Baby Boomers have been a very busy and hard-working generation! Boomer Bardo is a place for information exchange, humor whenever possible, commiseration (i.e., got ‘right-sized’ after 20 years of loyalty and team playing!), possiby helpful hints and some really useful information, self-development tidbits (for those who still have that go-getter mentality), expressions of lively and thoughtful cynicism and other whatever else occurs.

Boomer Bardo is (among other things) a place to ask and ponder important Life questions, such as:

~ When you walk up to a group of folks in their 20’s or 30’s and one of them says in a loud whisper, ‘who’s the old dude?’, do you look around for the old geezer?

~ Why does it seem that only folks in their 20’s, 30’s or early 40’s seem to be getting promotions and/or recognition in the workplace?

~ Why am I helping to support aging parents and kids (and sometimes grandkids?!). Who will look after me when I’m 64 (and not lucky enough to be Paul McCartney?)

~ What happened to my dreams of being a rock star (trekking around Europe, moving to India, winning the World Poker Tour or inventing a Pet Rock)?

After this generation, ‘retirement’ will never be the same! (Remember Mick Jagger’s famous comment on retirement: “I’ll be playing rock n roll when I’m pushing around a walker!”)

Anyway – it could all be Quantum****! As you probably know - the whole Quantum event thing could not exist without your viewing it – right? So thanks for your assistance in viewing and creating this site!

* “Sandwich Generation” - Americans roughly ages 40 to 60 that are simultaneously raising a child and providing some form of financial assistance to a parent.

**Truckin’ by the Grateful Dead, “American Beauty” Album (1970).
Sometimes the light’s all shinin’ on me;
  Other times I can barely see.
  Lately it occurs to me: What a long, strange trip it’s been.

*** Are You Experienced? by Jimi Hendrix, “Are You Experienced?” Album (1967).
  Have you ever been experienced?
  Not necessarily stoned, but beautiful

**** Quantum – A continually changing reality that really does all depend on your point of view.

I was a reluctant parent: never planned on kids. But they just happened and that’s part of the circle of life; so, you go forward. After all – how much time/effort could it take? (more…)

A Piece of Our Time
Thursday, Mar. 27, 2008 © By RICHARD LACAYO, TIME Magazine  

Just like Madonna and Michelle Pfeiffer, the peace symbol is turning 50 this year. When an icon turns that age, you can start making some judgments about whether it has what it takes to endure. Madonna? Hanging in there. Pfeiffer? We’ll see. But the peace symbol–it’s 50 years young and going strong.

By now, the little sectioned circle has become so familiar, it feels as if it had no genesis, that it just emerged out of a collective folk culture, like the Star of David or a nursery rhyme. But in fact it can be traced to a single inventor, Gerald Holtom, whose story
is woven into two new histories, Peace: The Biography of a Symbol by Ken Kolsbun with Michael S. Sweeney (National Geographic; 175 pages) and Peace: 50 Years of Protest by Barry Miles (Reader’s Digest; 256 pages).

Holtom was a London textile designer who had been a conscientious objector during World War II. By 1958, as Britain, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were well into the nuclear arms race, a grass-roots movement to “Ban the Bomb” was gathering force in the United Kingdom. Early that year, a fledgling disarmament group called the Direct Action Campaign (DAC) started to put together what would be Britain’s first major demonstration against nuclear weapons. The plan was for a 52-mile (84 km) march from London to the town of Aldermaston, home to an A-bomb research center.

Enter Holtom, who brought to the DAC his design for a symbol that marchers could carry on banners and signs. He had arrived at the image by combining the semaphore signals for the letters N, for nuclear, and D, for disarmament. The first is a figure with arms held downward and out from both sides; the second, a figure holding one arm above its head while the other points to the ground.The symbol was simple–a few straight lines inside a circle.

But like a Chinese character, its form was suggestive. The straight lines hinted at the human body. The circle brought to mind Planet Earth. (It also looked a bit like the Mercedes-Benz logo, which has led to some confusion over the years.) Importantly, anybody could draw it. Before long, millions of people did. It debuted on April 4 in London’s Trafalgar Square, the assembly point for the four-day march.

Over the next few days, it appeared in countless newspaper photos and TV reports. Bayard Rustin, an American protégé of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. who took part in the march, brought the symbol home to a growing civil rights movement dedicated to nonviolence. When the Vietnam War started getting out of hand, protesters discovered they had a ready-made icon to signal their feelings.There were people who didn’t like the symbol any better than they liked the movements it represented. They saw it as an inverted broken cross or “the footprint of the American chicken.” 

But it kept spreading through the culture. Like the Christian cross, which has served the purposes of soup kitchens and Crusaders, the Sisters of Mercy and the Ku Klux Klan, it was adaptable. Over time, it evolved from its narrow association with nuclear disarmament into an insignia for countercultures of all kinds.

Hippies made it a sort of all-purpose symbol of peacefulness. The environmental group Greenpeace, the militant wing of flower power, adopted it for its eco-defense campaigns.And inevitably, the market found it. By the late 1960s, peace symbols were appearing on coffee mugs, miniskirts and ponchos and were dangling from chains around the necks of guys you would expect to see at the Playboy mansion.

Duplicated endlessly as a hip fashion accessory, it threatened to devolve into a meaningless emblem of benign and groovy sentiment. It started looking corny, a kind of smiley face before there were smiley faces.But events have conspired to keep giving the peace symbol fresh life.

The arms race rumbles along, wars keep happening, and it continually comes back into circulation as, well, a peace symbol. The war in Iraq has created all kinds of opportunities for it at rallies and demonstrations. If it’s true, as John McCain has suggested, that the U.S. may have to remain in Iraq for 100 years, then the peace symbol probably has a long life ahead of it.

Sign of the Times For a photographic history of the peace symbol, go to time.com/peace

For 50 Years This Has Been the Symbol Of Peace. Far Out.

© By Paul Farhi, Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 4, 2008; Page C01

The peace symbol — three simple lines within a circle — turns 50 today. It’s had a colorful and often turbulent life, which is odd considering that it’s supposed to symbolize, you know, peace. 

Unveiled at a British ban-the-bomb rally on April 4, 1958, the peace symbol’s peak of potency was in the 1960s, when it was the emblem of the anti-Vietnam War movement and all things groovily counterculture. (Said its late creator, British graphic designer Gerald Holtom: “I drew myself . . . a man in despair . . . put a circle around it to represent the world.”)

The symbol has marched in service of many causes over the years: civil rights, women’s rights, environmentalism, gay rights, anti-apartheid, the nuclear-freeze movement and the latter-day antiwar crowd. Conservatives once denounced it as a lefty tool (”footprint of the American chicken,” etc.), but not all the peace symbol’s politics have been so easily classified. During the Soviet era, it was a ubiquitous totem of resistance in such cities as Prague and Berlin. 

In its spare time, the peace symbol has done plenty of commercial work, much of which it probably isn’t very proud of. Suffice to say, most anything that can been manufactured or marketed has at some point come with a peace symbol. Ben&Jerry’s (”Peace Pops”) turned it into an ice cream novelty. In 1999 the U.S. Postal Service put it on a stamp. At least it has always been more serious and thoughtful than its frivolous cousin, the smiley face……..  (more…)

10:09 AM CDT on Sunday, March 23, 2008,

Americans are living longer than ever. How can we make these extra years productive for us and rewarding for society? Mankind’s greatest triumph of the last century was not the mastery of flight, the invention of the computer or the recognition of rights for women and minorities. As huge as those achievements were, they were overshadowed by something more profound.

Over the past 100 years, humankind fulfilled the age-old dream to extend life, by making bigger gains in life expectancy than during the previous 50 centuries. In 1900, Americans lived an average of 49.2 years. By 2000, they lived to 76.9 years. Better public health, medical breakthroughs and health care reforms added almost 30 years to life and made old age more than a curiosity. And the best may be yet to come. Scientists expect biomedical research to lengthen life even more in the 21st century.

Read Entire Article…

Wait a minute – that’s me?!*$#

Ever find yourself in a situation (job interview or whatever) in which you very strongly suspect that Ageism is being applied towards you, but of course, you cannot prove it? How does our society view the over 40’s? And now that Baby Boomers will be retiring in vast numbers in the next few years – will we be perceived as ‘cool’? Or as just terribly old and outmoded?

