Boomers

The Problems and Opportunities of Generational Understanding

Do young generations understand the events leading up to the unusual happenings of the 60s and 70s?

A good question, inviting a rhetorical question.

How much do you understand about the U.S. Civil War?

Do you recall the significant battles, major turning points, and the commanding personalities who influenced the outcome? Probably you know a lot if you’re a history buff, but you’ll never understand that war the same way that those who lived through it did.

This is an underlying thesis of generational sociology. Concerning major historical events occurring before our youth and maturation, we “appropriate memories,” meaning we learn memories secondhand through books, movies, television, teachers, parents, and online.

For those historical periods we personally experience during youth, we “acquire memories.” Mediated and elaborated by our generational peers, acquired memories are much more powerful and enduring in formation of “collective values” and a sense of shared “defining moments” with generational peers.

Younger generations can, through scholarship, become well versed in the events and personalities of the 60′s and 70′s, but they can never understand the full panoply of emotional meaning and content that influence those who lived through the era as teenagers and young adults.

It’s one thing to read the transcript of a speech from Martin Luther King Jr., or watch a YouTube video; it’s quite another to have stood in a crowd in Washington D.C. with hundreds of thousands of impassioned people and absorbed the message of “I Have a Dream” for the first time it was ever uttered by a legendary Civil Rights leader.

Generations share common values through “intergenerational continuity,” but each generation forms unique values based on common and shared experiences during the formative years between the ages of about 12 through 25.

For those interested in gaining a deeper, more nuanced understanding of 1969 and 1970, I invite you to check out Noble Chaos: A Novel, my literary novel. The book is available in softcover, Kindle and Audible formats. 

Check out this link to listen to a five-minute sample of the award-winning audiobook.

 

Is The Arc of History Bending Toward a Better Day?

The Strange Similarities Between 55 Years Ago and Today

In front of the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C., on a statue by Robert Aiken, a young woman gazes into the distance, contemplating things to come. Engraved on the base of the statue is an inspirational quote by William Shakespeare from his play, The Tempest, Act 2, scene 1: What is past is prologue. The phrase conveys the idea that history creates a context for understanding and shaping current events.

Never in American history have social, political, and cultural challenges from the recent past had such eerie similarity and relevance in the present. 1969 and 2024 have disturbing parallels.

Fifty-five years ago in 1969, rebellion reverberated through the Black Hills of South Dakota. Native American activists scaled Mount Rushmore and occupied the memorial for months while demanding that sacred land be returned to the Sioux. Native Americans protested President Donald Trump’s 2020 Fourth of July celebration at Mount Rushmore. Once again, they demanded removal of the national monument from tribal lands, a refuge that had been guaranteed through an 1868 treaty.

In 1969, the women’s rights movement received an outspoken new advocate when Hillary Rodham Clinton became the first-ever student to address a Wellesley College graduating class. Clinton then claimed the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, becoming the first U.S. woman to lead the ticket of a major party. Propelling the feminist movement further, Senator Kamala Harris followed Secretary Clinton in 2020 by becoming the first African American, the first Asian American, and the third female vice presidential running mate on a major party ticket. Harris then became the first female vice president of the United States. 

On July 17, 1969, in York, Pennsylvania, with racial tensions at the boiling point that summer, a Black youth burned himself playing with lighter fluid. He falsely blamed a white gang. Black and white gangs began fighting that afternoon with conflict lasting through the night. The warring mobs set buildings ablaze, and police responded by barricading Black neighborhoods. More than 60 people were injured, police arrested over 100, and city blocks turned to charcoal.

Just a year later, tens of thousands of antiwar demonstrators gathered around the federal courthouse in downtown Seattle, crowding city streets. Vandalism, traffic disruptions, and building occupations took over the city. A police force “Tac Squad” brandished clubs and sprayed tear gas.

In 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, died while in the custody of Derek Chauvin, a white Minneapolis police officer, after Chauvin knelt on Floyd's neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds. Following this brutal killing, protests broke out and spread from Minneapolis to more than 2,000 cities and towns in over 60 countries. Between 15 and 26 million people participated in demonstrations throughout the United States, the largest protests in United States history. Protests today have been met with tear gas and clubs.

Near the Santa Barbara coast in 1969, an oil well blew out, spilling 235,000 gallons of oil and covering 30 miles of beach with tar. In the past five years, deadly California wildfires have burned millions of acres.  

