I was born in 1938. In the early ‘60s, I was living in Greenwich Village in New York and just waking up to life. Some friends wanted me to meet a special woman. She was just a few years older than me but reputed to be a true Earth Mother – an Astrologer and a sage.
We met one afternoon and, after tea and about an hour’s meeting, she had described me to myself so thoroughly I was astounded. She was very comfortable and direct about my preferences in things, my weaknesses, my skills, hopes and current state of affairs. Meeting her changed my life.
I was a relatively open-minded scientist up to that point who felt a stronger calling to the arts and mysteries of life and love Now, if the positions of the stars and planets could influence and even predict future behavior and events, then it was clear there was so much more going on in existence than I had previously believed, I had to take still another, deeper look at everything.
After buying a book recommended by my Astrological friend, which I still have, I did what any former lab rat would do and set up an experiment to test the validity of basic Astrological assumptions.
I taped big swaths of butcher paper up on the wall that I faced above the kitchen table in my apartment. I wrote in twelve categories, one for each Astrological sign, and made areas for men and women that I could study as I ate. Then I began asking all of my friends and relatives for their birthdays. I only asked people I knew well enough to know something of their working lives, personalities and habits.
I kept filling in names in the different Astrological fields as the lists of people grew to significant numbers. I would study them over breakfast every to see if this Leo was like that, or if Scorpio men and women had similar Scorpio-like traits that should be recognizable. I was amazed to see how uncommonly accurate the predictions usually were. Conducting this experiment cost me the respect of my very scientific father who probably felt that his son had lost his mind into drugs and fantasies. No... I was just looking into some other disciplines.
But seeing that something as non-rational as Astrology could offer valid information, insight and understanding of human behavior at some level forced me to accept that existence as I had come to know it was way more mysterious and not quite as easily decipherable as my training would suggest. That realization was humbling and liberating for me and became a key catalyst in opening my mind to new life and understanding thereafter. Experience has kept the process going indefinitely.
The Astrologer, who so read me like a book, said that I would be a guide and advisor to those who immediately followed, and that same position would widely apply to a great many of my vintage, the ‘37-‘38 crowd.
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It has seemed to me that we were great innovators and trend-setters for the Boomers. There were so many profound changes in existence during our youth that it was unavoidable.
An easy example for me to cite is the development of “high fidelity” music production in the 1960’s. That technological leap alone put us so much closer to the artists that were having such a major effect on youth at the time. The trueness and richness of the sound that became available on record put us right next to the artists, intimately within “breathing range” of their inspiration.
Since music is so much about, and connected to, the emotions, it is not at all surprising that we broke the bonds of traditional emotional and physical repression in the ‘60s and set in motion thoughts about sex, love and behavior that changed our world forever.
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But what makes us who we are to a great extent is that we have an unusually rosy view of what the world is and what people are like. This is not a fault and shouldn’t be taken as a criticism. It’s an “is,” that’s all.
The '30s were very hard on people, but the upside was that so many Americans came together to help each other through those times, that it became normal for most people to be inclined to give the other person a hand when possible. It was sweet lemonade from lots and lots of lemons.
WW II drew the nation together even further, as only a major external threat like that could. Americans, at least white Americans, pulled themselves together even closer in most aspects of life and work. That feeling of unity on a large scale that our vintage grew up with was normal and helped shaped us and our views of life in profound ways.
The ‘50s were repressive in social matters but were also expansive as our nation grew stronger and wealthier and was teeming with opportunities from the Roosevelt-Truman era policies that were largely based on helping everyday people.
That had not been the normal structure of governments prior to that, not even of the original U.S. Government our revered Founding Fathers created. The rights and freedoms they established, as lofty as they were, applied to men and not women, and to white men at that, and really to white men of European descent, which I believe, represented about 17% of the people living in the original 13 colonies at the time.
But we kept improving the Dream of American Democracy. Slavery was ended in a torrent of blood and destruction. Women became full citizens and were allowed to vote in 1920, which, for the record, is after my mother was born. She is still alive and living independently.
My mother, Rose, was almost married off to a man she didn’t like. It was as though her parents “owned” her and had the right to give her to someone without her having any say in the matter. I am alive to mention this tale because she had the courage to run off with my father before her parents snatched her adult life away from her. Times change.
We are different, I believe, partly because we grew up in times when our parents’ generation were unusually giving and heroic in facing the economic hardships of the '30s and World War II in the ‘40s. We benefited from their sacrifices and their wish to give us a better life and a better world. Our growing up in the ‘40s and ‘50s was a blessing because the United States had truly become the Land of Promise as never before.
Our generation carried The Promise a lot further and expanded life, love and possibility to levels unheard of since before the Dark Ages. We are products of a particular time that infused us with behaviors and views of humanity that are more idealistic than the reality of these times, certainly, and most times, probably.
But reality becomes what we make of it through our vision, hard work, knowledge, wisdom and patience. I don't have to tell you how much the '60s changed us and the world at the time, and how deeply it had to have affected those who immediately followed.
The vision we brought earlier is desperately needed now to help humanity save itself from the ecological disasters that are surely coming if we don't change our blindness and arrogance into vision and compassion in very short order. We may guide, but others will have to implement.
Through the happenstance of time, we came to experience and know humanity's beauty and brilliance more intimately than the madness, selfishness and absurd stupidity that are currently gripping the United States and much of the rest of the world.
We are a different crowd for good reasons - a group imbued with strength and creative gifts that impacted the world and opened life to new vision.
There can be no doubt that we hit the right combination of parenting and circumstance, scholastic and scientific growth, and advances in health, nutrition and community that were the gifts to us that became the gifts we, in turn, generated further to and for others.
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