Demographers love to label generations. Apparently a new one arrives every 18 years or so. Mine is called the Baby Boomers. There is some difference among sources as to when the first Boomers started arriving but it is generally identified as the mid-1940s when our parents were reunited after the end of World War II.
The cohort contains people born up through 1964.
I've long held my own theory about us Boomers. It starts with the facts: As we entered the school systems in our towns and cities, we broke everything we encountered. There were never enough desks, chairs, or educational supplies for us, starting with kindergarten.
Instead, we had standing-room-only and sharing as alternatives while our desperate teachers waited for the reinforcements to arrive.
A similar trend greeted us as we became adults. Partially due to the cultural shift we were spearheading, we were not a good fit into the existing job markets. We were rebellious, idealistic, ambitious for social change. We were angry at the social injustices we saw around us.
So we created our own institutions.
In the business sector I chose, journalism, many of the founders of the institutions where I worked were led by Boomers. Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone, was both in 1946. Louis Rossetto, Wired, 1949. David Talbot, Salon, 1951. Richard Gingras, Google News, 1952. Lowell Bergman, CIR, CBS, etc., 1945.
I arrived in 1947.
Hell, even Donald Trump is a Baby Boomer (1946).
Those of us in the older slice of the Baby Boom generation not only tended to create new institutions; we also led them for years. Most of our employees were younger Boomers, much like our younger sisters and brothers.
We brought a new attitude to these institutions we created. The dress and work style tended to be casual, the decision-making at least initially was collectivist. We didn't like hierarchies, not at first. Our primary audience was composed of people very much like us.
Now many of us are growing old.
***
It's hard to escape the notion that some of the people around us may be gradually going slightly insane under the self-imposed conditions of our isolation from each other.
A friend of mine in an assisted living facility said he couldn't stand the silence and he had to do something about it. He went out of his rom, ran up and down the halls, screaming.
Afterwards, he said he felt spent. No one responded.
The other day, driving to a nearby house to drop off or pick up some supplies, we passed a strange sight. A boy, maybe 11 or 12, was running down the sidewalk wearing only a pair of underpants. He seemed ecstatic, as though he'd escaped from somewhere. Following him, some distance behind, was a muffle-aged woman, with a frantic expression as she sought to recapture him.
Was that his mother?
As we all peered through the right-side windows in the car, we felt helpless to intervene.
Social distance.
***
I'm hardly an expert at this Facebook thing. Although I've been a member since 2005 (I closed my original account and opened this one in 2006), I never posted much here. In recent years, I mainly promoted the projects my colleagues were producing at KQED -- the investigative stories that I respect so much.
When this pandemic crisis erupted, and being retired, I felt compelled to contribute some thoughts; thus, this flow of daily essays began. Again, I didn't have any clear plan in mind, and no one urged me to get involved in this.
It just sorta happened.
As a result, a sleepy page with a few hundred friends has exploded to a daily site with thousands of readers. I am grateful for the response, the feedback, the comments, shares, messages, and especially for your encouragement.
But I'm also a little shell-shocked. Soon, it is clear, we will have reached Facebook's limit of 5,000 friends. I guess the growth stops there.
Why facebook imposes this limit remains murky to me. All the advice I can find via Google is 'if you want to keep making new friends, drop some of your old ones.'
Why would I do that?
You can never have too many friends. That's me saying that.
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