In the same year as his election in 1969, President Richard Nixon became a disrupter of national harmony. After pledging to bring the country together, Nixon intensified divisions by escalating the Vietnam War and driving wedges between races and economic classes.

During the four years of his presidency, beginning in 2016, Donald Trump employed similar tactics to divide Americans on issues such as immigration and security at the border with Mexico.

Nixon appealed to “the silent majority,” while Trump appealed to “forgotten Americans.”

The United States in 2024 is reeling during an era of profound disruption, with polarity and acrimony spreading. Courteousness has almost vanished between citizens of opposing views. Anger and anxiety have intensified. Violence is on the upswing.

American citizens increasingly distrust each other as culture wars pit conservatives against liberals, whites against Blacks, young against old, and the establishment against the counterculture. Social and political disorder rule while the nation’s traditional motto, E Pluribus Unum—translated Out of many, one—seems quaint and unrealistic. Americans have no clear sense of the path forward.

The Open University 60s Research Group summarized that decade with hauntingly familiar observations:

It is right, of course, to give attention to artists and cultural leaders, to movements and sub-cultures, but the ultimate significance of the sixties lies in what happened to ordinary people.

As today’s wounded nation stumbles forward under continuing duress from a coronavirus pandemic, culture wars between conservatives and liberals, and natural disasters attributed to global warming, Americans question what is happening to ordinary people, especially their children and grandchildren.

Shakespeare understood the responsibilities that surface with repeating history. He wrote, “Whereof what’s past is prologue; what to come, in yours and my discharge.” The past is irreversible, but the future is ours to influence, subject to the choices we now make, as a country and as ordinary people.

Beyond Male Dominance: Gender and Generational Hallmarks Compelling Baby Boomer Men Today

Never before in the history of this nation have so many men entered the 70+ life stage. A Boomer male turns 70 about every 15 seconds. This inexorable march to 70+ will continue until 2034, and then this generation’s longevity dash continues forward toward the ninth and tenth decades of life. Someday, millions of Boomer men will survive beyond the average life expectancy achieved by their grandfathers and fathers.

Demography by itself does not fully predict the future course for this generation. Values inspired by the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960’s and 1970’s add dimension to future scenarios. Here are four significant influences:

Being Boomer Male and Feminism

Boomer men were and are widely supportive of feminism, especially those aspects of the social movement focused on economic equality and full participation in institutional society.

Many recall early encounters with feminism during their teen years: perhaps a polite request not to open the door for a young woman passing by, or a more vociferous denunciation by being called a “male chauvinist pig.”

The experiences of feminism often served to confuse Boomer men; they wanted to please their female counterparts but did not necessarily wish to relinquish some of the privileges and territory of maleness as their fathers and grandfathers had defined it. Boomer men sometimes feel caught between opposing values about sexual roles: those celebrating full equality between the sexes, and those that honor the special privileges of manhood such as classic corporate and institutional power.

Many privileges under onslaught today spring from ancient religious traditions and time-honored customs when men practiced rituals of initiation, preferred separation from females during specific periods and seasons, and developed their own language nuances and culture.

Patriarchic traditions are under siege today in the cultural narratives expressed through books and movies. For example, an article in The Atlantic described how role reversals are impacting Boomer men, once-upon-a-time large and in-charge of romantic relationships:

“Up in the Air, a movie set against the backdrop of recession-era layoffs, hammers home its point about the shattered ego of the American man. A character played by George Clooney is called too old to be attractive by his younger female colleague and is later rejected by an older woman whom he falls in love with after she sleeps with him—and who turns out to be married. George Clooney! If one of the the sexiest men alive can get twice rejected (and sexually played) in a movie, what hope is there for anyone else? The message to American men is summarized by the title of a recent offering from the romantic-comedy mill: She’s Out of My League.”

It seems that Boomer men, out of choice in youth and out of necessity in middle age, have embraced the precepts and implications of feminism. Will women in the future embrace the possibilities of maleness as it finds new expressions in elderhood?

Boomer Men versus Health and Wellness

Baby Boomer men are dichotomous with respect to health & fitness. They grew up in a time when the adult population was largely ignorant of today’s diet and health maxims. For example, I recall consuming a steady diet of high-fat foods, prepared and presented by my well-meaning mother. My mother’s refrigerator was always stocked with cheeses, bacon, whole milk, bologna, and cheese casserole leftovers.

