Lest anyone accuse me of ageism, I will say that I am a boomer. I am at the tail end of that generation or what some websites call the “Boomer 2” generation. I am part of that demographic of that big boom of babies born after the war years.
Generalizations being as useful as fish scales on a pig, I am also going to say, anyway, that my generation experienced stable economic growth as compared to the succeeding generations. At least that is what it was like for middle class Filipino children and other middle class children in other parts of the world.
Having been assured some amount of peace and prosperity, I am proud to say of my generation that its frivolities had some good features. In the Philippines we were the generation of the First Quarter Storm. We did not waste our access to the universities because here, and in other universities, the student movements marked my generation. Filipino students protested the Vietnam War as much as their counterparts in the US. Oriented as our culture was (and is) to our former colonizers, I became a feminist and a hippie in grade school. But, for that Philippine flavor, I became a Maoist a few years later. I was a feminist, hippie, and a Maoist when Ferdinand Marcos Sr. declared Martial Law.
I know, I know. That is only possible if you’re that young, immature, and essentially stupid. But my motivations and those of others of my cohort were unimpeachable. We wanted to change the world and knew we could change it.
Kicking out America
And we did. The Vietnam War ended, mainly because the Vietnamese kicked America in that area of the body used for sitting. The last time I was in Hanoi’s National Museum, there was a display of international support for Vietnam during their liberation struggle and one panel showed Filipino student protests.
Locally, we set up to end Martial Law, and we did. Our generation is marked by those years. We are scarred and traumatized but we ended it. Much of civil society today is marked by that experience including our commitment to human rights, people’s participation and heroic martyrdom.
Living under the worldwide threat of nuclear annihilation, the peace movement was our response. It is said of the iconic Woodstock festival that it was the first gathering of that many men that was not a gathering meant to send people to war.
Then the females among us began to revive feminism to suit the challenges of the time given us. From equal access to jobs and education, equal pay for the same job, the recognition of violence against women as a genuine issue, setting aside women only spaces, ending sexist stereotypes, we worked on it locally and worldwide.
Seamy side
Yet we had our faults. Because we are also a generation of hypocrites. The generation that could not finish our revolutions. The generation whose seamy side liked the freer sexual attitudes and the drugs but not the mystical and feminist aspects that motivated that experimentation. We are also the generation of the rich, mostly men still, who solidified big payoffs for upper management and made sexual privilege over women part of being in the C suite. The generation that failed to stop on climate change even if we had appreciated those mushrooms on the forest floor.
Generalizations are as useful as toes on a snake. Some of us get it, some of us can’t. And as we age, those of us who are truer to our better impulses, are letting go for the sake of the newer generations. We are happy to remember how absolutely brilliant we were in changing the world despite being new and young and stupid. Except some of us won’t let go.
I do not admire the choices of the US electorate as they move towards a presidential election. Trump is a dangerous, sexist, felon. Joe Biden, whose politics I used to prefer, has supported genocide in Palestine. As for those boomers like Netanyahu and the leaders of Hamas – a pox on all of them. War to exterminate people. The games of decaying old men. See them brag and then stumble while their shaky fingers hover over the red button of nuclear war.
The Philippines, too, had such wonderful choices in the last elections. A younger boomer Marcos who did like the sex and drugs, if rumors of his youth are true, and the older boomer Duterte who is as genocidal and lewd as the rest.
Intergenerational
In the social Philippine movements, polite young activists have to put up with our evocations of how we did things during the glorious struggles of martial law. In the meanwhile we fail to give them answers about how to wage a social media war in a landscape of struggle we can’t get into because TikTok baffles us. In fact all they hear us do is bewail misinformation and the world that has befallen us as if this was not of our own making, handed to them to deal with.
Confucius tells us the inner virtue has to be matched by behavior. A large part of that is knowing your place in the web of social relationships in society including the requisite decorum. In this world aging gracefully is not merely an individual passage. It is also passing from the hardworking to the venerable. From the learner to the sage. Aging is still a passage of the individual in the wider world. The elderly must release themselves upon it as an itinerant interacting with x, millennials, z and a generations.
To them we can offer different skills and attitudes. Studies of the older brain do show changes that make the senior look at the world differently. And it is these skills that we bring to society as useful and contributing members. It is this struggle that we wage now, for us to be recognized for what we can bring that is so different from what we brought. And it is this struggle we can still win for the next generations.
Active aging
Humility, distance, de-centering, the ability to live with contradictions and ambivalence, the integration of disparate cognitive tropes, are all there to be had if we decide that the time is now. These are not the virtues of the top honchos. They are the virtues of those who are preparing the next generation so that they do not ruin themselves and the world as they prepare for their own future. It is their future and so it is they who must determine the present. We must hope they finish their revolutions better than we do.
Generalizations being as useful as feathers on yak, I can say of the young activists I work with that they are better at showing decorum than their elders. They remain polite and caring. They recognize our experience and wisdom. Also they’re wimps and snowflakes who have no concept of proper punctuation.
I have a lot to talk to them about. Lots of disagreements and a lot of continuities. Strangely enough, the children of the millennials, the generation of the boomer’s grandkids, disagree with their parents on some issues and agree with me. Lovely.
We must hope that like my generation, the coming generations can find it in themselves to believe they can – and will change – this awful mess we are in.
As a first step, the boomers among us can help the younger ones get the dinosaurs to step down. – Rappler.com
Sylvia Estrada Claudio is a doctor of medicine who also has a PhD in psychology. She is Professor Emerita of the University of the Philippines, Diliman.