The Luckiest Generation
It rhymes with rumors
Boomers are moving into Independent Living facilities in America. They are making documentaries about their generation’s musical brilliance.
They are becoming vegetarians, swallowing nearly legal magic mushrooms, and filling CBD orders down at the strip mall.
They will mostly die out before our planet does, one more way they’ve been lucky.
American Boomers have been the luckiest, wealthiest generation to ever walk the planet. They are louder by far than their two predecessors: the aptly named Silent Generation and the possibly overrated Greatest Generation.
They overshadow GenX like a Great Dane next to a Chihuahua.
Here are all the ways they have been fortunate sons and daughters.
The Best Music
Boomers grew up just after Motown and the Beatles, but they had everyone from Hendrix to Janis Joplin to the Grateful Dead on their playlist.
Documentaries like 1971 and films like Love and Mercy chronicle the genius of this generation. They produced millions of copies of vinyl records that now sell on eBay for exorbitant sums.
Andy Williams and The Kingston Trio have long faded, but there is little doubt Joni Mitchell, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, Elton John, and Pink Floyd will shine on.
The Best Neighborhoods
Boomers grew up in the 1950s, for the most part.
Their childhoods played out under still starry skies, or in bustling cities with safer spaces than we have today.
They roamed freely, many growing up on farms before their parents moved to the city for better opportunities.
There were the projects, of course, where countless souls suffered racism, clogged together in places like Cabrini Green. There were poor suburbs, isolated farms, and industrial ghettos — but for the most part, a huge number of people grew up in the relative peace and quiet and safety of the family farm, a suburban street, or a city block where parents all knew each other.
They knew nothing of Stranger Danger, milk carton kids, or school shootings.
The Best Planet
Rachel Carson penned Silent Spring in 1962, but Boomers grew up before her warning made waves. They breathed cleaner air, swam in mostly non-acidic lakes, and explored wilderness just beyond their back doors, whether on farms or in growing suburbia.
They could hear birds singing.
Yes, some places were already polluted. Lake Erie was a cesspool, not to be cleaned up until the 1970s after Congress passed the Clean Water Act of 1972. The Salton Sea was smothered by agricultural run-off.
But most Boomer kids had no consciousness of environmental degradation. They lived in fear of the Bomb for a while, but the end of all life on earth wasn’t their problem.
The Best of Tech
Many Boomers had to adapt to technology later in life but most of them caught the wave early enough, especially office workers.
Most of them don’t text with their thumbs like their nimble Millennial or Gen Z counterparts, yet they get all the benefits from the PC experience.
They watched the dawning of Apple, Microsoft, and the computer age, and happily switched from rotary phones to touch tones to wireless to flip phones, landing fortuitously in smartphone territory.
They got into tech before its darker side emerged.
This isn’t to say AOL didn’t host chat rooms full of pedophiles, but Boomers got the best of both worlds, tech-wise.
They got on board early enough to benefit from personal computers at home and work, but haven’t been plugged in from the time they were toddlers. As far as using computers and the internet, only GenX has been luckier.
The Best Paydays
Boomers are rich AF.
They bought houses when they were affordable, and have sold off properties at the right times. They purchased hovels in San Francisco that they sold for millions.
The herd of 60 to 80-somethings have pensions. Most of them can remember the days when there were Christmas bonuses. A lot of them got tidy inheritances from their Silent or Greatest Gen parents.
This isn’t to say many didn’t struggle during the 2008 Great Recession. Some lost their life savings. The film Nomadland chronicles what happened to the unlucky Boomers, but most of that shift occurred after 2008.
A huge swath of the Luckiest Generation is steering behemoth RVs to warmer climes in winter or mountain campgrounds in summer before they head back home to comfy houses they paid off years ago.
The Best Moms
Boomers grew up in an era before dinner was fast food.
Most of them sat down to meals with their families at least once a day. Mom made a nice breakfast, probably not consisting of Pop-Tarts.
Yeah, Tang and Wonder Bread and TV dinners made their way into American homes and sugary cereals crept into kitchens in the 1960s. But most Boomers ate pretty well, and still had eggs and bacon prior to the Food Pyramid’s dubious advice about “six to eleven” servings of grains every day.
Boomers’ moms didn’t work, because back in the 50s and 60s a lot of American households could get by fine on one income. Yes, women’s opportunities were far more limited, but for the Boomer kids, life at home was a lot less lonely than it is today.
They weren’t overscheduled, anxious couch potatoes, either.
They didn’t have to come home to an empty house, and if mom did work she wasn’t as exhausted or cranky: back then, teachers had tough jobs, but they didn’t have to grovel for cash in a public arena, as our own Jessica Wildfire recently documented.
The Best Newspapers
Finally — media. Let’s talk about what’s happened to journalism. Maybe the news got whitewashed in the 1950s and 60s. Hell yes, a lot of tragedies never got reported at all, like police shootings of black suspects or sexual harassment in the workplace.
Walter Cronkite might have been the most trusted man in America, but we know the CIA was up to some evil hijinks and was phoning up newspaper editors and feeding them horseshit for public consumption.
Then, Watergate happened. So the Boomers got the best news once they were old enough to read investigative reporting in relatively ad-free rags. Editors who championed the truth, even though it was still fairly racist and sexist, ran the big newspapers.
They got the news in proper portions, too, before the 24/7 cycle took over.
The news wasn’t fragmented, plastered with advertising, sullied by FOX News extremism, or turned into thinly veiled tabloid sound-bites.
Boomers got a coherent story.
Astronauts for Sale
Maybe the biggest advantage of all for Boomers is they grew up, at least in America, in a more innocent time.
Their teen years and twenties were scarred by Ohio State and Birmingham, but their families were intact and none of them had to fear a school shooting.
They didn’t get the praise of World War II heroes and came back from Vietnam wounded and wary. But we shouldn’t forget that all veterans, from the Civil War to Afghanistan, come back forever changed.
Boomers still had the luxury of growth, progress, and an ever-expanding human adventure. They grew up watching astronauts.
Today, we are growing up watching privateers engage in petty battles about who will own space as they try to flee a dying Earth.
Jean Campbell is a GenX who missed Boomerdom by one year. She writes humor, true crime, health, and the occasional atheist rant on Medium.