On the contrary, this generation also discovered outdoor sports and jogging in their twenties, influenced an explosion in the fitness facilities industry throughout their thirties and forties, and escorted many diet and weight-loss fads to popular and economic prominence. Thus, when it comes to health and wellness, this is a bifurcated generation. About 40 percent are overweight or obese; a smaller but nevertheless significant percentage is dedicated to maintaining fitness, with accelerating commitment to workout regimens. An entire new category of master athletes has become prominent in the last few years.

Marketing to Boomer Men as Healing

Boomer men are moving into a period of their lives representing unprecedented opportunities for growth, service, community, and fraternity. Along this path, dangers lurk: irrelevance, anger, depression, lack of appropriate role models, obesity, and a general dearth of purpose. The impact can lead some men to make abrupt and unwise changes, from quitting a job to leaving a marriage.

What might be the source for these challenges of male aging? According to Jed Diamond, PhD, author of Male Menopause, acting out by older males involves much more than external stresses.

“Often a man’s restlessness and irritability come from the pull of his inner world, not a pull from outside. He may think he needs to leave his family, have an affair, change jobs, run away from home, or leave the country. The real longing may be to fulfill his soul’s calling.”

These potential illnesses of the body and soul need healing, and this is the service that many companies in the future may provide. Marketing can be restorative when insights gleaned positively change the way men think about themselves as husbands, partners, fathers, grandfathers, and mentors. Just as marketers have been instrumental in teaching women about breast cancer, so can marketers take a leadership role in helping men understand their own needs and positive ways to address what they want through the choices they make as consumers.

Marketers can teach environmental awareness, the special role of fathers in the nation’s future, and how men and women can co-evolve, wherein both sexes share equally in the American dream. 

The most powerful marketing premise of the coming years will be healing. In healing the nation’s aging men, those insightful and courageous companies will also heal many ills besetting the nation and the globe. Along this hopeful path, enlightened companies will also experience the economic and psychological rewards of making a substantive difference, while elevating late-life manhood to a status worthy of esteem and aspiration by younger male generations.

Toward Relevance and Reinvention

Although late middle age has been traditionally associated with predictability, quiescence, and gradual withdrawal from mainstream society, Boomer men are poised to shatter these stereotypical expectations, challenging barriers to employment for those over age 60 or 70. The softer side of maturity is a quest for reinvention and self-actualization. Boomer men have spent decades focused on their responsibilities as employers, employees, fathers, husbands, partners, and business and civic leaders.

The stage of life after 70 presents renewed opportunities to reach for greater idealism and relevance in life. It’s a time to discover life anew, and this perpetually seeking male cohort will pursue later life with questions, a search for meaning, and by finding ways to bring life into perspective while leaving behind meaningful contributions to society. These Boomer quests will include new ways to create a more sustainable economy, ways to mitigate poverty and attendant diseases, and ways to build greater influence for the nation’s thousands of nonprofit organizations.

Excerpted from Generation Reinvention: How Boomers Today Are Changing Business, Marketing, Aging and the Future. 

When Old Is New Again: Apple iPhone 14, Aging and Intergenerational Connections

Some of us are intimately familiar with every outdated technical skills demonstrated in a classic TV ad from Apple.

The spot follows an unassuming archivist working in an ancient building. Shelves bulge with film reels, photos and negatives. With a gentle gaze, the stooping man orchestrates his antique tools to bring celluloid memories alive. The final result, a short documentary film called “Together,” appears miraculously on a young mother’s iPhone somewhere else in the world. Images of her young family fly by as Lykke Li’s moving interpretation of "Unchained Melody" calls to our memories of young love, parenting, and perhaps Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze’s poignant movie, “Ghost.”

The purpose of this ad, incidentally, is to showcase Memories, Apple’s iOS 10 app for iPhone 7 and above. The app auto-magically curates iCloud photos and videos from a time period, wedding them to music to create emotional mini-films. As if a ghost from another time, the wise, tireless archivist is always ready to help when his call light snaps on.

So is this one more ageist TV ad portraying negative connotations of aging? Or is this docudrama a positive depiction of aging and the special power of intergenerational connections? Please post your reaction and comments below. 

It's noteworthy that with the introduction of iPhone 14 in September 2022, Apple has adopted the creative theme of "Far Out." Younger readers may not connect with this as historically significant, but Baby Boomers will recall this declarative statement as part of our coming-of-age journey back in the 1970's. "Far Out" was part of our unique slang lexicon, as was "Dream on," "Peace and Love," "Boogie," "Whatever," "Groovy," "Uptight," and "Can you dig it?" 

