My Big Chill

One slice of the Ann Arbor delegation of the Baby Boom gathers in my apartment in the Fillmore in the early '70s.


So I grew up in Michigan. I was born in Women's Hospital in Detroit two years after the war ended. My family moved into one of the expanding suburbs, Royal Oak, amidst a cluster of other families that consisted of returning soldiers, wives and boys and girls named David, Susan, Bill, Bob, Jim, Mark, Bonnie, Nancy, Kathy, Fred, Peter, Carole, Paul, Diane, Mary, John, and so on and so forth.

We were the leading edge of the Baby Boom Generation -- a cohort so large that we broke every institution we encountered. When we got to school, there were never enough classrooms, chairs, desks, books, or other resources. Teachers suddenly had to handle many more students at once than had previously been the case.

When we reached our teens, there was not enough overt passion in the music that our parents and older siblings enjoyed. Thus, a mass market for rock and roll was born.

Meanwhile, the political economy of the nation newly victorious in the second war of wars dictated that America become an empire, as all conquerors since time immemorial have done.

As we grew up, America's empire -- imperialistic, arrogant, ugly, and consumed with fear by an alternative model -- Communism -- spread globally.

People like me grew up reading books like "Our Friend the Atom," a distinctly propagandistic reader that was our government's attempt to convince us, years before we could vote, of the rightness of its policy to develop nuclear power plants while stockpiling WMD's to protect us from the Russians, Chinese, and other socialistic foreigners.

Much of the rest of my generation's story is written contemporaneously in music, in poetry, in film, and in our collective memory. Confronted with the worldview that our fate was to conquer the world, many of us rebelled, begging to differ. (But hardly all of us, witness George W. Bush and his allies.)

The rest of us opposed the war in Vietnam. We marched in support of the civil rights movement. We launched the women's liberation movement and the gay liberation movement. We smoked dope and dropped acid and danced in the streets.

We had Dylan and the Beatles, the Stones, and so much more. One of our early heroes, when we were still kids, was Elvis. The music always reflected our own edge -- the ragged edges of a churning chainsaw that we used to slice our way through the society we were born into to try and establish a new order.

The best politician to emerge from my generation, by far, is Bill Clinton. Everyone else, in either party, pales by comparison. My hope is that his recent health problems do not force him into silence for a long, long time. The series of speeeches he gave, mostly overseas, late in his administration, remain by far the most visionary, future-oriented material uttered by any American political leader to date.

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