Generation of taboo breakers are a selfish lot

Sydney Morning Herald - Australia ^ | July 10, 2003 | Miranda Devine

[wtc911]

Yeah, but she was such an unforgettable pain in the ass...

[Zionist Conspirator]

Thank you for that beautifully thought-out and written post. I am not ignorant of the rebels of previous generations. I was reacting to the blurb on the jacket of that book I saw in a bookstore as well as various marketing campaigns being directed to Baby Boomers as a generation of proud and unrepentant Sixties rebels. And there really so many rebels in our generation that I occasionally get caught up in the labelling. I apologize for the injustice of this.

I know that not all the members of our generation were destructive. All one has to do is to go to findagrave.com and read the comments posted by boomers to such departed icons of our generation as Bob Keeshan and Shari Lewis. There you will find many, many people bemoaning the coarseness of popular culture and wishing that today's young people could be exposed to such gentle and uplifting influences. Yesterdayland.com is no longer online, but onc could find the same thing there: very gentle people of our generation who are still as gentle as they were when The Captain read them stories who wish such innocence could return. Or one may go to the Internet Movie Database and look up beloved Baby Boomer-era television shows and see the comments by very sane people who miss the "sanity" of those former times.

There has indeed been a tendency to depict all Baby Boomers as highly irreverent even towards their own icons (for example, the use made of old Hanna-Barbera cartoons during Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim"). And we have all been told that the first television show created by "boomers" was the irreverent and leftist "SNL." As a boomer myself I really should be aware that this isn't the whole truth, but sometimes I am overpowered by this image.

And btw, I not only not wild now, I have never been wild (my life is externally observed probably the most boring in history), yet I look back fondly on the Seventies, with all that decade's faults, as the time I came of age (and I still like to listen to disco, even though I have never been to a discotheque and would never go to one).

I must confess also that despite their faults and my differences with their philosophy that I have a certain fondness for the beatniks of the Fifties. They weren't nearly as atrocious as the hippies that followed them, and I think they were much more consistently libertarian rather than the hypocrites who "rebelled" at home while cheering the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China. And maybe it has something to do with the stereotype of the beatnik affecting a bit of a Southern drawl?

I love the oldies!

Thank you for reminding me that I am not alone and that not all of us were so destructive. Unfortunately, the destructive ones seem to have had much more influence than those of us who wish Captain Kangaroo were still around.

[Paved Paradise]

Glad you came through unscathed. I was wild when I was younger. I did a lot of stupid and crazy things, but some of it was truly out of naivete. I also bought into some of the clap-trap that was preached by the feminists.

But you know how they say our brains don't really fully develop til we're around 25? That's my excuse (hehe). I never did drugs though. Too much of a fraidy cat. I've had a lot of people tell me they can't believe I got through the 70's without doing drugs.

I guess I get a little ornery when I hear the blasts against boomers since we HAVE done good - think about a lot of the medical advances being made right now, well, guess what? It's US.