The winding Boomer journey

I was not a hippie.

I was clean-cut and "straight" by the standards of the time. 

I wanted to change the world for the better and thought that politics was the way to do it. Bad politics brought the war in Vietnam; I thought good politics might end it. I wanted to look acceptable to the adults who held political power so that I could persuade them to end the war in Vietnam before I was drafted to fight it. 

I have been thinking about what constituted good politics from childhood, when I watched school budget elections. In my teens I took the speech and debate classes taught by Jerry McDougle at Hedrick Junior High and by DeVere Taylor at Medford Senior High. I was hooked.

My post yesterday expressed concern that the "No Kings" rally was populated predominately by Boomers. Where were the people in their teens and twenties angry about the cost of college and the mismatch between incomes and housing prices? Aren't they pissed off that our generation is trashing the democratic norms of our republic? Where are the young idealists, the next generation of people like me back in the day?

Michael Trigoboff took a different path, but we ended up in a similar place, wondering what went wrong with the politics of our generation.

Young Michael Trigoboff

Trigoboff, taxi license

Trigoboff reports a more countercultural youth than mine. He makes a different point about young idealists. He observes that young people have ill-considered, dangerous ideas, so it is best that young idealists not get their way. They would mess things up even more than we Boomers did once we came into power.

Trigoboff recently, age 78

Both of us are at an age where we reflect on our generation. We succeeded in getting old. Readers might prepare themselves for his comment by listening to his humorous re-work of a song by Steppenwolf, "Born to be Wild." We were born to get old, and we can chuckle about it.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1CsVaROYDY

Guest Post by Michael Trigoboff

I was one of the hippies who heard that Jefferson Airplane song back then and thought we were part of a cosmic consciousness revolution. But in the mid-1970s, about 9/10 of my generation suddenly stopped being hippies and started doing cocaine, wearing polyester leisure suits, and dancing to stupid music at discos. We hippies thought we were the revolution, but it turned out that most of us were just trend victims.

Not me, though. I am still a Grateful Deadhead hippie Buddhist. I never went to a disco in my life, and never wanted to. Tried cocaine twice, didn’t like it, and never did it again. Those experiences and a number of others taught me that my naïve youthful utopian idealism was dumb and needed a huge dose of practicality to have any hope of improving things.

We hippies were lucky that our revolution did not succeed, unlike the ones from then that did: the Chinese Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot in Cambodia. If we had succeeded, the bad karma from that “success” would likely have led to our next 10,000 incarnations being the caterpillars that get paralyzed by wasps and eaten alive from the inside out by wasp larvae.

Now the young people call us Boomers, and they say we are the problem. I won’t be around when they get to be my age and discover that a lot of what they thought when they were young was just plain wrong, and that now the even-younger people are blaming them for the state of the world.

But what goes around comes around, and they, too, will someday have their turn in the harsh light of condemnation by the clueless young.

 

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