The Great Deprogression Of The Baby Boomer Generation
They were the original flower power generation. Now, Boomers lead the pack with conservatism and hate speech.
When I was young, I wasn’t really exposed to a lot of modern culture. Whatever modernity I got was either at school or cartoons that were heavily monitored by my parents. I had no video game system and didn’t have cable for years at one point.
This led to a lot of traits that make me appear to be way, way older than my peers. For example, I actually got the Laurel & Hardy reference in the Red Ape Family cartoon before they turned them into legitimate characters.
I still occasionally make Abbott & Costello references, watch Harold Boyd movies, and make references to Dobie Gillis. I’ll also be one of the only people to play Scott Joplin while I work. Old habits die hard, I guess.
At school, this would often lead to bullying. It was fairly common for kids in my class to ask me, “Why do you listen to all these oldies, Ossiana? They’re stupid, and you’re not 50.”
The truth was that I low-key idolized my parents’ generation — especially American hippies.
When I was young, all I’d ever do is probe my dad about what it was like in the sixties. I was obsessed with learning about the flower generation, partly because I was allowed to watch the Beatles movie with my best friend and partly because the 60s were painted as this major cultural revolution.
The way my dad explained it to me as a kid was as such: people hated the Beatles because they said that it’s good to love each other. This was a revolution because people wanted to hate one another. The anti-war protest was how his generation handled hatred.
I was spellbound. I wanted to be a hippie so bad.
Oddly enough, my dad was conservative — much to the complete shock of anyone who first saw him.
It never made sense to me. How could my dad, who was so vehemently anti-war and so pro-Beatles and pro-Zepplin be conservative? How could my dad, who regularly got hate for dressing differently, be conservative?
While I never understood it, conservatism was something that was fairly pervasive in my childhood. My best friend’s mom was from a religion that hated communism with a passion, owned a gun factory, and encouraged children to arm themselves.
My mom would tell us horror stories of life in Ceausescu’s Romania and how bad commies were. We were told that conservatism was how America was better than communism, and that was that.
I suppose, looking back, it was strange that I never questioned it as a child. I was a nosy, nosy, nosy kid. And yet, the conservatism was there, present and subtle to my youthful eyes.