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No, I did not say any of those things.

So, you did not send that line to me? Nor did you say the following?

Ok you win. The Boomers are the most wonderful generation ever.

My bad, I must have misread them elsewhere. I know that you did not say any of the rest of the things I covered in my rant but, those are common misperceptions about boomers that I frequently encounter here at FR. That's why I responded as I did.

You tell me not to take things so personally but, in my experience on this website, everytime someone posts a generational story, baby boomers are characterized as being the worst, most useless, selfish nonentities that ever walked the face of the earth. So, not believing that to be true, I am going to take it personally. Whether by choice, or by a circumstance of birth, when people take a broad brush to tar all boomers, it includes me.

Finally, demographics are just numbers and numbers can be turned, twisted and manupulated to show whatever anyone wants to show. When it comes to "statistics" such as demographics, those are the very first things I discount. I look more at history and behavior.

In the mid- to late-50s, the Beatniks were a relatively significant movement in many of the major cities of the eastern seaboard (NYC and Boston to name two major centers) as well as LA and San Francisco on on the west coast. They may have spread as far north as Seattle, but I am not certain of that. From the coffeehouses of the 50s, many of the Beatniks graduated from college, then took their radical ideas of "Question Everything" as well as their embrace of socialism into college campuses where they became professors and assistant professors; disseminating their ideas to the future hippies of the day. This is where the hippies acquired a lot of their radical ideas. In the 50s, socialism was considered a "trendy" philosophy that sucked in many elites of the day. The McCarthy hearings caught up many Hollyweird celebrities who had no clue what socialism was about, but joined up because it was a trendy thing to do.

The Beatniks did not becaome a movement the size of the hippie movement because the social mores of the 50s kept them relatively suppressed in public. However, those same mores did not control what they did in college classrooms and that's where the hippies were exposed to them. The rest we know.