Apple has made a smart choice with this creative concept because Baby Boomers have accumulated the financial resources needed to purchase Apple's newest products, with iPhone price points heading to the stratosphere.

"Catch you on the flip side." 

 

How to remember and honor those who have died from Covid-19

When we depart this life, must the stories of our existence fade within the passing of a few years? That has been the fate of billions of mortals who have preceded today’s living.

Since the beginning of human history around 50,000 B.C., 108 billion humans have been born. Just over seven billion are living now, or 6.5 percent of all those ever born are still breathing—a tiny fraction when we consider the meteoric growth of world population today.

How much do we know of the 101 billion humans who have preceded us? The majority are nameless, forgotten as if they never lived, merely dust in the wind.

Except for a relative handful of kings, queens, heroes, political leaders, scientists, artists, writers, intellectuals, athletes, and celebrities who have been held in perpetuity through their works or historical documentation by others, the clear majority of human stories have just perished. We know nothing of those masses who have lived and passed on. Most of us do not know anything about the lives and times of our great-great-great grandparents, if even their names.

The First Immortal

Five thousand years ago, in Mesopotamia, the ancient lands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers now called Iraq, something miraculous happened in the evolution of our species and its ceaseless battle against temporality. Humans discovered how to write.

Death could no longer silence people after departing their mortal bodies. The written word gave our species the power to reach through millennia and speak inside the heads of those living in the distant future.

Then something else happened, another miracle of self-preservation. Enheduanna, daughter of the first emperor in history, was also the first person known to sign her name to a literary creation.

She lived 4300 years ago, and her gift to humanity was the possibility of immortality that can be bestowed by the written word when assigned to a single visionary author. The writing was no longer nameless, codified thought but personal ownership in the future.

Enheduanna’s name means “Lady Ornament of the Sky.” For centuries after her death, the first author continued to set standards for culture, literature, liturgy hymns, poetry, and religion. Her legacy includes an extensive body of creative output, including forty-two poems, psalms, and prayers that have served as a template for poets, priests, and scribes throughout history.

We know that she existed at a certain point in time. We know what she dreamed. We are aware of her fearlessness and prescience. We know she was a great author, composer, poet, and High Priestess of the ancient Moon God Nanna at temples in the Mesopotamian city-states of Ur and Uruk (Iraq).

Enheduanna lives today, four-and-a-third millennia after she exhaled her final breath. She speaks to us through her creations—and when combined into a complete archive, we have her time capsule filled with revelations that we can contemplate at will.

Permanent Acclaim

A generation ago most unexceptional people, removed from the public eye, could not hope to persist beyond death, except perhaps as represented by a deteriorating marker bearing an irrelevant name, lost somewhere in a cemetery or mausoleum. Without notable personal achievements that would become written documents or audio or video recordings, it was not possible for the majority to survive beyond the grave.

With the advent of the digital age and the extraordinary power and memory of the internet, it is now possible for anyone to write and record their thoughts, dreams, and values for others to read, see, and hear—and with archival preservation, for thousands of years from now. Today, for the first time in human history, anybody can paddle beyond the grave, aiming for the distant shores of time.

Questions to contemplate about your “Immortality Narrative”

• Which of your life lessons are most important to share with your children or other young people in your life?
• Have you been inspired by classic children’s book characters, and, if so, which characters had the most impact on your views and values?
• Who would you most like to attend your last lecture and why are these people most important?
• If you were to be diagnosed with a terminal disease, such as pancreatic cancer, how would you prefer to spend your final months of “functional health,” if granted this time for closure? What would be your priorities?
• What tangible memories about you would you like to leave for future generations, and in what form would these memories be encapsulated? A book or other writing? A video? Artwork? A legacy website?

Excerpted from Questions of the Spirit: The Quest for Understanding at a Time of Loss by Brent Green, Copyright 2017. All Rights Reserved.

A beautiful hit song by Kansas, a progressive rock super-group, helps drive home the point of this blog post. Kerry Livgren, the song's writer and guitarist, was my high school classmate. Kerry has recently published his memoir entitled Miracles Out of Somewhere.

 

To order your copy of Questions of the Spirit, visit the book's Amazon page.

