We’re 42 Million Strong: We’re the Mega-Boom Generation

DID YOU ever get the feeling that you don’t have a generation?

After all, you’re not really a Baby Boomer. You never ran naked through the mud at Woodstock, never waded through rice paddies in the Mekong Delta, never hissed at Lyndon Johnson on TV, never cried when Jack and Bobby got shot, never dropped Owsley acid to the strains of The Doors.

On the other hand, you’re definitely no Generation X-er. You never heard of Kurt Cobain until he killed himself — and then you still didn’t care. You use your computer for crunching spreadsheets, not for playing Doom. You would never stick pins through your mucus membranes. You think “ecstasy” is a beatific state achieved by saints and mystics, while “lovers” (you generally assume) are two people of opposite sex.

So what are you?

Don’t ask the demographers. They’ll tell you you’re a Baby Boomer, one of 76 million people born from 1946 to 1964. But those of us born from 1955 on know in our hearts that we’re a far different breed from the real Baby Boomers.

Let’s say you left the womb in 1955. You would have reached draft age only in 1973, just as the last U.S. troops pulled out of Vietnam. During your four years of college, the hottest campus disturbances would have been streaking, frat rushes and Saturday Night Fever.

Let’s face it. The most notable thing we thirty-somethings ever did was to miss the ’60s by a hair’s breadth. It wasn’t our fault. We thought we had plenty of time. We thought Nixon would still be president when we reached college. We thought the war would still be raging. We thought the world would hold its breath and wait for us to join the fray. But it didn’t.

Many of us tried our best to keep the spirit going. All through the ’70s, our stereos blasted music by the Beatles, the Stones, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. We grew our hair long and leavened our speech with hippie jargon lifted from the pages of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Sometimes, as we strolled between classes, we even closed our eyes, straining to catch some etheric vibration of sights, sounds and smells from that fading past, the crackle of angry speeches through megaphones, the stench of tear gas, the thunder of electric guitars. But alas, it was gone.

No matter how long we wore our hair, how many joints we huffed, how much acid we dropped or how vigorously we fornicated, we knew the real Baby Boomers would always consider us squares. No many how many petitions we signed, or how many subversive meetings we attended, the real Baby Boomers, we knew, would sneer from their deathbeds that we were nothing but “sellouts.” Why? Because when they did those things, the Establishment trembled. When we did them, only our parents lost any sleep.

For 25 years, we have sulked in the shadow of the real Baby Boomers. But in 1996, things may finally start to turn our way. New Year’s Day saw the first crop of Baby Boomers turn 50. From now until the year 2014, says the National Council on the Aging, a Baby Boomer will turn 50 every 7.5 seconds. That means the Boomers are cresting. Soon they’ll be slowing down. Taking it easy. Feathering their nests for retirement.

But not us. We thirty-somethings won’t turn 50 for another ten to 20 years. At last, the mantle is falling on our shoulders. And guess what? There’s a lot more of us than there are of them.

That’s right. Pundits, historians and sociologists have long attributed the ’60s uproar to the sheer numbers of young people flooding the schools during those years. Some 34 million little Bills and Hillaries were spawned from 1946 through 1954 [Note: I later named this crowd the "Mini-Boomers"]. But it’s the second half of the Baby Boom that will pack the biggest punch, as we enter our prime. A whopping 42 million of us sprang into being from 1955 through 1964 — nearly 25 percent more than the ’60s generation.

Call us the Mega-Boomers. Without us, the Baby Boom would be a bust. We are Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Madonna and Michael Jackson. We are bankers, lawyers and business owners. Our revolution is quiet, but efficient. We don’t march on Washington. We’ve got home offices, Web pages, Internet news groups and talk radio.

“God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion…,” Thomas Jefferson remarked after the Shays uprising of 1787. `What country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time that this people preserve the spirit of resistance?”

Like the Baby Boomers before us, we Mega-Boomers span the political spectrum. But our passion for liberty unites us. As we enter this election year, let us take the torch gratefully from our elder Boomers. It lies in our hands to determine whether this millennium ends with a bang or with a whimper.

This column originally appeared January 8, 1996 on my free AOL home page, and also January 23, 1996 on Mickey Mercier’s NewHavenMag.com. It was my first cybercolumn — that is, my first column published exclusively online.