I'm A Baby Boomer...You're Welcome!

I have the best friends. They are smart, articulate, kind, giving and smart. Did I say smart twice? That's because it bears repeating.

I have very smart friends. And for the most part my tribe are all baby boomers, growing up during some of the most turbulent times in our country. But Baby boomers got up one day and decided things needed to be changed. So this generation, these baby boomers, made some changes.

Women burned bras and busted through glass ceilings.

Black people drank from any water fountain they wanted and Jim Crow laws disappeared.

"Crippled" gave way to "disability" and "wheelchair accessible" became part of our lives.

Lets hear it for seat belt laws that saves thousands of lives, and 60 is no longer professional death. Start a whole new life at 60 if you want.

Frozen dinners are better...peas are not nearly so fluorescent.

Electric rollers, blow dryers and curling irons all started to come onto the scene with Vidal Sassoon. I don't know why..but they did and we stopped seeing women shopping with curlers in their hair.

Smoking is way down since we sent the Marlboro man packing....and drunk driving, thanks in large part to MADD is a serious crime.

We were charged with saving the oceans, the whales and the rain forest. Since they are all still here we must have triumphed over that. I don't hear much about acid rain and the brown skies of Los Angeles are clearer. Folks stopped littering....in fact throw something out of your car window and watch your butt get a ticket.

Again, you're welcome.

And then we made other changes.....

Computers, cable TV and the internet!!

On the word of a president we went to the moon.

On our watch we have mobile phones, and polio, whooping cough, and small pox are things of the past, and cancer has a much higher rate of survival.

Voyager I was the first man made object to leave the solar system - the universe got a lot bigger after Voyager I.

Baby boomers have made some mistakes...but even with the wars we have had there has not been a world war III. 60 million people died in world war II and we have had the capability to destroy the whole world with nuclear weapons since 1945.....but we haven't.

You're welcome.

My parents were children of the depression, they lived lives of scarcity even when things got better. I don't save every bag as my mother did, or wash off the foil paper to use over again....but I appreciate the world they left me.  Baby Boomers started to gear their lives toward abundance and so many great things have happened. Our parents had to live through World War II but we watched the Berlin Wall come down without a whimper. Communism in the USSR disappeared and Hungary became Hungary again, Poland went back to being Poland...and on and on and on.

People who have changed our lives forever are baby boomers...Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steven Spielberg and the Beatles..not to mention the Beach Boys. Jerry Seinfeld, Stevie Nicks, George Clooney...Wolfgang Puck, Craig Venter, Steven King and of course, Oprah Winfrey. String theory came about as did the human genome project....Ben and Jerry, Gary Trudeau, Michael Jordon and Rush Limbaugh.

And Millennials? When we annoy you with requests for help with our computers, remember we gave you the Super Bowl, the mini skirt, and saved you from beehive hairdos and fins on cars.

You're welcome.