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If you were born from 1946 through 1964, you are a boomer, a member of the most intriguing population this country has ever known. A new study invites you to look into your future for an in-depth view of how you, and your diverse group of cohorts, are likely to adapt as you grow old. "Boomers: The Next 20 years, Ecologies of Risk" is the title of a report from the Institute for the Future and the MetLife Mature Market Institute. It predicts some wondrous things as well as presenting some cautionary issues. Overall, it is quite a positive picture....

I guess I'm not the only one wishing Boomers would just shuffle off quietly to Hippie Valhalla. The whiniest, most self-absorbed generation is apparently wearing out its welcome among others as well. And with good reason. This is the generation that brought us Viagra commercials on TV during family hours, introducing our youngsters new and interesting phrases. This is the generation that mainstreamed porn, marketed slutwear to our daughters and encouraged our boys to be pimps. I know, boomers are not the authors of our current social dysfunctions, but they were the libertines who stormed Bastille, unleashing the corrosive social...

Carol Fisher thought she did everything right to prepare for retirement--and to live her dream of seeing the country from a recreational vehicle. She and her husband, Larry, worked at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren. They planned to sell their log home in King George County after they retired and live off the interest, along with their pensions. But when Larry Fisher died two years after the couple began traveling, Carol Fisher's dreams ended, too. ------------------------------------------------------ She also had a decade-long spending spree, buying souvenirs from New York to Nova Scotia. When gas and grocery prices soared, she...

Here is how our baby-boom generation solves problems: -- Recently, George Bush went to Saudi Arabia to ask the ruling House of Saud to pump more oil. That request had about as much chance of success as the Democratic-led congressional effort to “sue” the Saudis in American courts for their selfish “price-gouging.” The current debate about energy in the United States has devolved into doing the same old thing—consume, don’t produce and complain—while somehow expecting different results. Congress talks endlessly about the bright future of wind, solar and new fuels, while it stops us from getting through the messy present...

Recently, I reviewed a new American history anthology. I was amused to find included in the book a generous selection of 1960s protest songs. Apparently, lyrics by Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Country Joe MacDonald are making their way into the academic canon, and at least some professors seem to think these are “must-read” documents for our students. Well, maybe so. But if one really wants song lyrics that reflect the 1960s, I'd point my students instead to some of the songs from math professor and musical satirist Tom Lehrer. In terms of insight into America, Lehrer's “National...

NEW YORK - The economic downturn is hitting roughly one in 10 middle-aged and older Americans especially hard, compelling them to borrow money for everyday living expenses and to seek help from family, friends or charities, according to a survey released Tuesday by the AARP. In the telephone survey of 1,002 adults 45 and older, nearly four in 10 said they had helped a child pay bills or expenses. Among retirees, one-third said they’d helped their children pay bills. Eight percent said they’d helped a parent pay bills or expenses. The survey’s margin of sampling error was plus or minus...

AS Bill Clinton was the first baby boomer president, Barack Obama could be the first Generation X president. Or, depending on how you figure it, Mr. Obama, born in 1961, could be the third boomer in chief, following Presidents Clinton and Bush. In theory, the candidate Obama belongs in the boom, defined by the Census Bureau as births during the years 1946 to 1964… The generation-spotter Jonathan Pontell, on the other hand, argues the boom began in 1942 and ended in 1953. He places Mr. Obama in “Generation Jones,” a term Mr. Pontell coined to characterize those born during the...

Back in 1963, when I was a junior in high school, summer jobs were not so easy to come by -- the negative aspect of Baby Boomer demographics. Finally, a friend managed to line me up with a job busing tables at a local Catholic retreat house. I served breakfast, lunch, and dinner, washed dishes, and did my best to keep a low profile. It wasn't much, but the start of my career of gainful employment. A strict rule of silence was enforced then on Catholic retreats. The participants, entirely male, did not speak to each other, and particularly at...

O ne of the most fascinating notions raised by the current presidential campaign is the idea that the United States can and must finally overcome the divisions of the 1960s. It's most often associated with the ascendancy of Sen. Barack Obama, who has been known to entertain it himself. Its most gauzy champion is pundit Andrew Sullivan, who argued in a cover article in the December Atlantic Monthly that, "If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today's actual problems, Obama may be your man." No offense to...

The Baby Boomers’ retirement will change the texture of society in ways we’ve scarcely begun to contemplate. A dispatch from America’s coming silver age It is cliché to speak of sleepy little country towns, but my mother’s hometown goes beyond sleepy into Rip van Winkle territory. Newark, New York, has more churches than bars. Neat clapboards and stately Victorians line quiet streets wrapped tight around the Erie Canal. Drive through Newark quickly, and it looks like America’s past. Stay a little longer, and you begin to recognize it as our future. Walk into one of those churches on a typical...

