Don’t blame (female) boomers

I was born a boomer, I’m told. I never looked at myself as a boomer, but my parents helped to create the boom after WWII. Many people who were Gen X or Gen Y – our own children - held the world against us. I didn’t really start thinking about this until people directed their nasty comments at me! FFS, who am I, really??

I was born in 1956, had a lovely childhood with lovely parents, went to school, went to work when I left there, and worked pretty much every year until my stroke in 2014. I spent most of my time in very good jobs, but at the start of my working career there were a couple or three which proved (to me) that misogyny was still happening back in the 1970s – and it continued onwards.

I got married in 1980 and had my two children in 1982 and 1986, got divorced 11 years later, lived as a single parent for 11 more years and got married again (silly me). Divorced again 9 years later, just the year before my stroke.

Many people I had/have seen in top employment roles were/are men. Until fairly recently they were around the age I am, and yes, they set up shocking lives in what they did – such as mens-only clubs. They became shareholders, and yes, they made millions. Perhaps they were boomers – but they were very different from me and many, many of the women who are told we were boomers.

What has distracted me since the 1970s is environment, climate change, domestic violence, education, racism, disability discrimination, equality and much more, but I didn’t build the country. I am one of the many of the boomers who worked most of my adult life, but I have not made millions. I am one of them who have a disability. I am one who has sat pretty close to poverty since I went on to DSP after my stroke. And yet, these days, my age is against me rather than for me. I am not due any respect from the Gen X or Gen Y / Millennials or Generation Z.

Those who are due respect are the Lost Generation (WWI), the Greatest Generation (WWII) and the Silent Generation (otherwise known as the Lucky Few who missed the fighting). My parents were the Silent Generation, and they helped to rebuild the country after the war. They also taught us how to do things ourselves, like gardening, fixing our own cars, driving manual cars, reading books, playing, swimming, etc etc etc. They were wonderful people.

My own opinion, which I’m pretty damned sure that anyone in the generation I am to name will be absolutely against what I am to say, is that the generation I blame are the Generation X people. These people are born between 1965 – 1980. We, the boomers, had started to pick up on environment, climate change, domestic violence, education, racism, disability discrimination, equality and much more, but the Gen Xers threw their hands up and turned away from it. They had seen what we were getting, and they wanted more!

Of course I know some rich old boomers, but I also know a lot of rich Gen Xers. And I’m starting to meet some pretty well off Gen Ys. People like me, middle-of-the-generation boomers, didn’t really change much at all. We set it up, and the Gen Xers jumped on it. They set it in fast-forward for Gen Ys. Gen Zs, I have heard, aren’t getting anything like Gen X and Gen Y did. Nor, as I am told, what boomers had.

Well here are my opinions. You can agree or disagree, but don’t you ever argue with me because this is MY view, and probably not yours.

• I am a boomer, but I am only called that after people like my parents created a population boom after WWII.
• Recession recovered for the next decade after the WWII, changing the living standards upwards.
• New homes were built after WWII, before I was old enough to help build any of those that people like my father built. They were built so fast for the returned soldiers.
• The 1950s became the turn-around for car sales for the Lost / Great / Silent generations due to the end of the war. Boomers didn’t buy a car until the 1960s or 1970s.
• Workplace computers started in the 1950s. Boomers started using computers at work from the 1970s onwards.
• Until the early 1960s women were not expected to work when they got married. That was even before boomers were old enough to get married!
• Superannuation was available in the 1970s when I was in the NZ Army, set up by Lost / Great / Silent people in government.
• Boomers acknowledged drug use, but mostly used only marijuana and/or LSD. Ghettos used heroin.
• In the late 1930s holidays overseas were only for wealthy people. The chap who set up Horizon Holidays in the 1950s was an earlier generation than the boomers. 
• Hotels were set up all around Europe in the 1960s, and especially in Spain where they were looked on greedily by Franco who was an earlier generation to boomers.
• Pollution started a couple of centuries before now, from the industrial era started, again, by men.

I’ll finish my post now, because I could go on and on and on. I know what I am, regardless of whether I am a “boomer”, and I know how I lived with people who were generations before me and who were generations after me. I object to those who don’t really seem to know much about history but just want to blame us. Stop that, it’s disrespectful: that is, if you even know what that means.