BOOMERS - 'We had the best of it.'

The Baby Boomer Generation - 'We had the best of it.'

It is something you commonly hear in a gathering of those of us of similar age - 'We had the best of it.'

And so we did. We grew up in a time of increasing prosperity. Few of us knew real hardship. Hardly any of us knew what it was to go hungry.

1950s

In our childhood, we knew freedom that our grandchildren never know - bonfire nights, being allowed to play near the river without adult supervision, learning independence a lot earlier than they do now. In Queensland, there's a law that children cannot walk alone to school until they are twelve. Twelve!

  

Oh yes, we were so much more free than the poor children growing up now.


In our teen years, we grew more aware of the Cold War, and the prospect of instant annihilation by nuclear bomb. I clearly remember one teacher at high school assuring us that there was a nuclear missile aimed right at us, right then. Since it was a small country town, that was quite unlikely, but all the same, just a few bombs on a few capital cities would have meant that an enemy (the Soviet Union, of course) would not need to spare a thought to possible interference from Australia.

'Mutually assured destruction,' they called the policy, aka 'MAD.' In other words, each contender would have enough destructive power to send the enemy back to the stone age, except that the 'victor' would also be sent back to the stone age.

Even now, I found six books on my shelves from that era - all about the likely course of a nuclear war, and survival strategies - if survival was possible.

 

Did we fully believe that the world as we knew it could end? Maybe, partially. I remember my father once asking me when I was around twenty, and I thought about it and finally replied that Yes, I thought there would be nuclear war one day.

We had no control over it, so most of us didn't worry too much. There was the 1962 Cuba Crisis, but we were children then and took no notice. (I suspect it was largely kept from the news, so adults would have known little more.) We must have come closer to nuclear war then than at any time since.

Most of us went on with our lives, but maybe that threat was a factor in the growth of the Hippy movement - 'Make love, not war,' and choosing to be 'flower people.'

Drugs, as well. The drugs didn't get into my local school until after I had left, but the younger baby boomers - some of those destroyed themselves with drugs, mostly Heroin at that time. (They started with Marihuana and LSD was also big in some quarters - 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.')

From Australian War Museum
Australians in Vietnam

The Vietnam War.

Thousands of young men were drafted into the army for two years, where they were sent to be traumatised in a war that we should never have been in. Sound familiar? We were assured that no soldier who was not a volunteer would be sent to Vietnam, but I can remember news footage of a young man being carried onto the ship kicking and screaming. He did not look much like a willing volunteer.

Opposition to our participation in the Vietnam war mounted, and when a Labor leader, Gough Whitlam, was elected, he put an abrupt end to it. I will always be grateful to him for that, as my young brother would soon have been of an age to be drafted.

So our Vietnam veterans returned, quite quietly. Sadly, some of the opposition to the war was extended to hostility toward the young men who were only doing their best to do their duty.

Vietnam now

It was not long later that America also retreated, leaving victory to the wicked communist North Vietnamese. Except that somehow, they have made a rather nice country anyway, and a favourite tourist destination.

Women's Liberation: 

Another major change was the Women's Liberation movement, helped along by the advent of the Contraceptive Pill. By the time I went to work, it was no longer accepted that women would automatically leave their jobs once married, and families became smaller. I had two children, my parents had four, my grandparents fourteen and five respectively, and that is fairly typical of the generations.


Sadly, the feminist movement has totally lost its way these days. The so-called 'leaders' seem absolutely barmy, and would rather invent offences like 'mansplaining' and 'manspreading' than dream of doing anything about our poor unfortunate sisters living under Islam.

The 'Grand Tour.'

That term is from olden times, when a young man was not considered educated until he had done some travelling. It applied only to the rich, of course.

In our day, it was not only the domain of the rich. We worked for a few years, saved our money, and off we went for a year or two of 'backpacking.' We stayed in Youth Hostels, (far more basic than they are today) and hitched rides, or travelled by bus, plane and train. We could work if we chose. As I recall, the 'Working Holiday' permit for the UK allowed us to work for 6 months of each year.

At that time, the plane fare across the world was relatively far more expensive than it became later, meaning that we stayed longer. It is only in more recent times that so many people have an annual overseas holiday. Surfer's Paradise was fashionable then, not Bali, and not places further afield.