Are Social Security and Medicare benefits a sinking Titanic?

In a one-sided editorial argument lambasting “old-age benefits,” Denver Post editorial writer Chuck Plunkett employed the metaphor of a sinking Titanic. The ship’s designer recognized that too many watertight chambers had been breached by an iceberg and that the ship would sink: “a mathematical certainty.” This vivid analogy buttressed Plunkett’s argument that with similar certainty, old-age entitlement programs, a.k.a. Social Security and Medicare, will “bring down the world’s greatest economy.”

Generational accounting, the iceberg of this argument, tends to be one-dimensional: it’s about the numbers. Accountants look at past taxation, productivity, and consumption patterns, coupled with demographics, to develop their scenarios. It’s by no means an exact science, but entitlement program critics present their foreboding numbers as if “the gospel.”

For example, on page 97 of his book, The Coming Generational Storm, author Laurence Kotlikoff explains how uncertainty interacts with economic scenarios:

“So current decisions depend on future outcomes, but future outcomes depend on current decisions. The only way to solve this problem is to solve for both current decisions and future outcomes simultaneously — hence the term simultaneity problem. In practice, the solution begins by simply guessing future outcomes. These guesses are then used to determine current decisions.

“Next, the current decisions are used to update the guesses of future outcomes, which are then used to generate a new set of current decisions, new updates of future outcomes, and on and on until the model has converged. Convergence here means that the procedure has found a set of current decisions that generate the same future outcomes as had been guessed on the previous round and that were used to determine the current decisions.”

In other language, ominous prognostications being proposed are based, just as Kotlikoff suggests, on guesses. They might be intelligent guesses, they might be guesses based on sophisticated computer modeling, with convergence of current public policy decisions and future anticipated outcomes, but they are nevertheless, guesses.

Generational accountants are modern-day soothsayers. Their science is an art, and they do not command mathematical certainty with the same engineering precision as a ship designer. Predictions are based on their perceptions of a future that may or may not happen as many as 40 years from now. How much reliance should we place on their assumptions?

Look at this way: Show me a generational accountant who, in writing, successfully predicted two of the most significant business and technological changes in the 20th century just ten years before these transformations. Show me someone now predicting economic disaster in the mid-21st century who in 1975 predicted the way microcomputers would transform everything in business by 1985. Show me a generational accounting expert who in 1985 predicted the ubiquitous advent of the Internet in 1995.

Looking over our shoulders today, we can see many historical precursors harkening forthcoming societal revolutions around desktop computers and distributed digital networks, including their concomitant economic transformations.

If the entitlement soothsayers could not predict these major changes ten years before they happened, how reliable can they be at predicting our future 30 or 40 years from now? What possible future transformations in genetics, robotics, information, and nanotechnologies have they not considered? How do they predict impact of a generation committed to staying engaged in economic activities across the lifespan?

Soothsayers read crystal balls. They want you to believe they see clearly into a future that nobody can truly see. They substantiate their predictions by analyzing the past and projecting today’s demographics into the future. As Marc Freedman, author of Encore: Finding Work That Matters in the Last Half of Life observes, “This is scenario planning in the rearview mirror.”

Frankly, Kotlikoff’s predictions do not show much sociological imagination about how Boomers can and will transform the future.

In his book, Kotlikoff also offers a number of recommendations for addressing his perceptions of the fiscal challenges of Social Security. His most dramatic proposal is to eliminate the Old Age Insurance component of Social Security and replace it with equivalent compulsory contributions to PSS (Personal Security System) accounts. How would these accounts be managed? By investing them “in a single market-weighted global index fund of stocks, bonds, and real estate.” In other words, social insurance becomes market driven, not a guarantee.

Do you want to be wealthy? Make sure Kotlikoff’s proposals become law, and then be sure you’re in senior management for one of the private-sector investment companies that will service and oversee these investments, handing taxpayers their transaction costs.

