The Coolest Generation?

I'm starting to see memes saying, "Your grandparents were cooler than you will ever be." One showed people on line for Star Wars in the Summer of 1977.

It's a message to today's young people, the ones who would have included my children, if I'd had any, about my parents' generation. A 16-year-old on that line would now be 63.

Well, the heck with the premise: I was 7, and I was on one of those lines.

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What is it with Baby Boomers, especially the early ones, born between 1946 and 1954, and their never-ending need to be seen as The Coolest Generation? Is it because they feared early death, due to being of draft age during the Vietnam War?

It seemed to start even before they fully came of age. American Graffiti came out in 1973, and was set in 1962, just 11 years earlier, yet, already, it leaned into nostalgia.

People wanted to forget Vietnam. They wanted to forget Watergate. They wanted to forget race riots. They wanted to go back to the era when Dwight D. Eisenhower was America's grandpa, or at least to the era when John F. Kennedy was America's big brother. When the biggest thing they had to worry about was whether they had a dime for the jukebox at the malt shop after school.

Hey, I get it. But 2024 - 11 = 2013. I don't see too many people holding up Barack Obama as a figure of nostalgia. Of course, unlike Ike and JFK in 1973, he is still around. As is Bill Clinton, who was President at a comparatively better time.

But you don't see people looking back fondly on the cars of 2013. Or the music. Okay, the most popular singer now is Taylor Swift, and she was the most popular singer then. But, in spite of her own naming of her current tour as "The Eras Tour," nobody looks at her as a relic of a bygone, better age. 

Elvis Presley, the Baby Boomers' 1st big non-sports hero, died on August 16, 1977, while Star Wars was still in theaters. The day Elvis died was the day that the Baby Boomers realized that they weren't kids anymore. The day Yankee legend Mickey Mantle, the biggest baseball star of the Baby Boom era, died, August 13, 1995, 18 years later to the week, was the day the Boomers had to accept that they were now old. But they haven't accepted that they were old.

At least they had great music. But "old people music" is going to get worse. Nursing homes play the music the residents heard growing up. Well, guess what: If a person was 13 when Elvis debuted nationally in 1956, they're now 81; and if they were 13 when The Beatles came to America in 1964, they're now 73. So we're getting rock and roll in nursing homes now. But in a few years, we'll be getting disco. By the time I'm old enough to live in one, we'll be getting the early MTV stuff. I lived through that garbage once, in my adolescence. I don't need to hear it when I'm old and my wheelchair's motor isn't fast enough to get me away from it!