Boomers

I watched the Brokaw special "Boomers" on TV Tue. I had read the book and found it pretty good but the show tended to lump the entire 50's and 60's into a few big events and overlook all the smaller things that defined the boomers. It was just some more of the same stuff we have already heard. When Brokaw asks Tom Hanks about the most important popular culture of the generation, Hanks steps past television - the answer most people would give - to music. I agree that music was the defining common thread with all boomers. "I knew what time it was by the television," says Hanks. "But I knew how I felt by the music." I love that statement. The music was worth an hour all by itself. But the inclusion of Hanks also suggests a problem, which is trying to understand a generation through its most familiar people and most famous events. He barely touches on the so called every day boomer; those of us who didn't burn draft cards, or attend Woodstock. Hurricane Camille came ashore the same night as Woodstock, so those of us in Ms. were otherwise occupied. An interview with a career military man reveals more than the interview with draft resistance spokesman David Harris, who's been yapping on the subject for four decades and he's gotten a little tiring after all that time. Many of the younger generation think all there is to Boomers was Vietnam, the civil rights movement, smoking pot and screwing in the mud at Woodstock. It's easy to sum up the very complex issues with a phrase like "The '60s was a background for profound social change." Or you get a guy who went to Woodstock saying he would go back to the 1960s in an instant, while writer P.J. O'Rourke says they were hypocritical and awful. I never had any use for the prissy O'Rourke anyway. I'm pretty proud to be a Boomer and to have lived through all that happened then. I haven't seen anything to match the era. But the TV special was a little tiring to me but maybe in the end, there is no way to show how it was because the times were as varied as the Boomers themselves.We really thought we were going to change the world back then, but it just hasn't happened. YET.