Other than destroying the social insurance programs that have been an unqualified success in lifting this nation’s older adults out of poverty and untimely sickness, some solutions to the alleged forthcoming “generational storm” touted by Plunkett and Kotlikoff include:

1. Bag the big elephant in the room: age discrimination in the workplace. Bias against older adults has been well documented by The New York Times, AARP and other organizations. Yet, according to recent MetLife and AARP studies, over 70% of the Boomer generation wishes to keep working past age 65. The longer a greater majority of this generation remains economically active, the less impact on Social Security’s “unfunded liabilities” (which have, in reality, been funded through mid-century, but that’s another story).
2. Focus national R & D investments on genetic, robotic, information and nanotechnologies. So-called GRIN science can invent new strategies to “engineer negligible senescence” in older adults, thus allowing them to remain vital longer into old age, increasing our collective healthspan. These technologies will have worldwide value and thus create rich new markets for U.S. industries focused on vital life extension.
3. Declare war on waste, fraud and abuse in the Medicare system. Also, create favorable policies for global competition in healthcare services and health insurance. So-called medical tourism can deliver equivalent surgeries for chronic conditions in accredited hospitals overseas for as much as one-tenth the cost of similar procedures in the U.S.
4. Attack media, marketing messages, and editorial opinions that denigrate aging adults. This social revolution needs the same force and clarity as when the nation confronted gender and racial inequities. Once it becomes economically debilitating to portray aging adults as of lesser value, then society will become much better equipped to address multi-generational problems from an inter-generational perspective.

Professor Kotlikoff is making a name for himself with inadequate arguments that this nation faces an “old-age benefit” crisis. With very little investigation, it becomes quite clear his acolytes include financial services companies that can’t wait to capitalize on privatization of Social Security and Medicare.

Imagine the implications if today’s 65+ adults had had their old-age benefits tied to financial markets of 2008 and 2009. The implications, according to Washington-based Center on Budget and Policies Priorities: 47.6 percent of the 32 million elderly people in the United States could now be living in poverty.

Why Quentin Tarantino doesn't understand 1969 and hippies

When I first considered watching Once Upon A Time in Hollywood in a movie theater, the 2 hours and 45 minutes running time was almost a deal breaker. That’s at least two intruding bio-breaks and a large swath of the day. However, since I’ve written and edited a book about 1969 with seven coauthors, it also seemed incumbent upon me to see the movie soon after release given relevant historical context.

This movie is quintessential Quentin Tarantino with A-list actors, gratuitous violence, suspenseful plot twists, a virtuoso classic rock soundtrack, and memorable cultural touchstones. For those who enjoy this director’s idiosyncratic film innovations, the movie is a work of time compression: the actual 165 minutes of film running time can feel like 60 minutes. I was so entertained by the acting artfulness of Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie, with the movie’s rapid-fire pacing and short vignettes, that I felt a twinge of regret when the credits finally appeared onscreen. It’s over so soon?!

There, I’ve given the movie due tribute. Now I will address what’s wrong with this larger-than-life film, entertainment value notwithstanding.

If moviegoers assume they will be experiencing a vicarious and instructive trip back to 1969, they are destined to be disappointed, especially those of us who lived through 1969 as young adults. Given the 50^th anniversary of 1969 in 2019, Tarantino wisely hooked 1969 into the movie’s framework, perhaps because of promotional possibilities. This movie taps into the half-century look-back and nostalgic zeitgeist many are experiencing now.

What Quentin Doesn't Comprehend

However, 58-year-old Tarantino did not experience 1969 through the lens of adolescence or young adulthood. As a six-year-old back then, he was still playing with Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots and G.I. Joe. Nor did his lead actor, 46-year-old DiCaprio, who was born in 1976, or 57-year-old Pitt born in 1964. These Hollywood giants understand 1969 second-hand through a mishmash of media reports or their own imaginations. Their conceptions of 1969 have been appropriated from public memories rather than acquired through personal experiences.

Since Tarantino wrote the screenplay, I’ll focus my critique on him. His movie ignores huge swaths of essential hallmarks of the last year of the 1960’s: Apollo 11, the Vietnam War, Woodstock, and the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam on October 15th, to name four monumental examples.

The smidgen of important history covered about that year is the Manson Family murders, but the screenwriter/director re-configures history as is his practice. His macho protagonists, portrayed by DiCaprio and Pitt, kill the invading family members rather than playing out actual history, when Manson’s messengers murdered actress Sharon Tate, four other adults, and Tate’s unborn child.

My other criticism is Tarantino’s portrayal of hippies. He has an inglorious attitude about them. They first appear in the movie as scavengers invading trash receptacles in an alleyway. Charlie Manson’s minions are also hippies, thus drug-addled, unwashed slobs — sociopaths capable of mercilessly murdering random luminaries.

