Don't Gel Too Soon

Blogging Boomer Carnival #84

Well the Blogging Boomers have returned after a Labor Day respite and we are loaded with remarkable new content.  It's all housed over at John Agno's So Baby Boomer.   There are plenty of political links, but also some interesting perspectives on retirements and aging, spiritual retreats,religious belief, marriage and the 5-th birthday of AARP.  So don't miss it.

RETURN OF THE CULTURE WARS - BUT DID THEY EVER LEAVE?

Some very smart analysts, including POLITICO and  PressThink founder Jay Rosen, are talking about the current Republican strategy in support of Sarah Palin as a "reigniting of the culture wars."  Attacking with all the code words of past anti-"left" vocabularies.  And here's Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal:

I'll tell you how powerful Mrs. Palin already is: she reignited the culture wars just by showing up. She scrambled the battle lines, too. The crustiest old Republican men are shouting "Sexism!" when she's slammed. Pro-woman Democrats are saying she must be a bad mother to be all ambitious with kids in the house. Great respect goes to Barack Obama not only for saying criticism of candidates' children is out of bounds in political campaigns, but for making it personal, and therefore believable. "My mother had me when she was eighteen…" That was the lovely sound of class in American politics.

When the McCain Summer of Love ad debuted, I wrote this - They Will Campaign Against Us Until We're Dead, and Maybe After.  If you watch CSPAN, especially Washington Journal, you know from the phone calls how much anger still exists; how much hatred of the generation I grew up in.  Against our opposition to the war, mischief and outrageousness, and even more, our search - no, demand - for peace. Going after all of us, FORTY YEARS LATER, still works.

I guess that since I've been posting quite a lot about that time forty years ago, the memories are long on both sides.  But Barack Obama was 7 years old in 1968.  It's not and never was his culture war.  It is, however, the never-ending flash-point in the conservative playbook, a safe way to rile folks up and re-ignite the hatred and anger manifested in the 60's and 70's and again in the 90's when that Boomer couple, the Clintons, were in the White House.

I've given up trying to figure out how to respond.  Most Americans, including us 60's people, love our country and loved it then.  It was the a desire to return the country to its true nature -- just as it is today -- that drove us.  But it's far more useful to the McCain campaign to taunt us -- and Barack Obama; and to divide us, too, with these ancient battles.  The tough part is figuring out how to answer.

MUSIC, POLITICS, PATTI SMITH, KRIS KRISTOFFERSON, ROBERT HUNTER AND A LONG WALK

For weeks I've been writing about politics here, but today - some personal politics. They say the personal is political, and for me, the personal is music (and political) -- and music makes all the difference -- through time, sadness, joy, loneliness, political anguish, even spiritual connection. 

I've started walking every morning - around two miles.  Part of the reason is that I never get to listen to music anymore, so on my walks, I pretty much let my iPod take me wherever "shuffle" wants to go.  For while we moved from Bruce to Great Big Sea to Juno.   Then things got serious - an anthem really, of a time in my life when I valued awareness, aliveness, presence above all else: along came Me and Bobby McGee.  Kris Kristofferson wrote it but this is one of the few videos I could find of him performing it - Janis Joplin's version was the famous one.  Still -- it was this version, Kristofferson's, that spoke to me.

A cut-loose road song and a love song too.  "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose."  I remember my mother railing against this chorus -- claiming that freedom was real and important and much more than "nothin' left to lose" and she was probably right, but then...  Then that road life was one I craved but never had the nerve to undertake and this song was my chance to travel along.  Later, on Saturday Night Live, Gilda Radner did a monologue as "Bobby McGee" who had moved home, and whose "mom even kept my room for me."  She'd given up.  There I sat on our water bed in our Upper West Side apartment in our married, new baby life, and cried. It was way too familiar.  Made me face the gap between what I had wished and what I was, that gap we all face as we enter "grown up" lives, with kids and responsibilities.

Then, around the time my walk reached Georgia Avenue, I traveled to London's Grosvenor Square, and Scarlet Begonias.  The Robert Hunter/Grateful Dead song included this description:  "Wind in the willows playin' tea for two;   The sky was yellow and the sun was blue, Strangers stoppin' strangers just to shake their hand, Everybody''s playing in the heart of gold band."  It sounds comical now, I suppose, and it was really about Dead concerts, but I remember so many marches where people passed food around, each taking what they needed, and driving on the turnpikes on the way as we gave M&Ms to each tollbooth operator along with our quarters and even, at the first Clinton inauguration, being hugged by some guy I'd never met as I stood alone, close to tears (again) when Bob Dylan came out and surprised everyone.   

