Skip to main content

Baby Boom Last Year Sucks

Real quick light handed sketches caught
using  the Wacom Inkling.  I wanted to use
them to ink over with dip pen.
Boon Cartoons Boondawgoggle
 I've written about being born in the last year of the baby boom before.  By all accounts, I'd thought,  the baby boom normally is quoted as covering the years 1945 to 1963.  Which would put me as being born in the last year, and yes I turned 50 in December.

Well this morning, as is typical,  I was watching the Today Show and they did a segment on turning 50.  They touted 1964 as being the last year.  If you go look it up there really doesn't seem to be an exact consensus of the dates.  I really thought I was dead on.  Evidently not.

So there ya have it.  Another thing I thought I held significant distinction, being born in the last month of the last year of the boom all blown to hell.

Scanned image of sketch pad.  Here I inked
in the Inkling sketches with a dip pen.
Boon Cartoons Boondawgoggle.
I wonder if we are going to see a gazillion specials and shows on this event, the last boomers turning 50.  What does it all mean?  I hope if they do they point out that for the most part the tail end of the boomer bubble sucks.  As I've said before my entire life has felt as if I'm on the back side of wave, on a surfboard, paddling like hell to catch the wave.  I only feel that the wave will come crashing into the beach before I ever benefit from the front end boomer's push.

We suffered worst in the stock market crashes, since we really weren't invested heavily in the long up swing from 1995 to 2000. We've suffered the most by coming out of college when most businesses were squeezing out all middle management, from the LBO craze, leaving us nowhere to be promoted, since all the older boomers were stuck not moving through the middle management ranks.  We suffered  the worse in the housing market, since a lot of us were just moving up from our starter homes to homes for our families in the mid-2000's.  We are going to suffer the most from the eventual need to increase taxes to meet the social welfare needs of the front end boomers.  We really have been sucking the tail pipe of this fantastic generational anomaly.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Departure

My mother reached down, straightened my tie and told me to go on outside and wait by the car. My sister soon joined me, dressed in a typical 1970’s plaid dress, knee socks and black buckle shoes. The sun had just started to rise on this late summer day in the suburbs of Washington, DC.  Me being all of six years old and my four year old sister, dressed to the nines standing in the driveway next to the family’s light blue Volkswagen Beetle must have been a sight of curiosity for the neighbor out walking his dog before leaving for work.  He must have known, although we were in our Sunday best, church was not our destination. Soon our mother appeared dressed in the latest seasonal fashion and in keeping with mine and my sister’s attire.  She pushed the storm door open and stepped to the side of the small concrete stoop to hold the door open for our father to emerge.  He was in a brownish suit with a perfectly coordinated tie that was classic seventies, ironing boa...

First Sighting

By this point in my life I’d flown enough to have seen the world through a wider lens than afforded on a car trip.  I’d seen the tree tops, fields and mountains from an airplane window, but flying to an island, looking out the window and seeing effectively what looked like nothing was an eye opening experience.  Water is pretty featureless from 35,000 feet.  Just black as far in all directions as you can see.  It really drove home the reality of how huge the ocean is, and the world by extension and how small we are in comparison.  There is a lot to see out there and I was seeing a small bit of it for the first time. After five hours of the featureless, blackness our destination appeared as a disruption to the nothingness on the horizon.  The earth started to poke its rocky, tree covered dermis forth from the water.  The black water started to turn to dark blue giving away to ever lighter hues of blue.  The outline of the land looked like the pip...

GROWTH THROUGH EXPERIENCE

We returned to Hawaii several times after that first trip.  Each trip having its own unique twist or dynamic.  We were there when the Brady Bunch filmed their famous Hawaii episodes and played in the waves and sand with the Brady kids behind the historic Royal Hawaiian.  We vacationed with my mom’s mother, sister and my cousin.  At least once we rented a green VW Thing and toured the island, jungles and mountains.  Visited Air Force friends of my parents and my sister and I stayed the night with them and learned about Man O War jelly fish when we had to forego a dip in the ocean.  We stayed on Kauai and Maui and I stupidly passed on one trip to stay home to attend a summer high school class, then stupidly again several years later cut a trip short to return to my college girlfriend.  My last trip to Hawaii was June 1999.   It was my father’s last flight as a commercial pilot.   He was based in Honolulu and was a Captain on the 747.   ...