For noncritical moviegoers who harbor the same prejudices as Tarantino, Hollywood’s hippies represent strawmen for Baby Boomers, a generation that came of age during the late sixties and early seventies. The protagonists are middle-aged characters and sympathetic representations of hard-working and well-meaning Americans of that time. Not perfect. But respectable. The younger hippies represent all that’s wrong with a nation unraveling at the seams during an era of extreme upheaval. The director fails to communicate essential context for youth rebellion, which was Vietnam, a disastrous war that claimed 58,000 American lives and killed more than 2 million Vietnamese.

Many people who reached adulthood during that time will admit to some “hippie sensibilities” such as longer hair for men, tribal and mod fashions for both sexes, opposition to disingenuous politicians, and experimentation with psychoactive substances. But the vast majority were not unwashed, sociopathic, directionless narcissists. Yours truly grew his hair longer, protested the Vietnam War, sampled a few psychoactive substances, served as a student leader, worked at part-time jobs throughout college, and continued accumulating academic achievements that placed me on the Dean’s List at Kansas University. I partied and played and protested, but I maintained focus on my academic and vocational future. Most of my peers did the same.

Hippies Were A Tiny Segment of the Boomer Generation

In 1968, the late social scientist Lewis Yablonsky published The Hippie Trip: A Firsthand Account of the Beliefs and Behaviors of Hippies in America By A Noted Sociologist. This is an academic discourse by an expert researcher that describes and estimates the size of the American hippie sub-segment of young people. Yablonsky concluded that there were about 200,000 full-time hippies in the United States—those identifiable as dropouts from mainstream or straight society. Yablonsky also estimated that there were another 200,000 teenyboppers, part-time hippies, and weekend iconoclasts who might attend high school, college, or work in conventional jobs, but who also dabbled in hippie culture. This leads to an estimate of about 400,000 total hippies in 1968.

Hippies as a cultural sub-segment came largely from Boomers born between 1946 and 1955, which I have labeled as Leading-Edge Boomers. The oldest would have been 22 in 1968, and the youngest would have turned 13. Based on data from Births in the United States 1930 to 2007, the size of the 1946-1955 Baby Boomer cohort was 37.63 million. Using Yablonsky’s estimate of 400,000 hippies as the numerator and all Leading-Edge Boomers as the denominator, the percentage of Boomers who participated in the 1960s’ counterculture at the most extreme edges of engagement or withdrawal would be 1.06% (400,000 / 37.63 million = .0106).

Yet, those who harbor negative attitudes about Boomers and wish to perpetuate stereotypes about this generation, prefer to equate the hippie cultural construct with all Boomers. 1969 Boomers = Hippies. 2019 Boomers = Made Over Hippies. On the contrary, most members of the generation were going about the serious business of attending college, training for trades, serving as social and political activists, and beginning careers. Many superficial hippies then grew up and proceeded to revolutionize our lives. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates come to mind.

Tarantino is another example of a long line-up of cultural critics who portray the Boomer Generation’s coming-of-age period as societal and cultural miasma, underscored by nihilist narratives promulgated by rebellious youth. This is an interesting thematic approach from a screenwriter/director who has undertaken extraordinary steps through his movies to improve the cultural and social standing of groups that have been typecast and mercilessly maligned during the 19^th and 20^th centuries, from African Americans (via Django Unchained) to members of the Jewish faith (via Inglorious Bastards).

Visit a theater near you or stream the movie into your living room and watch Hollywood if you want to enjoy another fictitious Tarantino blockbuster with its cinematic grandeur and superior acting.

Do not see the movie if you are looking for an accurate and comprehensive portrayal of 1969, including the young people who helped define the year through their social justice passions and personal sacrifices. Tarantino doesn’t understand one of the most chaotic, challenging, and compelling years of the 20^th century. He's not a reliable historian.

Alternatively, I offer our book as one historical resource that does get it.

How Baby Boomers Are Changing the Hospice Industry...For Good

“Life is a journey from beginning to end, measured not in time but in quality.”

This is the first sentence in a pamphlet produced by The Hospice of the Florida Suncoast, the largest hospice in the United States, based in Clearwater, Florida. With an average of 2,400 patients and a staff of 1,500, this exemplar organization has played a major role in the evolution of hospice since the movement became popular in the U.S. shortly after introduction of a trendsetting book in 1969: On Death and Dying, by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, M.D., an eminent psychiatrist. Her book demystified death and the dying process, making the final stage of life more comprehensible and manageable — for those who are dying and their caretakers.