MARTIN LUTHER KING AND BARACK OBAMA: ANOTHER COSMIC ANNIVERSARY

I was about to be a senior in high school that summer, with my family on vacation in Provincetown, MA, at the tip of Cape Cod.   All I really wanted to do was find Edna St. Vincent Millay's summer hangout and the theater used by Eugene O'Neill  and the Provincetown Players.  Those were gone; instead, I tripped over a future that quickly ended my quest for the past.

Walking by a restaurant, we passed a TV sitting on the sidewalk, on a milk crate so everyone could watch.  On the air: the March on Washington and the speech by Dr. Martin Luther King.  I was transfixed.  Living in a little town outside Pittsburgh, I hadn't really paid much attention.  Until that moment.  It was August 28, 1963, and it launched the next phase of my life.  As I watched, I knew that I belonged there - where there was purpose - in the middle of history.  It was a profound thing to listen to this man, to see the sea of people around him, watch the individual interviews, hear the music.  When people wonder how we became a generation of activists, I know that this was one of the moments that drove us forward, if we weren't there already.

How beautiful then that EXACTLY 45 years later, Barack Obama will accept the nomination of his party to be the Democratic candidate for President of the United States.  I heard Rep. John Lewis, so badly beaten in the 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, tell an interviewer that he wasn't sure he could make it through his own speech -- that if anyone had told him that 45 years after that Selma march he'd watch an African-American man accept the presidential nomination, he would have told them they were crazy.  Obama adviser and friend Valerie Jarrett, describing what it would mean to her parents in an interview with our own Erin Kotckei Vest, struggled to contain her own tears.  This is important.

BLOGGING BOOMERS #83: FROM

OK I'm sorry.  I got so caught up in the convention that I forgot to post this.  The wonderful Janet Wendy Spiegel of GenPlus is this week's host of the Blogging Boomers.  Take a look; you're bound to find something -- work, immigration, fashion, history or politics --  that interests you - boomer or otherwise. 

1968-2008 FORTY YEARS SINCE THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION IN CHICAGO AND I WAS THERE

I wonder if you can imagine what it felt like to be 22 years old, totally idealistic and what they call "a true believer" and to see policemen behave like that.  To see Chicago Mayor Richard Daley call the first Jewish Senator, Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, a "kike" (you had to read his lips - there was no audio but it was pretty clear) and to see your friends, and colleagues, and some-time beloveds with black eyes and bleeding scalps.  To be dragged by a Secret Service agent from your place next to Senator McCarthy by the collar of your dress as he addressed the demonstrators, battered, bruised and angry. To see everything you'd worked for and believed in decimated in the class, generational and political warfare.

HER BAD MOTHER AND THE STORY OF THE LOST BOY

Read this.  Right now.  The stunningly gifted Catherine Connor (that's her photo)  also known as Her Bad Mother, has shared a remarkable, heart-breaking story.  Although, sadly, it's not uncommon, it's one you will NOT want to miss.  So get out of here -- go read this post.

DON'T MISS IT: BLOGGING BOOMERS CARNIVAL #81

The fabulous Blogging Boomer Carnival - the 81st in fact - has landed here at Don't Gel Too Soon.  And a real feast it is. 

As the Baby Boomer generation approaches retirement age, over 7.7 million business owners will exit their businesses over the next 10-15 years.  John Agno at So Baby Boomer says this demonstrates a tremendous need for exit planning.

And while we're talking money, two more posts this week.

This comes from Janet Wendy at Gen Plus:  If, like much of America, you are sick of watching your dollar shrinking, Janet Wendy at Gen Plus, points you to an eye-opening post on what banks are NOT doing with your money. Oh...and be careful.  You might bust a seam laughing.

