The Boomers are coming! The Boomers are coming!

     I am a Baby Boomer. I was born in Santa Monica, California, on the fifth anniversary of the Soviet Union's lifting of the blockade on Berlin. For those of you who don't know your history, that would be May 12, 1954.
     Beginning in June of 1948, the Soviets made a decision to block all services to Berlin: water, food, electricity, coal, and all traffic that might bring services and supplies to the population of Berlin. Soon after, in an attempt to circumvent the ground transportation limitations, the American and British governments began to airlift food and coal to Berlin. These efforts saved Berliners from starving and--later, when winter came--from freezing to death.

     The airlifts lasted 15 months and totaled delivered goods valued today at somewhere between $2-5 million. One positive outcome was better relations between post-World War II Germans and the Western Allies, particularly the U.S and Great Britain. But it was also the beginning of the Cold War, a vividly memorable period of air raid sirens, nuclear war threats, Russian propaganda, and espionage.
     Who doesn't remember the sound of those sirens? In the Midwest, where I lived for 14 years, they use the same sirens to announce tornadoes and I would always flash on "Duck and cover" before I would think, "Run to the cellar!"

     During this media-frenzied time, Russia was humiliated, vilified, demonized by propaganda in the US and Europe, a status that remained intact for decades... some would even say until the dissolution of the USSR in the 1990s.
    Movies like "The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!" (1966), "Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" (1964), James Bond in "From Russia With Love" (1963), and "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962) were all symptomatic of the Cold War paranoia that gripped our imaginations.
     And yet nearly 80 million children were born in this period of time, despite widespread fear of Russian invasions and nuclear holocausts. These 80 million babies are the generation known as the Baby Boomers (1946-1964). 
     We are now aging and the world is not prepared for us. It is time for us to get creative about our survival. I plan to flourish. This blog is the start of a deconstruction, a study of what good has come out of the Boomer generation, what mistakes we have made, and what remains to be done before we go.