Many prefer not to think about the inevitable conclusion to life, but for Baby Boomers, the end of life is becoming more concrete and palpable. Boomers are losing their parents, and a surprising number of their peers have begun to succumb to fatal illnesses, including high-profile personalities such as newsman Tim Russert, folk-rock-star Dan Fogelberg, and Carnegie-Mellon professor Randy Pausch.

I addressed marketing professionals for hospices from around the nation under the auspices of the National Hospice Work Group (NHWG) and then the leadership team of the Suncoast Hospice.

NHWG is “a professional coalition of executives from some of the largest and most innovative hospices … committed to increasing access to hospice and palliative care.” These compassionate leaders want to eliminate “bad deaths”: dying in pain and in places other than in accordance with the wishes of the dying person. NHWG hospices strive each day to fulfill one overriding promise: that each patient may die with dignity — as each person defines it.

This association’s members take care of about 12 percent of the nation’s hospice patients every year. It’s not merely coincidence that many of the CEOs of the nation’s hospices are Boomers who have pursued this profession with passion since the 1970's and 1980’s — another tangible testament to the beneficent values of the “sixties generation.”

Hospice provides care for those who have terminal medical conditions. Either in free-standing, often home-like facilities, in patient homes, or in hospitals and nursing homes, hospice practitioners deliver palliative care. Services include pain control, nursing care, spiritual counsel, and many other nurturing services. One major goal of hospice is to help patients experience maximum possible peace and comfort during the final months, weeks or days of life. Hospice also provides bereavement counseling and support groups for family members of those who are dying or have passed away.

My presentations addressed some boilerplate topics, including an overview of all living generations, the sociological and cultural factors constituting each generation, strategies for marketing to generations, emerging business trends, and current life-stage issues confronting Boomers. I also shared my assessments of how Boomers might challenge the traditions of dying, including hospice.

For example, healthcare policymakers can expect this generation to test inflexible traditions that reduce the fullest possible expression of life experiences during final months and weeks. A trend emerging now is “slow medicine,” in which those confronting difficult medical choices slow down the process to assess fully the restorative potential of yet another medical procedure.

Life-prolonging medical intervention has its value when the outcome allows greater life quality if not extension of time remaining, but when medical procedures only promote more pain and weakness without recovery, then many Boomers will reject last-ditch procedures. Many will put the brakes on “heroic medicine.”

A Boomer neighbor of mine had brain cancer last year, and surgeons recommended a biopsy, which she reluctantly approved without further investigation. She later lamented not traveling to Europe with her husband for a couple of weeks instead of suffering the brutal and lingering side effects of the biopsy. She never regained enough strength and stamina after the biopsy to enjoy any of her remaining time.

Many Boomers will endeavor to make their final days as meaningful as possible by recording and preserving their legacies. This will lead to dramatic growth of personal historians and online resources for those with terminal diseases to “upload” life experiences, values, philosophies, photographs, videos, insights and hopes for humanity.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have recently isolated the psychoactive compound in the hallucinogenic mushroom psilocybin, one of the drugs some Boomers experimented with during the sixties. Researchers have tested the synthesized drug on adults who have never experimented with recreational drugs to determine the potential impact of psilocybin on spiritual exploration. In various studies, those who have taken the synthesized drug have reported experiencing some of the most profound spiritual events of their lives. Someday, hospice may offer psilocybin or other consciousness-altering medications for their patients who are seeking profound experiences of the divine but who are unable to get to this state of awareness through prayer or meditation.

Experts predict that nearly half of those who die in another 20 years will choose cremation. This will have significant impact on the funeral industry. Some Boomers will have their carbon ashes compressed into manmade diamonds. Others will choose “green cemeteries,” where remains are buried legally in public parks and inside cardboard boxes with no grave markers. Others will choose to have their cremains buried offshore in artificial reefs. Hospice personnel will likely become involved in helping patients plan more creative funerals and burials.

We can expect Boomers to transform the final stage of life with as much creativity as they changed the nature of being a teenager, a middle-aged adult and now a grandparent. They will embellish the dying process with new customs that allow people to reach the conclusion of life with the greatest possible dignity and grace — a genuine sense of completion.

The last slide of my presentation revealed a graying Boomer man holding a protest sign, hearkening back to the sixties and a time of strident protest marches; he bore one possible concluding aphorism for this generation: