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A Boomer’s Journal

By Tom Anselm

Maybe it all started in the 1960s. It surely was a time of great domestic upheaval in the good old US of A. The Civil Rights movement was just beginning. People were being flushed down the streets of southern cities by fire hoses. A 14-year-old boy was beaten and hung in Mississippi. Medgar Evers, who worked for the NAACP, was murdered in his own driveway. Four little girls died from a firebomb when attending an Alabama church.

A popular and promising president was shot in Dallas. His killer was then shot in a police station, on live TV. A little over a year later, Malcolm X was shot 22 times in front of his family. Then, the popular and promising leader of the civil rights movement. And then, the younger brother of the slain president was killed. All in less than 7 years. The nation was in shock, I think.

Throughout the Sixties. each and every day we saw on our 6 o’clock news the mayhem being wrought in a small Southeast Asian country. Keeping the world safe for democracy, was how I remember it being phrased by the politicians and pundits. Also, the Sexual Revolution was in starting to bloom, fueled by drugs and rock and roll, and populated by Baby Boomers’ offspring.

It was a most volatile period. Some say America lost its innocence in The Sixties.

Surely it can be argued that there has been a steady and slippery slide down the slope since then. Morality was challenged by the ‘Free Love’ mantra of the hippies, authority assaulted at every level. It was the time of ‘if it feels good, do it.’It and moral relativism.

So it came as little surprise that in 1973, the highest court in the land said it was just fine to abort an unborn baby while still in its mother’s womb. I have come to see that decision as the beginning of The Numbing of America.

Today, we see the last of the Baby Boomers still running things, for the most part. The current President was born in 1961, just inside the upper limit to claim Boomer status. But this generation is fast becoming less of a force, economically, politically, morally. Boomers are retiring at a rate of 10,000 every day, and this should go on for the next 14 years. Our nation will soon be in the hands of the Generations X and Y, who are the Boomers offspring, and even some Millenials, those born from 1980 to 2000. And just what will this country be, that we are handing off to them?

There are 37 states that have legalized same-sex marriage. Seven of the 13 that have not are undergoing legal challenges to that prohibition. That makes almost 75% in favor, possibly reaching as high as 88% if the challenges win. People who call themselves pro-choice are more likely to be worried about animal rights and the ozone layer than the right to life of an unborn baby.

Politicians and news pundits and entertainers and sports figures are found out to be liars and philanderers, cheats and frauds. But amazingly, some avoid consequence, and some even prosper in spite of their indiscretions. Violence and graphic carnage pass for entertainment in the form of video and online games that are marketed to our youth. Numbing.

And most recently, a movie that glorifies sado-masochism and sexual bondage has taken the movie-going public by storm to the tune of $91,000,000 in box office receipts in its first weekend. Amazing, and sad.

I am praying for a new revolution. One that sees our kids and their kids somehow clawing their way out of this muck. Maybe the horrific atrocities being committed in the Middle East will jog them and us all into realizing now is the time to end this slide. But I am concerned that this may be asking too much of them—that irreparable damage has already been done. That the ‘everything is relative, man’ tone ago has taken too strong a hold.   I hope I am wrong.

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