Are You a "Boomer?"

The Baby Boom generation is technically defined as postwar--starting in 1945. If you look it up you will find there are two Baby Boom cohorts, the second starting around 1955 is sometimes called Generation Jones.

If you look at the bulge in the birth rate over time, what you will see is that the rise in birthrate began sometime before 1945, and in some other countries Boomers are considered to include people from earlier years.

The next previous cohort is known as "the Silent Generation," and as children of the Depression.

I was born in 1942. While growing up my mother had always referred to me as being part of the Baby Boom generation, and so that is how I have always thought of myself. I now struggle a little with the idea that I am not a "Boomer," and I certainly don't feel like or see myself as a Depression-born Silent Generationer. I guess you might say that I am really on the cusp, between cohorts.

But consider this. Here is the list of memorable events for the first Baby Boom cohort (born between 1945 and 1955) from the Wikepedia entry:

Memorable events: the Cuban Missile Crisis, assassinations of JFK, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., political unrest, walk on the moon, risk of the draft into the Vietnam War, anti-war protests, social experimentation, sexual freedom, drug experimentation, civil rights movement, environmental movement, women's movement, protests and riots, Woodstock.

The comparable list for the Jonesers is:

Memorable events: Watergate, Nixon resigns, the Cold War, lowered drinking age in many states 1970-1976 (followed by raising), the oil embargo, raging inflation, gasoline shortages, Jimmy Carter's imposition of registration for the draft, Ronald Reagan, Live Aid.

The first list is for me my coming of age experience. Most of the second list feels less salient to me.

I was married a couple of weeks before JFK was assassinated. I was just starting college during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Vietnam and the protests against it was the context for that period for me. The year that seems most memorable to me was 1968 which saw the decision of LBJ not to run, RFKs and MLK, Jr.s murders, the Chicago riots, and the return of Tricky Dicky--supposedly the "New Nixon," but as it later turned out, just as tricky as ever.

So 1942 or not. I'm really a Boomer.