POINTS OF VIEW
8036 Politics 1 – Baby Boomer
In terms of its strict definition, I was not a baby boomer. That generation started in 1945 and I was born five years earlier in 1940. Having said that, I was one of the precursors of that generation -- and as such was possibly even more influential, where the birthrate was much lower at the beginning of the Second World War. Thus it was that my small cohort which -- as teenagers -- actually invented the whole concept of teens. We were also the group who invented, or at least promoted, rock music. It's strange to think that, before our time, children moved from adolescents to adulthood without any intermediate stage. We invented that new intermediate stage, which now is one of the most joyful -- albeit angst-filled -- in many a person's life.
I then went on, at university, to be one of those who created the first generation of protest. In my case the cause was anti-apartheid, which was the great anti-establishment movement in those days. You can read about that elsewhere. It was this movement which grew, through the 1960s, to embrace opposition to the Vietnam war. I was never a child of flower-power, but as a young adult I was well aware of it -- and supportive of it.
But I sort of missed the sexual revolution, or at least anticipated it. Pat and I were very unusual for the time in having sex before marriage. My mother was horrified when she found out. It was always assumed that we were going to get married, and despite all the ups and downs, we still remained married. The real sexual revolution came five years too late for me. We didn't have the benefits of the pill, nor the much freer sex which came with it later.
I noticed this most at Cussons, where my brand manager, Roger Ollerton, was right on the cusp of the sexual revolution. In fact, though I envied him, it imposed more problems than benefits. He went out every evening, mixing with the same group as George Best; the infamous alcoholic footballer. Roger used to come in the following morning looking haggered. He moaned that he felt he had been a failure, since he hadn't being able get into bed – let alone satisfy - the young girls that he had pulled during the evening. He invariably had to go back to his 'steady', who was a girl who was much freer with her favours. He couldn't admit to himself that he wasn't part of the new generation. At the same time, though, he still had the hang-ups of the old generation. It is a real dilemma to be in that position, between two different generations.
Treating myself as a 'boomer', which - in terms of values I am most closely associated with - I really am, my generation has shaped the world -- in our own image -- as we have moved through time. That's the reason for title of this whole autobiography. As I have said, we almost invented protest in the 1960s. Prior to that the young had been a protest free zone.
As we moved into the Seventies and Eighties, and raised families, our values didn't change much, except they tended to focus on Dr Spock rather than on political developments. The outcome of this was that our children were given much greater freedom, as a matter of principle, than those of the previous generations. This posed problems for Generation X -- our children -- captured by the seductive songs of the right-wing (particularly Margaret Thatcher in the UK and the neo-cons in the US). These promoted the idea not of true individualism -- which was the cry of the 1960s -- but of selfishness. At same time we, the baby boomers distracted by the responsibilities of parenthood, lost our newly gained political power once more to the older generation who were taking over governments across the world.
It was only in the 1990s that power returned to the baby boomer generation. But Tony Blair and Bill Clinton were the most obvious examples of the power of our generation. Indeed, the acid test of such a new politicians is the influence on them of Jack Kennedy. More personally, the leaders I mixed with in Ethiopia, who were amongst most adventurous political leaders I have ever come across, were also similarly influenced by Jack Kennedy
Now baby boomers are moving into their dotage. All of a sudden, it is no longer the young generation -- as we baby boomers once were -- that is the centre of attention. Now, rid of our families, political power lies with us as we become the grey population.
In that sense, at least, we baby boomers have been a very selfish generation. This is paradoxical, since the values we took onboard in the 1960s, and still a large extent still hold, were those of individualism within a commitment to community. In a selfish sense, though, we have tried to impose our values on society as a whole, and have largely succeeded -- except possibly in the United States, where the traditional values of the Christian evangelists - coupled with the parallel ambitions of the neo-cons - hold sway.
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