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About Baby Boomers

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Baby boomer is a North American-English term used to describe a person who was born between 1946 and 1964. The baby boomers were the first group to be raised with televisions in the home, and television has been identified as “the institution that solidified the sense of generational identity more than any other.” Starting in the 1950s, people in diverse geographic locations could watch the same shows, listen to the same news, and laugh at the same jokes. Television shows such as Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver showed idealized family settings. Later, the boomers watched scenes from the Vietnam War and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy.
The boomers found that their music, most notably rock and roll, was another expression of their generational identity. Transistor radios were personal devices that allowed teenagers to listen to The Beatles and The Motown Sound.
In 1993, Time magazine reported on the religious affiliations of baby boomers. Citing Wade Clark Roof, a sociologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the articles stated that about 42% of baby boomers were dropouts from formal religion, a third had never strayed from church, and one-fourth of boomers were returning to religious practice. The boomers returning to religion were “usually less tied to tradition and less dependable as church members than the loyalists. They are also more liberal, which deepens rifts over issues like abortion and homosexuality.”
At some point, Baby Boomers will have a large impact on the health care industry (Funerals/Hospice/Cemeteries), but as a generation, they have tended to avoid discussions and planning for their demise and avoided much long term planning. Baby Boomers often experience high anxiety about aging and death, and live in denial of these realities of life. Many do not believe these events have to be a reality of life.
Journalist Jeff Chang wrote in his book Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, “Boomers seem to have had great difficulty imagining what could come after themselves.”
One book, written by Colorado doctor Terry Grossman, titled “The Baby Boomers’ Guide to Living Forever”, proposes how Baby Boomers might avoid death. On page 3 of the book, Grossman writes, unironically, “As an official member of the Baby Boomer Generation, I really and truly do not believe that it was intended for us to die. Death, if and when it occurs, clearly will represent a mistake of some kind.”
The humor publication The Onion published a satirical article celebrating the anticipated large-scale deaths of Baby Boomers in the upcoming years, quoting one fictional expert as saying the Boomers are “the most odious generation America has ever produced.”
The Baby Boomers have been, like the older, successful child, the favourite generation of whom much has been written and said. When the Baby Boomers were young, there was much hope surrounding their potential that ‘Time’ magazine gave its Man of the Year Award in 1967 to the Baby Boomers. As Claire Raines points out in ‘Beyond Generation X’, “never before in history had youth been so idealized as they were at this moment.” When Generation X came along it had much to live up to and to some degree has always lived in the shadow of the Boomers, more than often criticized (‘slackers’, ‘whiners’ and ‘the doom generation’) than not.
One of the contributions made by the Boomer generation appears to be the expansion of individual freedom. Boomers often are associated with the civil rights movement, the feminist cause in the 1970s, gay rights, handicapped rights, and the right to privacy.
Baby boomers presently make up the lion’s share of the political, cultural, industrial, and academic leadership class in the United States. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, born within sixty days of each other in mid-1946, are the first and second Baby Boomer U.S. presidents, and their careers in office illustrate the wide, often diverging, spectrum of values and attitudes espoused by this largest American generational group to date. To date, baby boomers also have the highest median household incomes in the United States.

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