Talkin' About My Generation ..

Why is it that the only boomers to become president were all born the same year?

Eighty years ago this month, World War II ended. The official surrender wasn’t signed till Sept. 2, but Japan announced it was surrendering on Aug. 14, and hostilities ended immediately. Before long, millions of American servicemen were headed home, and millions of them had an enormous urge to procreate.

Not only had they had to put off fathering children during the four years America was in the war; they had endured more than a decade of the Great Depression before that, when many did not have enough money to marry or start families. The result was the famous Baby Boom, which officially lasted from 1946 to 1964.

Less than a year after Japan officially surrendered, three little boys were born, barely two months apart, all of whom would grow up to become Presidents of the United States: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. They were, of course, all very different. But while that first year saw the fewest babies born of any time during the boom (3.4 million), and most years in the 1950s produced at least 4 million babies. it looks like there will never be a president from that decade.

And though Barack Obama, born in 1961, is technically a boomer, it’s often been remarked that children born towards the end of the boom have a much different outlook than early boomers. Plus, he grew up largely in Hawaii and Indonesia, not in the United States, and his father never really lived here.

So why have we had three presidents from that first year of the boom, and none since? Certainly that’s partly by accident, and three other early boomers, Al Gore (1948), Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney (both 1947) were nominated but lost.

But people are products of the place and times in which they lived, and perhaps especially when and where they grew up. Clinton, Bush and Trump came into a world where America was supreme. There were two other kinds of countries in the world: Those terribly battered by World War II including our allies, most of who had suffered terribly and who had much of their infrastructure destroyed, including our enemies, who were in even worse shape, but over whom we reigned supreme, and finally, what we used to call the “third world,” nations that were largely primitive.

The Soviet Union had a massive army, but for the first four postwar years we had the A-bomb and they did not. Our economy dwarfed any other, and indeed, was larger than most other countries put together. We grew up thinking we could do anything, that things were going to get better and better, economically, socially and in every other way. We worried about a nuclear war, but after the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Test-Ban Treaty of 1963, it didn’t seem inevitable any more

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The general mood of my childhood (I was born in 1952) was one of almost unrelenting optimism. Then came Nov. 22, 1963, and after that Vietnam, Watergate and stagflation, and other blows to our worldview, and we as a nation never have gotten that feeling of relentless optimism about life and America’s future back again. Many of us have, however, been looking for it and a leader who could take us there, which may explain the appeal of false prophets like Donald Trump.

This is a simplistic analysis I know, and there are many people to whom it doesn’t apply at all. Some things are better now than they were, especially if you are Black, female, or trans or gay, even though the current administration is trying to make life worse for all the above.

I have lived through these decades and studied them, and I think there’s a lot of truth in what I’ve reported here. But I also still believe we can pull out of what we are going through now, and get our mojo back and believe in ourselves and the promise of America again. We just have to be clear-eyed, decent and want to do so.

It really is up to us.