To a large degree – that depends on Baby Boomers themselves and how much we let our opinions be known.

Baby Boomers have, over the years, taken on huge social causes such as pollution (the original Earth Day), crooked Presidents (I mis-spoke myself!), social injustice (integration and racial profiling), rock and roll and denim jeans for all - and more in a list too long to enumerate here. Boomers in general have the reputation for being sticklers on the ideals of fairness, ethical behavior, development of renewal energy resources and affordable health care and food/shelter.

That’s the ideal about Boomers. The reality? Boomers are too diverse a group to categorize in any particular way. But I think we can all agree on one thing: Ageism is not acceptable! And, we are STILL cool, thank you very much!

* It Can’t Happen Here by The Mothers of Invention (Frank Zappa), “Freak Out” album (1966).

Midlife Fashion Crisis Mirrors Society
09:58 PM CDT on Monday, March 24, 2008, Dallas Morning News

Buoyed by the promise of spring, I went shopping for a new outfit, something bright and becoming that didn’t have to be dry-cleaned. What I got was a sartorial reminder that ordinary grown-ups seem to be disappearing from our cultural radar.  The large and reputable department store I visited had two styles of clothing for adult women: juvenile and geriatric.
  
The former, of which there was a vast but strangely uniform selection, ran toward hideous baby doll blouses with puffy sleeves, shrunken T-shirts with glitter and rhinestones and blue jeans cut to circumnavigate the torso in a death grip just south of what is euphemistically called the “bikini line.” 

The other style option comprised mix ’n’ match pastels suitable for the early bird special at Luby’s and bus tours of Branson, Mo. There wasn’t much available for what I guess is the esoteric niche market of persons between the ages of 25 and 65. “Don’t you have anything between ’Teenager’ and ‘Grandma’?” I wailed to a hovering saleslady. She just smiled and shrugged apologetically. Those were the only choices. 

Question: What happened to the broad, leisurely category of “middle age”? 
Answer: It was subsumed by “old.”

What used to represent, for many people, a comfortable midlife period of stability and contentment instead became a frightening transition from young-hip-edgy-and-trendy – cool! – to boring, Buick-driving irrelevance – not cool at all. 

Hence the unlovely specter of adults in their 40s paying good money for gibberish tattoos in phony Chinese characters (”The artist told me it means ‘wisdom through strength and spiritual centeredness’!”) and littering their written communications with text-message abbreviations and those idiotic emoticons. 

Y’all, we are being suckered. Apparently, the chirpy assertion that “50 is the new 30!” has been interpreted not as a celebration of health and longevity, but as a signal to get a 20-year head start on that embarrassing midlife crisis. This is sad for a multitude of reasons, most of which are more serious than finding something to wear. Saddest of all is that we are wasting a precious gift our ancestors would have viewed with awe and reverent envy: life.  Not so many generations ago, human life was short, difficult and scarred by tragedy. If you lived to see your 40th birthday, you had beaten the odds. The average American can expect to live more than twice as long as his colonial forebears – a miracle that means more than the advent of cars, computers, iPods and Facebook combined.
  
What are we doing with all those precious bonus years? Pretending to be teenagers.   In an insightful essay written for our Sunday Points section, my colleague Bob Moos reflected on the “ageism” that poisons our culture, even as more and more of us are marching toward the dreaded ranks of the aged. It all seems so dumb, so insulting, so unnecessary.

My best friend, a pal since childhood who is exactly three weeks my junior, remarked with a sigh the other day, “We’re old now.” 

I started to remonstrate with her sharply – We’re not old! –but I knew what she meant. She meant that we’re no longer young, that we have outgrown crushes on rock stars and sappy “chick flicks” and giggly conversations (thank God) about our dates. She didn’t mean “elderly,” but “old” is the only word in our cultural vocabulary for “not young.” 

Well, I’m not young, and I don’t expect to be old for a while yet, either. Until I get there, I guess I’ll just have to wear what I’ve already got.

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OPINIONS ANYONE?

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