Saturday, December 20, 2014

First Wave Boomers must help transition Second Wave Boomers into the new world

My history professor, Judith Fingard (born in 1943) , myself (born in 1951) and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper (born in 1959) are all considered to fit the definition of Baby Boomer by most authorities on that vexed subject.

Stephen Harper, Rogue Boomer


But Fingard and myself actually knew Modernity at first hand, before easing ourselves into PostModernity - while Harper only read about Modernity in a book.

Even I, going through school eight years after Fingard , had plenty of teachers whose key formative years were during Edwardian times before the calamity of WWI - the age cohort that I consider the most ardently pro-Modernity of that entire era.

We both got Modernity's values both barrels in our schooling - and Modernity was still mostly in the driver's seat in the outside world, in areas like human rights and social values, until late in the 1960s.

But by then Judy and I had both left our High School in Dartmouth Nova Scotia - but Harper was not yet even in Middle School.

And in a growing prosperous Toronto suburb such as Harper lived in, I suspect that even his Middle School teachers were mostly a generation younger than the equivalent ones had been for me or Fingard.

(Because just a couple of years after I left High School, the high school teacher population in Dartmouth seemed to undergo an abrupt generational change --- a change that seemed to lag by a few years the situation in more rapidly growing and prosperous areas of North America.)

"Super Hero Modernity"


What Rogue Boomers like Harper mostly peddle is nostalgia for a super hero-like Modernity they never personally know.

And as usual in such circumstances, their very best customers are themselves.

So we First Wavers have a moral duty to our Second Wave fellow Boomers .

Because we are truly unique : once almost fully comfortable as modernists, we are now also almost fully comfortable as postmodernists.

To adapt George Orwell's (& Henry Miller's) famous phrase, we have been comfortable inside two whales.

We have successfully made the transition from the old way of thinking into the new - while knowing both.

Stephen Harper and his climate destruction denying buddies, 1930s hubris combined with 21st century high tech tools , will rampage across the entire planet and destroy it for all future generations - unless we other Boomers can help them make the needed transit into the new ways of regarding the world...

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