Help me, Boomers

Baby Boomers, children of the ‘60s, those born somewhere between 1947 and 1965 (if my internet search is to be believed), I need your help. I know we’ve had our disagreements in the past, and I know we’ll have them in the future, but for now I’d like to offer a brief truce to our good-natured horseplay and have a heart-to-heart for a minute or two.

I grew up in a Boomer’s world, hearing stories from my Boomer parents about what life was like in those hazy, crazy days of peace, love, war, and people getting their heads cracked in at protests. It was certainly a crazy time, growing pains for The American Experiment if you will, but I grew up knowing that we had moved forward as a nation and as a people, stronger from all of our past battles. As I sat terrified as a kindergartner and listened to a song whose lyrics I can still hear clear as a bell 27 years later asking, “Mr. President, will there be no more trees?” I still knew that somehow it would all turn out all right. I can remember, even being only six years old, feeling an immense amount of relief wash over me when Mom explained to me that there was no Soviet Union anymore, and we can now breathe a little bit easier.

My parents had grown up with duck-and-cover. My parents were 13 and 10 years old respectively when the world held its breath about the Cuban Missile Crisis. An exercise called Able Archer, which the Soviets almost thought was a backdoor into war, happened two years before I was born while my parents were already raising three kids and trying against everything to keep up a living as farmers. The world they grew up in, as they and many other Boomers have told me, was always in the shadow of a possible future mushroom cloud.

So now, Boomers, I need your help: how did you handle this? With the threat of another nuclear conflict unfolding before our eyes, how do you go through the day-to-day? This isn’t something we weren’t taught to deal with like you were. Explain to us, guide us through how you went to work, raised families, and carried on through it all. Is that why Archie Bunker was so mad? Is that why the old stereotype of the sitcom Dad had to crack open four beers a night and stereotype Mom buffed every surface in the house to a mirror sheen? Please explain how you carried on to a generation that was told our best days were still ahead of us, not a possible nuclear nightmare.

And it’s not just the nukes: there’s the worrying studies that say climate change will get us if the nukes don’t, or the rise of actual, literal, we-don’t-mind-that-you-call-us-Nazis in America, of all places. Or the regularity of stories detailing poisoned drinking water, or corrupt corporate bigwigs, or people dying because they can’t afford insulin anymore. How, Boomers, did you manage to sit down at the doorstep of oblivion with your children and watch Star Trek, a television show whose entire premise is “yeah, we had a catastrophic war, but then we got better a hundred years later” and not lose your minds? Please, from the soft-headed, bleeding-heart, liberal snowflake Millennial, I’m asking you in earnest: can you tell us how you did it?