The 1970s. 

 Parties, candles, colour. A fad for meditation and Astrology. A fun time, and the first generation where it was fine to enjoy sex before marriage since the risk of unwanted babies was slight.

Marrying, having our own families, and because we were such a large bulge in the population, things seemed to become available just around the time we needed them - everything from pantyhose in our teens (remember stockings and suspenders?) to the slow and reluctant passing of voluntary euthanasia laws right around the time we started to think about our last days of life.


Retirement.

Surely we are the first generation to have sufficient financial security that so many of us have been able to buy ourselves a caravan and become 'Grey Nomads.' Some of our parents managed it, but the Boomer generation managed it in their hundreds of thousands. In the last decade, there have been more and more of us on the roads, in all sorts of vans, from the small and second-hand to luxurious motorhomes. Nearly always friendly, snobbery a rarity. None especially rich, (the rich had overseas holidays) and none especially poor, as the lifestyle did, after all, cost something.

Entertainment around a campfire, gossiping, seeing new things. Enjoying life as much as possible before old age and poor health takes over. 'Adventure before dementia,' some would say. Or 'Every day above ground is a good one.'

Wandering, relaxing, enjoying life

But all good things come to an end.

In 2020, China exported a particularly nasty virus. But worse than that - it has managed to export its notions of how to deal with a population who might prefer to be free than to be confined. The idea of 'lockdowns' came from China, and now, in September, 2021, the idea of having a 'social credit score' and living under constant surveillance seems to have come here as well.

Australia is no longer a free country. It saddens me greatly. The excuse was a disease that kills mostly only the very old and the very sick. And yet what damage the fear of it has brought about.

There are other indications of a bleak future ahead.

  America withdrew from Afghanistan in a show of defeat so utterly incompetent that some have aired their suspicion that deliberate treachery was involved. The Taliban are now in charge there, and the women, never very free, will now be made invisible again behind their personal tents. Under Islamic Sharia Law. How very, very sad.

 

2001

The triumph of these barbarians will inspire other Jihadists. We can expect more attacks. There was already one in New Zealand (3rd September) when a man grabbed a knife in a supermarket and started attacking whoever was close. The 20th Anniversary of 9/11 is imminent. What's the betting that there will be Islamic attacks on that significant day?

And yet, the Islamists are not the threat that China is. It may be only a few years ago that Australia's leaders (very foolishly) signed a Free Trade Agreement with China, but now China is showing itself as undisguised enemy.

It has used economic coercion to try and bring other countries to heel, (and often succeeded) it has taken over the South China Sea, with a few objections, but no-one tried to stop it, it brought down the jackboots on the citizens of Hong Kong a lot sooner than they were hoping for, and worst of all, sometime probably in the next few years, it will try and take over Taiwan. With America ailing under a weak president, it is unlikely that anyone will try and stop them.

Soldiers of the Chinese Army

Once Taiwan has been digested, China is likely to turn its attention to further conquests. War with America would be a disaster.

If America under Biden prefers to act the craven incompetent, as it did as they left Afghanistan, that is also likely to end up in disaster. I don't know what will happen there, but I can see nothing good.

From a free country to what?

There is the loss of free speech, the rise in censorship, the 'Cancel Culture,' and our grandchildren being subject to lunatic ideologies in their schools, such as the ideas that males are bad, that whites are automatically oppressors, and that girls can turn into boys and vice versa.

And right now, we are losing our freedom in our own country. Signing in wherever we go, face-masks mandated whether or not they have any protective function whatsoever (they surely have none when outside alone) and the latest unconstitutional order is that proof of vaccination will be required as a condition of travel and as a condition of doing just ordinary things like having a meal at a pub, or crossing the state border - when the state borders finally open, that is.

It makes me sad and it makes me very angry. Those people who choose not to be vaccinated, (and they have a perfect right to make that choice,) will be the new under-class, along with any of us who stand on principle and refuse to use this new form of control. We have lost our privacy and we have lost our freedom

This image of a little statue which I have had since the 70s is displaying the sign which seems to alternatively mean 'Peace' or 'Victory.' Whichever, it is a sign of optimism.

I hope the reader can feel some optimism, because this lady has none left.

Yes, we had the best of it. 

 

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