Longevity - or Bust

n., pl., -ties.

1. Long life; great duration of life: His longevity vexed his heirs.
2. Length or duration of life: comparing the longevities of the two peoples.

Thus this Blog is for the seniors in our community. Finding out that at over 50 I could be considered a senior citizen floored me. I can’t be old! For one thing, I’m a baby boomer, old isn’t one of the clubs we want to join.

From Mickey Mouse Club to Frequent Flier [sic] Club, baby-boomers have traditionally led a clubbish life organised around happenings and trends, from the twist to hula hoops to frisbees to disco to aerobics to line dancing. They give the impression that baby-boomerdom itself is a club, an exclusive gang, with everyone else on the outer.
Davis, Mark, Gangland: Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, p.7, 1997

Our generation didn’t plan on growing old. But here we are with graying hair, lose teeth and fading eyesight and wondering what happens next, when once we were the generation that changed the world.

How can a younger generation sit back and consider us fuddy-duddies, old fashioned, out of date, stayed or boring when it was our generation that created the mini, the bikini? We understand the meaning of loud music – we bounced them on our knee to tunes from the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Dire Straits and ACDC.

We are the generation of diversity with a drive that told the Traditionalist and Silent Generation that we would change the world. Through people power it was our generation that stood behind activists like Charlie Perkins and the Freedom Riders to expose the discrimination against Aboriginal Australians who were not able to enter cinemas, pubs and public pools in rural areas. We forced the government to give the Aboriginal the right to vote.

We marched against the Vietnam War, in fact given a good day we would have marched against anything that reeked of discrimination or social injustice. We were the liberal socialists, with a drum to beat and a hippy, alternative lifestyle that we marched into with our eyes opened – not so much because we knew what we were doing, but because we didn’t want to miss a moment of the action.

Ours was the first generation that took creativity to the zenith degree. We accepted the meaning behind “Blue Poles” while we found a meaning to our own lives to the rhythm of ‘’Ommmmmm”. As the first generation to be educated on mass, we knew our rights and we demanded them.

Like all generations we grew up, and settled down. Kept the pot out of the cookies and became respectable – bordering on boring – while we grew Generations X and Y – who knocked our work hard, play hard attitude. (and to think - if it wasn’t for us......)

We know we were the special generation, we know that we have seen more changes in our lifetime than any generation before us, and we think we made the changes for the future that a younger generation have us to thank for. We knew how to change the world, but often, as we head towards the bottle of Alka-Seltzer we wonder; did we change it for the better or the worst?

That is the problem with the Baby Boomer – we aren’t dead yet, and we know what it is like to be radical, different, and loud and we have time on our hands now ... having grown up with the generation that taught us... “That the Devil makes work for idle hands,” – don’t underestimate us. We didn’t always know what we were doing in our youth, and we admit that we don’t know what we are going to do with this thing called old age, but we are aren’t going to sit back and do nothing!

OR maybe, we have reached an aged where we have accepted our limitations in our later life and are just happy to be alive?