[raysachs]

I am, but I’m a ‘59 model and I contend that the experience of early Boomers and late Boomers was so different they shouldn’t be considered the same generation. I have a brother who’s an early (‘47) Boomer and a sister (‘45) who missed it altogether bt about 4 months. My brother and sister came up in the innocent ‘50s, were driving when the Beatles hit, were old enough to be fully traumatized by the Kennedy assassination, were old enough to either serve (or not) during Vietnam, and are basically the generation the fraught all of the cultural and political battles of “the ‘60s”.

Whereas I remember the Kennedy assassination and the Beatles, but I was a very little kid and neither changed my life at the time. Vietnam ended well before I was draft age, and by the time I was “of age”, the Summer of Love, the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement (the first one, anyway), the early women’s movement, environmental movement, and gay rights movement had all happened or were well underway, MLK / RFK / Wallace had all been shot and assassination attempts were a way of life. everyone took smoking weed and having sex in high school almost for granted. I was 10 years old when Woodstock and Altamont happened, and 11 when Joplin, Hendrix, and Morrison died and the Beatles broke up - that stuff was OVER before I even got started. I’m very close to my older siblings, but they were almost more like a second set of parents to me than siblings, at least until we were all kind of middle aged. We grew up and came of age in COMPLETELY different worlds!

Without getting into their politics at all, suffice it to say that our two previous US presidents were both technically “Boomers” but were probably the two most diametrically opposite people that we’ve ever seen in that office - one was a very early Boomer, one a very late Boomer. I’m not sure where the break point would be, but the lived experience of people born in the late 40’s and earlly 50’s couldn’t be much more different from those born in the late 50’s and early 60’s.

Sorry for the long winded-ness, but I dealt with demographics as a huge part of my career and I’ve thought about this stuff both personally and professionally a LOT.

-Ray