Boomer Randomness

Some politician my age had the audacity to ridicule the students who are planning the March For Our Lives. Don’t these politicians remember that we the boomers organized protests and marches to address the issues of the 1960s and 1970s when we were mostly students in those decades? We were young and passionate about making or trying to make positive changes in American society. We blamed the ‘adults’ of the day for war and racism, among other things. The March For Our Lives, today in Washington DC, is primarily organized by students who survived the mass shooting at a Florida high school last month. The main issue is sensible gun control laws. They say “the adults have failed us”. Congress has done nothing. Mass shooting after mass shooting. These student, many students, don’t feel safe in their schools. I won’t debate that issue too much here because it won’t do any good. Nobody will ever convince me that the average citizen needs an AR15. Nobody can convince me that sensible re...

Home alone on a Saturday morning, sitting on the sofa sipping coffee and reading a book about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, I take a short break to write some random thoughts that creep into my brain; thoughts that are interrupting my attempts to focus on the book. Even though some details are new to me, I mostly know how the Roosevelt story ends. Obviously I don’t know how my story will end, nor can I know in advance what my life journey details will be. I am at a crossroads that I bet many boomers reach in their 60s. The intersection seems to be in a large, open field where two highways cross, giving a person at least four directions to choose from in determining which way to proceed. Walk along a road north, south, east or west, step off the road and walk diagonally into the open field, or just stand there and contemplate the situation. That adds up to at least nine options. The picture in my head reminds me of a scene from the movie North By Northwest. Being the o...

“We’re going to get in our Expedition and drive north and west.” That was the most exciting sentence between bites of veal parmigiana Saturday night as we chatted about travel and retirement with our only-a-little-older-than-us friend who now lives with his wife in an active adult community in Florida. I visualized them driving their aptly-named vehicle north on I-95. Or maybe they’ll cruise along US 1 instead, enjoying the slower pace of the backroads. Their informal destination that week might be Maine, but they have no formal plan. They’ll drive for a few hours, stop when they see something interesting, check into a hotel or campground. At some point they’ll turn west and visit states as far west as the Dakotas, then maybe south through Utah or Arizona or wherever their whims direct them. Their plan is to spend two months on the road. Two. Months. With no agenda other than discovery. Back in the 1970s I had that same dream. I even bought a van with the idea of customizing ...

Were so many people always this ignorant and heartless?  Or is it just amplified by social media? Many things triggered this question in my head the other morning, the end of the week during which 18 people were murdered in yet another school shooting; but the specific headline that got my attention was something about angry tweets directed at Lindsay Vaughn for not winning a gold medal in the olympics that day. W T F ?! Is all this ignorant negativity a new and growing thing? Is it Russian interference in our societal norms?  Is it because we have a rude, ignorant, heartless president?  Or are we just seeing this negativity more because it gets reported more in the news and spread more rapidly via social media? And here I am spreading negativity too, by saying what I’m saying in this blog today?. Ugh. Next post will be more positive. Then there’s the gun nuts dissing the protesting high school students. Rude. There are valid points if view on all sides of the...