While on an ear­ly morn­ing pad­dle this week I watched a pair of young white-tailed deer lock antlers and shove each oth­er, prac­tis­ing for the upcom­ing strug­gle to find a mate. It made me glad I’m not a deer. In the ran­dom way that thoughts progress, it also brought to mind the ques­tion of whether “boomers” (like me) have had it bet­ter than sub­se­quent generations.

We were the “free range gen­er­a­tion”, able to play in the street, walk with friends to school, roam woods and fields, to cre­ate imag­i­nary worlds and invent and play games in which we, not adults, set the rules. The clos­est thing to the now ubiq­ui­tous scourge of “heli­copter par­ent­ing” was the point­less drill of ‘hide under the desk and cov­er your eyes’ in the event of a nuclear attack that Amer­i­can kids had to go through.
Com­pared with hav­ing to deal with today’s very real and obvi­ous dan­gers of cli­mate change, and the knowl­edge they will reach crit­i­cal mass in your life­time, the drill was a game.
And when we played organ­ised games, we nev­er had to deal with par­ents threat­en­ing and scream­ing obscen­i­ties at offi­cials. Today, it has become stan­dard practice.

          COMMON SENSE, MUSIC AND GRAMMAR

Instead of defy­ing log­ic and sci­ence, our par­ents embraced proven vac­cines that saved us from polio, whoop­ing cough, diph­the­ria and a host of oth­er life-threat­en­ing dis­eases. We in turn cel­e­brat­ed sci­ence and med­ical break­throughs that includ­ed the most lib­er­at­ing one, “The Pill”. It turned our par­ents’ strait-laced atti­tudes into “the per­mis­sive society”.
By great good for­tune, its arrival coin­cid­ed with some of the great­est bands in the world. Fifty-plus years lat­er, most of us can still sing along with the Bea­t­les, the Stones, Bob Dylan and so many more who wrote the sound­tracks to our lives. We remem­ber the lyrics of “Hair”, which some of us still secret­ly embrace as a phi­los­o­phy. I’m not sure any form of rap, or the pletho­ra of same-sound­ing, con­trived bands that dom­i­nate the charts today will clear that bar.
We learned gram­mar, speak in com­plete sen­tences, know gerunds from verbs and that “like” is not a com­ma. On the neg­a­tive side, in my case at least, that brings the dis­ad­van­tage of out­bursts of rage when­ev­er errors are made, which is to say in pret­ty much every news­cast.
Being a boomer can be very con­fus­ing, how­ev­er. Beset by hav­ing to keep pins and pass­words for deb­it cards, bank accounts and online access straight, we’re also under pres­sure to fig­ure out which pro­nouns might be offen­sive, and when we’re sup­posed to use whichever.

                 THE JOYS OF FOOTLOOSE TRAVEL

Before we plunged into the grind of the “real world”, we could hitch­hike around half the plan­et, most­ly unim­ped­ed by wars, and expe­ri­ence oth­er cul­tures with­out fear of being held hostage or behead­ed. We were free, as Oscar Wilde put it, to “Live with no excus­es and trav­el with no regrets”.
We kept in touch with home by pick­ing up air mailed let­ters at Post Restante that might have been wait­ing a month for us to arrive in a par­tic­u­lar city. For non-boomers, Post Restante was a ser­vice where­by a post office held let­ters for peo­ple with no spe­cif­ic address until they were col­lect­ed. And dif­fi­cult as it may be to believe today, trav­el with­out the cloy­ing pres­ence of  cell­phones, Email and What­sApp, no pres­sure or com­pul­sion to con­stant­ly update Face­book, Insta­gram or Twit­ter accounts and pages, is liberating.
Today’s young wan­der­ers don’t even have to reflect on what they see and self­ie. There’s a web­site with “over 100 cap­tion sug­ges­tions that you can use with your awe­some trav­el photos!”
Not quite on a par with Mark Twain’s adage: “Trav­el is fatal to prej­u­dice, big­otry, and narrow-mindedness.”

                     BUT THERE WAS A PRICE

It helped that most of us weren’t bur­dened with mas­sive amounts of stu­dent debt, although avoid­ing it meant work­ing rather than par­ty­ing all sum­mer. In what was by no means a unique expe­ri­ence, one sum­mer I put in 70-hour weeks work­ing on a rock drilling and blast­ing crew in con­di­tions that would (right­ly) not be per­mit­ted today. Anoth­er sum­mer was spent on a mid­night to eight a.m. shift at man­u­al labour in filthy, unsafe con­di­tions, and then Fri­day evening and all day Sat­ur­day pack­ing bags and punch­ing a till in a super­mar­ket. I don’t feel short-changed, but I don’t have any sym­pa­thy for Gen-what­ev­ers who think they ought to be mak­ing six fig­ures, dri­ving a flashy car and own­ing a house by the time they’re thirty.
I do, how­ev­er, deeply and sin­cere­ly apol­o­gize for our con­tri­bu­tions to the rapid­ly wors­en­ing world: cor­po­rate greed, sec­ond-rate to inad­e­quate lead­ers we’ve stuck you with, point­less and often unjus­ti­fied wars, and allow­ing pathogens to become pandemics.

All of which brings us back to the deer.
The one in the pho­to came out best in the shov­ing con­test, which made me think of him as the equiv­a­lent of a boomer.

 

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