Baby Boomers Like Me Experienced Something No Other Generation Will — 'It Was Magical'
The world as we know it will never be as beautiful as it once was for the Boomer generation.
Getty | Unsplash “He stood at the window of the empty café and watched the activities in the square, and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting, or else they’d have no heart to start at all.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
It was gone in the space of a heartbeat. The dying gasp of a spoiled world.
For us Baby Boomers lucky enough to have been born between 1946 and 1954, we got to experience something that had never happened before and will never happen again.
Our world was like the whipped cream that’s left over at the bottom of your milkshake after you sucked all the ice cream out. It was all that was left, and when you finished, it would be gone.
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Our Baby Boomer world was sweet, but we all knew it wouldn't last.
For my age group, there were inklings that maybe we got the last of the milkshake. Some of us ignored that, thinking that there would always be more milkshakes. A lot of us knew there wouldn’t be.
A lot of us tried to help, to change things, to make a difference, but ultimately nothing we did would stop the juggernaut of destruction that was already well underway before we were even born.
I won’t lie to you, being born in a Baby Boomer child was magical. There’s no way around that.
Even into the 1980s, there was still some of the magic left around.
My, then-wife and I worked about 15 to 20 hours each week as servers in a diner and we had an apartment three blocks from the beach in Santa Monica that cost us $135.00 per month.
The other people we worked with were writers, musicians, and actors who could work part-time and make enough money to support themselves while they pursued their dreams. A lot of them made it. You could still do that, then.
We got to take a ride on a worn-out, broken-down roller coaster that was collapsing almost before we got off, but it was still operational.
Having the magic was like holding a handful of sand on a windy day. All you could do was watch while it blew away.
But now the magic is gone.
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I used to go up on a hill near my house in Los Angeles and look across the valley and try to imagine what it must have looked like before the occupiers came, what the Indigenous population must have seen from the spot where I stood but it was unimaginable.
The destruction of that world was so complete, so merciless, that even the idea of it was gone forever.
I think that maybe young people today might not be able to imagine what it was like for us because our world, and theirs, has been so mercilessly destroyed that it could never again be brought to life.
I feel horrible that young people won’t ever get to know what that was like. I feel horrible that young people will never know what waking up to a day of promise and possibility was like. I feel horrible that my daughter will never get to see the world that I got to see.
“Every man has two deaths. The first when he is buried in the ground, and the second when the last person who remembers him says his name for the last time.” - Ernest Hemingway (a paraphrase)
The world will have two deaths: The one that we are seeing now and the one when no one can remember what it was like before we destroyed it.
Michael Campi is a writer, observer, and commentator. His writing has been published in Muscle and Fitness, Breaking Muscle, The Whole Earth Times, and on his Substack.