MB Civic

Editorial  |  May 18, 2006  |  The Boston GlobeTHE GREATEST Generation begat the biggest generation. The first of the 78 million postwar children are turning 60 this year, and many of us are coping with that milestone through denial.

Nevertheless, I will be joined today by Reggie Jackson, the former baseball slugger, the only person I have ever known about who shares my exact birth date. There’s nothing dignified about going into your seventh decade still identified as a baby boomer. ”Sixty is the new whatever” is the catch phrase for this denial, and there is no question that 60-year-olds in 2006 have more years to look forward to than Greatest Generation 60-year-olds did. Thanks to knee, hip, and shoulder repair operations, we can also count on being more mobile.

Boomers have not been so uniform in the ways they have coped with the wars that history has dealt them. One member of the birth cohort of 1946, Bill Clinton, dodged the draft during the unpopular Vietnam War, in which millions of his counterparts fought. Another 1946er, George W. Bush, escaped Vietnam service in the Texas Air National Guard but more recently started another defining war of the generation, equally unpopular, in Iraq. The most important boomer war ended unfought. That was the Cold War, which clouded 1950s childhoods as darkly as polio did until Dr. Jonas Salk came along.

The polio vaccine and surgical orthopedic advances are just two cases in which boomers have been affected by the happenstance of health. The lack of good birth control methods helped ensure our numbers before the invention of the Pill in 1960. Its timely arrival helped to guarantee that the generation behind us was smaller, protecting our status as the huge rodent in the python. The surgeon general’s warning on cigarette smoking in 1964 was a factor in breaking many of us of a lethal habit made alluring by the heroes and screen stars of the Greatest Generation. In 1981, AIDS suddenly became the terror of the revolutions in sex and drug use so identified with our generation.

Boomers have difficulty pleading innocent to accusations of self-indulgence and self-absorption. But we came by the indulgence naturally, from our parents, who considered their big families the prize for overcoming the Depression and the Axis. For 1946ers, the indulgence was also limited by the impact our sheer numbers had both on schools (where split sessions were common) and on living quarters (it took a while for suburban house construction to accommodate the growing families that overcrowded postwar apartments). As for self-absorption? Guilty as charged. Only a boomer like Reggie Jackson could have once described himself as ”the straw that stirs the drink.” Here’s to you, Mr. October.

DONALD MacGILLIS