DEPARTMENT:

Don't blame me for being a Baby Boomer

By Jim Cone

It isn’t a matter of knowing what it is like to grow older as much as learning the eternal serenity of always being young. It’s more than an attitude to feel youth, it is a mindset. Mindset is certainly a product of the social circumstances of our youth.

Don’t hate me because I’m ... a Baby Boomer. Can I help it if I’m on top of the world, with the wealthiest, largest, most productive, most active generation in the history of all time?

Let me give you an example. My dad is 81. When he was just old enough to understand, “hey this life thing is neat,” he got socked with the Depression and his family got hit by the Stock Market crash. It hit my dad and my Russian Jewish grandparents hard. Then just when things started to get a little better, my dad went off to join the War in the Pacific.

Going to war then was different than going to war now. In the early 1940s there was no Internet, no “Saving Private Ryan” movies, no realities of what war is, was and always will be. That war stole my father’s youth as it did to everyone else his age at that time. He was on the beach at Iwo Jima, need I say more?

So the war ends and he comes back, meets my mom and gets married like within six months. Now just think of all those social circumstances my dad and most of everyone in his generation had to deal with. My Mom gets pregnant and they both luckily come to the conclusion that they haven’t a clue of what to do with this tiny human being.

So, like the other tens of millions of people their age, in the exact same situation, they go out and buy a book that has since sold 50 million copies called “The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care” by Benjamin Spock. What this book did is teach an entire generation of Baby Boomers, my generation, independence and individualism to the degree that these Boomers became aka the anti-establishment.

Now I have a question, exactly who is responsible for making the rules on how I am supposed to behave as a 55-year-old person? It can’t be my parents’ generation, I never listened to them anyway. I’m not talking about being disrespectful, or immoral or anything like that, I’m talking purely attitude.

Who is responsible for telling me I can’t dance to the music whenever I want? Who’s job is it to tell me that when I’m 60, 70, 80, and beyond, my favorite song can’t be “Stairway to Heaven”? Why exactly can’t I have long hair and ride my bicycle as fast as I want, especially if I can?

I don’t know. What I can tell you is I have all my hair. I like bourbon and cigars and I ride my bicycle 100 miles a week. I was a fat kid and now I’m not. I like to wear tight jeans.

One thing is different now than it was before and that is I appreciate women more. And I believe that when it was written that “God created Man in his own image,” it originally was written Woman, but those guys changed it. Man can Father but only Woman can create. I’m not going to hold it against the original authors for at least trying. It probably was a generational thing.

I was asked the other day why I chose to have four children, all of whom are now younger than 15. My answer is, I like to surround myself with people with good attitudes; people who know what they want and are not afraid to ask for it even if they know they aren’t going to get it.

So they are small people, they’ll grow and I’ll be able to teach them consequences, individualism and independence and they will be one up on what my parents taught me.

My wife was asked recently how many children she had and she answered five. “I have two boys, two girls and a husband,” she said. What more can I say?

Jim Cone lives in Kaimuki, at the top of Wilhelmina Rise. He has lived in Hawaii since 1988 which is when he first started riding a bicycle regularly. He competes in most of the bike road races and he and several friends challenge each other to ride 50 miles of the Century Ride most years.

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