Baby boom: (n) a temporary marked increase in the birth rate, especially the one following World War II.

I am a baby boomer.

As with many other titles that have been thrust upon me, I have no idea in hell what that means.

I will say this–I often smile when people say the young people today are growing up in “much more perilous, dangerous and tempting times.” Honestly, there was no place crazier than the United States of America circa 1959 through 1972.

We were killing off leaders like we were part of a drug cartel from Columbia, and drugs were surfacing everywhere, which people experimented with in order to do their part in assisting the FDA.

We were also periodically threatened with atomic bomb annihilation, just to make sure we didn’t get too comfortable in our new hush puppies.

The music was turbulent. If you were a young man you were constantly threatened with being drafted and sent over to bleed in a rice paddy, and the sexual revolution, which was on the drawing boards, required a rotation of guinea pigs.

We were angry, frustrated, disconsolate, overjoyed and unrepresented.

I spent my teen years in that period, and even though I was a church-going boy and not a member of the SDS, when I look back on it, my life was surrounded by dying principles which were tumbling down around me like the walls of Jericho.

I remember one day, my father was in the middle of a speech about personal responsibility and how I needed to take more of it, when suddenly he stopped speaking, stared off in the distance and never continued. I don’t know what crossed his mind–but I think that even though he was an old guy, he realized that everything he was sharing was being disemboweled in his lifetime, and he did not yet understand what the New Order would require.

The travesty of the baby boomers is that they remained babies.

• So we never got the boom.
• We never got the sense of accomplishment.
• We all just eventually learned to sign on the dotted line, and started attending financial conferences on better mortgage rates.

But I am an oddball.

I have maintained a spark of revival, revolution and rejuvenation.

It causes me to be adequately dissatisfied … while on my way to find some moments of satisfaction.

Thank you for enjoying Words from Dic(tionary) —  J.R. Practix

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