And this from Ann Harrison at Contemporary Retirement:  Although we've always been told that money can't buy happiness, an increasing number of studies show that, if you know the right way to spend it, money just may be able to buy you happiness after all...  Find out how at Contemporary Retirement:

Meanwhile, Rhea Becker of The Boomer Chronicles has noticed something interesting about this year's Olympics: "A number of athletes in the Beijing Olympics are older than the usual crop."  She's profiled some of them.  In the Northwest Arkansas area where I make my home, that was the case with every community. Unfortunately, it is also the case that every one of them has closed.

If you're looking for someone else to fix things, Laurel Lee at Midlife Crisis Queen says "Cut it out."  No one else can change your life for you, no matter how much you pay them."
“Spiritual work is not something you can copy from someone else’s homework...."

One of those things you have to do for yourself is keep a marriage going.  Dina at This Marriage Thing says:  "Counselors say marriages are strengthened by honest talking.   But when was the last time you really communicated with your spouse?   Here are a couple of questions that might do the trick."

If that doesn't work, and you're facing the end of a marriage, Wesley Hein at LifeTwo offers an important consideration: In a divorce, who gets custody of mutual friends? This moral dilemma is discussed in "The Post-Divorce Custody Battle for Mutual Friends". Make no mistake about it, in divorce every aspect of your life changes--including friendships.

On a lighter note, no matter what the status of the rest of your life, you can fix your hair.  If you color your hair, then you know how the blazing summer sun and chlorine pools can really fade and damage your hair. Is there anything you can do about it, short of wearing a hat? Check out what the Glam Gals have to say about it at Fabulous after 40.

 

Our friends over at Vaboomers have an interesting offering too - a kind of online mall they call "viosks" --sort of online kiosks offering art, music, cookies -- lots.  As they put it:   "Vaboomer is excited to announce the Grand Opening of Vaboomer Viosks on Aug 8; A Suite of “Viosks" with the best of Boomer reFiree's original art, books, music and education."

 

My own entry is a pensive one - about a Jewish holiday with a huge emotional  punch.

BLOGGING BOOMERS CARNIVAL #80 - LOTS OF GREAT STUFF

This week our Blogging Boomers carnival makes its way to Fabulous After Forty - and fabulous it is: earthquakes, divorces, the bossy AARP, marriage, the Paycheck Fairness Act and more - and all in one place!  Take a look.

BlogHer, Bella, Books and Us Women

Two weeks ago I spent the weekend with 1,000 remarkable women.  You know where; the Web has been full of posts and tweets and messages about BlogHer, the women bloggers conference.  Since its founding, BlogHer has held four conferences, and I've been to three of them.  For those three years I've wondered at the strength and power of both the gathering and each woman, most far younger than I, who is part of it.  Audacious and rambunctious, honest and gifted, they are far beyond where I was at their age.  I've always known that all of us, sisters from the 70's and 80's and 90's, scratched and kicked and pulled and fought to move our lives, and those of the women around us, forward.  In many ways, we made a difference.  I'm proud of that.

Today though I was reminded of a real heroine, one whose star lit the way for much of what we did, in a wonderful piece in The Women's Review of Books: Ruth Rosen's review of  Bella Abzug: How One Tough Broad from the Bronx Fought Jim Crow and Joe McCarthy, Pissed Off Jimmy Carter, Battled for the Rights of Women and Workers, ... Planet, and Shook Up Politics Along the Way--an oral history of the life of Bella Abzug.  Among other things, Ruth says:

She fought for the rights of union workers and African Americans, protested the use of the atomic bomb and the Vietnam War, waged endless battles to advance women’s rights, and spent the last years of her life promoting environmentalism and human rights.
When she plunged into the women’s movement during the late 1960s, Abzug infused feminism with her fierce, strategic, take-no-prisoners spirit. As Geraldine Ferraro reminds us,
She didn’t knock lightly on the door. She didn’t even push it open or batter it down. She took it off the hinges forever! So that those of us who came after could walk through!

And with a bow to Bella and so many others, walk through we have.  It's tough to pass the stories 'I walked six miles to school in the snow' fogey.   Younger women, though, would find courage to fight their own battles in Bella’s story and in many of our own."

For me, Bella was a brave, untamed beacon of defiance and energy. Her story, and ours, laid the ground for these determined, gifted "blogger generation" women. I would so love to be able to tell them about her - and about all of us, just so they could know the solidarity, the battles, the anger and the hope.  And why seeing them all together, hugging, laughing and raising hell, makes me so damned happy.  And that Bella would have loved them.