Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Boomers and the Long Term Care Partnership (Part I)

I hadn’t planned to write such a long article, but as I began researching material for this, I found that there was much that needs to be said. Therefore, I have decided to publish it in two or three parts.

Boomers and the Long Term Care Partnership.It began in 1946, and while there is much debate as to when it actually ended, it is generally agreed that the 76 million American children born between 1945 and 1964 represent a cohort that is significant on account of its size. This group of people is widely known as the baby boomer generation. I am one of them.
A large part of the Baby Boom was an after-effect of World War II. The United States, like many other free world countries, experienced an unprecedented bubble of vigorous economic growth that did not diminish until 1968. Furthermore, in the U.S. the G.I. Bill enabled a record number of people to attend college and obtain, perhaps in many cases, the first college degree in their extended families.
Born in 1953, I was not only the first of my family to graduate high school (1971), I was also the first to attempt any higher education, earning my Bachelor of Arts Degree in 1980. Coincidently, I was a recipient of the GI Bill college benefits.
My interest in composing this article is partially because I have lived through the world that my fellow boomers have experienced, but a more important reason is to hopefully open some eyes as to what might lay ahead for my generation.
Some historians break down the Baby Boomers into two cohorts:
Baby Boomer cohort #1 (born from 1946 to 1954)
 Memorable events: assassinations of JFK, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, political unrest, walk on the moon, Vietnam War, anti-war protests, social experimentation, sexual freedom, civil rights movement, environmental movement, women's movement, protests and riots, experimentation with various intoxicating recreational substances
 Key characteristics: experimental, individualism, free spirited, social cause oriented
Baby Boomer cohort #2 (born from 1955 to 1964)
 Memorable events: Watergate, Nixon resigns, the cold war, the oil embargo, raging inflation, gasoline shortages
 Key characteristics: less optimistic, distrust of government, general cynicism
We were the first generation to be raised on television. We were widely associated with privilege, as many of us grew up in a time of affluence. As a group, we were the healthiest and wealthiest generation to that time, and amongst the first to grow up genuinely expecting the world to improve with time.
We tended to think of ourselves as a special generation, very different from those that came before us. In the 1960s, as the relatively large numbers of us became teenagers and young adults, we, and those around us, created a very specific rhetoric around our cohort, and the change we were bringing about.

An indication of the importance put on the impact of the Boomer Generation was the selection by Time magazine of the Baby Boom Generation as its 1966 "Man of the Year"

This is the end of Part 1. I hope to have Part 2 up soon. Thanks for reading. Opinions welcome.

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