Epistle 1 – Spam

. Technically, I’m not a Baby Boomer because I was born before the end of WWII. I guess that makes me a Beta Boomer. But the drift of my life has been borne on the high tide of the Boomers (not those old geezers like my brother), and so I cast my lot with theirs.

. The historic events that define the Boomer generation started right after WWII when all the GI’s returned home from the war and behaved like rabbits. A frisky bunch, those people. Good Lord, they kept it up for over 15 years!

. The first important thing I remember about being a Boomer is the public school food. The hallways of my grade school were stacked to the scuppers with army surplus food, particularly something truly evil call Spam. (No, children, spam was not invented to bedevil computer users. It was invented to bedevil Boomers during their tender, formative years, which explains their behavior.) The real Spam, (from Spawn of Ham, an old horror movie), is a ghastly, ghoulish thing crammed into a can and sealed tight for public safety. It can be sliced cold for a sandwich, cooked for a dinner entrée, or just left to squat in the refrigerator, daring you to even touch it, heaven forbid eat it.

. It would still be there except that boomer parents were made of sterner stuff than their offspring. Apparently the war also made them a hell of a lot meaner, too. Can you imagine forcing an innocent child to eat that today? You can’t even spank a kid today without going to jail, let alone poison it. But I read somewhere that native Hawaiians have made Spam their food of choice. Can that really be true? 113,539 Hawaiians can’t be wrong, can they? Maybe it’s the ukuleles.

. But I digress. The point is that the epic events spawned by Boomeritis were due to Spam. Of course, it has morphed into something very different now but it is still evil, and you young people deserve to know the awful truth. It’s not the crushing national debt that your elders have saddled you with for the rest of your life that you should resent to the very core of your being. It’s that they ate Spam. On the other hand, if they survived Spam, maybe you will survive the debt.

God loves little children and old Boomers.

We Will Win

Jonah and the Whale

. I’m a Christian. More specifically, a back-sliding Lutheran. But in a much larger sense, I’m a child of the same God that 3 of the great religions on this earth worship. While I believe in the Bible’s New Testament, I relate more to the rascals, wars and heroes of the Old Testament. The older I get, the less I search for organized religion and the more I search for spirituality. Lord knows the Baby Boomer Generation could use a little spiritual help about now . . . and a little humor wouldn’t hurt either.

. Which somehow brings me to Jonah. I can’t recall ever doing the right thing on the first try. Why is the right thing always the hard thing? God told Jonah to go to Ninevah, but he thought all the Ninevites were dirtballs so he bought a ticket on a cruise ship in the opposite direction. Bad idea. Now God had to whip up a storm and have the crew toss Jonah overboard. Then God had to have a whale, which was just minding his own business eating a plankton sandwich, swallow Jonah whole and take him back to the Middle East. How would you like to be inside that whale while he did whatever whales do?

. Sure enough, the whale spit old Jonah back on shore, probably covered with gooey inside whale stuff, so he would finally get to work on Ninevah. Maybe all Boomers don’t do things this way, but I bet most of us can relate.

Take avocado-green appliances, for instance. God didn’t want avocado-green appliances in your kitchen ruining your appetite. God wanted doctors to wear avocado-green smocks in operating rooms so they could ruin your chances of survival. In either case, if you spit up, nobody would notice.

. The point is that there were Boomers somewhere out there who knew better. Just like there were millions of Boomers who knew better about gas-guzzling cars. But instead of overcoming our addiction to pumping gas, we invented attack vehicles that could intimidate a Sherman tank.

. Up and down, back and forth, finding our way in spite of ourselves. That’s the Boomer legacy. Maybe we aren’t covered with whale goop, but it sure feels like that after the Great Recession of 2008. After a lifetime of this nonsense, I’ve finally lost patience with us. As an early Boomer, I was trusting in the rancid masses to come along behind and drive my property values to outrageous levels so I could spend my golden years in the lap of luxury.

But what did the masses do? They booked a cruise in the opposite direction and ran smack into the worst financial storm since the Great Depression. Instead of minding the store, they did what they have always don (aka whatever the hell they wanted), and the system tanked. My “retirement plan” of mutual funds and Florida real estate, which seemed like a hell of an idea at the time, went south without me.

. Of course, I’m not alone. There are millions of us–bald, fat, middle-aged veterans of more good times than any generation in history, wondering where the whale will spit us up. We could gnash our teeth, but they’re getting pretty worn.

We could pull out our hair, but there’s precious little of that left. So we blamed Wall Street, the government, the banks, the crooks, the Arabs, and everybody else but us. Sadly, it didn’t help. We have met the enemy and it is us. So there is nothing left for us but to go to Ninevah . . . finally.

. Personally, I think the whale should spit me out on the French Riviera. I’m sure God has important work for me there. Boomeritis never dies.

We Will Win

All rights reserved