, presumably)/

    There was a period of very high birth rates in the U.S. that lasted from 1946-1964. To talk about this phenomenon most of us use the term ‘baby boom’. What do you want to call it?

    It was, indeed, a “Baby Boom”. But I am not a “Baby Boomer”. The distinction doesn’t seem that difficult to me.

    We also need a word to refer to all of the children born during this period. Most of us use the term ‘baby boomers’. What do you want to call them?

    Call them whatever you want.

    I know what I am and, more importantly, am not.

  14. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that the whole “What is a Baby Boomer” argument is a nonsensical waste of time (sorry Mitch!). I was born in late summer 1967, the so-called “Summer of Love”. But was I a flower child? Nope. I was a child of a WWII Vet who was in his mid-40s when I was born. Rick has this one right.

    The whole Gen-X or 13th Gen stuff was crap, too. When I was starting out in the workforce about 16 years ago, some of my equally youthful peers were droning on about “our generation” this-n-that. Since when does everyone of an age completely relate to one another? My parents weren’t “Baby Boomers”, and they never listened to rock-n-roll. I am what I am, and I am neither a Boomer nor a Gen-Xer.

  15. It’s a long shot that anyone will catch this under an old post, but PBS has a documentary this week on the “boomers,” Wednesday, March 28, 8-10 p.m.
    Web link for the show is here:
    http://www.pbs.org/boomercentury/

    I clipped this from the site:
    “The Boomer Century: 1946-2046” is a two-hour documentary that looks to the baby boomers’ past for clues to how this generation of 78 million Americans will shape the future. Hosted by gerontologist and psychologist Dr. Ken Dychtwald, the program focuses on the boomers’ formative years to reveal the personality traits of a generation that has since rewritten the rules for work, marriage and parenthood, and is now redefining retirement and aging. The final question the program poses, is what kind of future will the baby boomers lead and leave for succeeding generations?

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