In 2008, the first wave of a generation 78 million strong will hit the Social Security system Greg Witt was born in January 1946, raised on Elvis, served two years in the U.S. Army and retired after 38 years of working for Allen-Bradley in Milwaukee. Now, he is on the cusp of turning 62 and reaching another milestone - receiving Social Security. "It's kind of like another step in your life," he says. "It feels kind of good, all these years of working and contributing and I get something back." Witt is among the first of 78 million baby boomers...

Baby Boomers Owe Young People an Apology   By Dennis PragerFrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, December 04, 2007 http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=1E5D04AE-14DA-4920-8F6A-1DCE01801277   We live in the age of group apologies. I would like to add one. The baby boomer generation needs to apologize to America, especially its young generation, for many sins. Here is a partial list: First and perhaps foremost, we apologize for robbing many of you of a childhood. We baby boomers were allowed perhaps the most innocent childhoods known to history. We grew up without material want, in one of the most decent places in world history, with media that...

Pols target tax on home heatingSavings to hard-pressed New Yorkers would amount to $300M Saturday, December 01, 2007 By TOM WROBLESKI STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The unseasonably warm weather Staten Island has seen lately doesn't mean that homeowners aren't feeling the pinch of rising energy costs. Before the cold weather settles in for good and really drives up the price of heating oil and gas, three Republican lawmakers are calling on the City Council to eliminate the 4 percent tax on home heating fuel. "Talk is cheap," said state Sen. Andrew Lanza (R-South Shore). "To reduce the skyrocketing cost of...

WASHINGTON — The nation's first baby boomer applied for Social Security benefits today, signaling the start of an expected avalanche of applications from the post World War II war generation. Kathleen Casey-Kirschling, a former teacher from New Jersey, applied for benefits over the Internet at an event attended by Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue. Casey-Kirschling, who now lives in Maryland, was born one second after midnight on Jan. 1, 1946, making her the first baby boomer — a generation of nearly 80 million born from 1946 to 1964, Astrue said. Casey-Kirschling will be eligible for benefits after she turns 62...

Earlier this year at a campaign rally, Bill Clinton said that when he was at Yale, he told Hillary: “I have met all the most gifted people in our generation and you’re the best.” Now, it’s always nice to hear a husband say he thinks his wife is tops. But I can’t get past the idea that while Bill Clinton was still in law school he believed he already knew every baby boomer worth knowing. ...Obviously, Clinton wasn’t including Barack Obama, who was only about 12 at the time. Now, Obama’s campaign is the revenge of Gen XYZ — an...

ack in the 1950s, a southern journalist named Harry Golden became famous by turning out a series of best-selling books, the first of which he called “Only in America.” The title was a reference to a popular expression that reflected the feeling of most of his countrymen that America was special, a unique place that offered millions of people unlimited freedom to express themselves and to achieve dreams that were unimaginable anywhere else on earth. In the half century since Mr. Golden wrote his book, things have undergone a sea change in this country. Partly the change has come about...

Baby boomers pay for six pack in a syringe By Philip Sherwell, Sunday Telegraph Last Updated: 1:00am BST 19/08/2007 With his six-pack stomach, bulging chest and bull-like shoulders, the muscleman in the newspaper advertisement displays the sort of rippling torso that adorns the cover of men's fitness journals. But there is one difference. From the neck up, Dr Jeffry S Life is a balding 67-year-old physician. His physique is the product not of a computer touch-up but a controversial American "ageing management" technique, that often includes a cocktail of human growth hormones and testosterone. Some 13,000 clients have so far...

MENLO PARK, Calif. —Today's New York Times has an article about people who are worth millions and are still complaining:Silicon Valley is thick with those who might be called working-class millionaires — nose-to-the-grindstone people like Mr. Steger who, much to their surprise, are still working as hard as ever even as they find themselves among the fortunate few. Their lives are rich with opportunity; they generally enjoy their jobs. They are amply cushioned against the anxieties and jolts that worry most people living paycheck to paycheck.But many such accomplished and ambitious members of the digital elite still do not think...

Ted Nugent Blames Hippies for Divorce, Abortion, Drugs and Crime 7/3/07, 2:22 pm EST It was only a matter of time before Ted Nugent decided to rain on the Summer of Love’s anniversary parade. In an article from today’s Wall Street Journal titled “The * Summer of Drugs,” the notoriously opinionated guitar god took some time off his busy hunting schedule to blame “stoned, dirty, stinky hippies” for “rising rates of divorce, high school drop-outs, drug use, abortion, sexual diseases and crime, not to mention the exponential expansion of government and taxes.” * Highlights (including some choice words for Jimi...

In the 1960s, history called the Baby Boomers. They didn't answer the phone. Confronted with a generation-defining conflict, the cold war, the Boomers--those, at any rate, who came to be emblematic of their generation--took the opposite path from their parents during World War II. Sadly, the excesses of Woodstock became the face of the Boomers' response to their moment of challenge. War protests where agitated youths derided American soldiers as baby-killers added no luster to their image.  Few of the leading lights of that generation joined the military. Most calculated how they could avoid military service, and their attitude rippled...