Vaboomer -- Baby Boomer Views & News

Call Us Boomerangers--The New Vaboomer Generation!

We Boomerangers fit most easily in the Baby Boom 1946-1964. While I am a few months ahead of the official start of the Boom, and have always felt its “hot breath” on my neck, I’m also the daughter and granddaughter of Boomerangers. How can women of three generations whose life spans stretch back over 140 years to the end of the Civil War have anything to do with those born during the Baby Boom? What do my mother and my grandmother have in common with the Boomers? And why am I calling all of us Boomerangers?

For those of us who have a Boomeranger stage of mind, it’s all about how we view life and little about the numbers. For my Grandmother and Mom, it’s how they continued to develop as human beings—always considering themselves becoming fuller and fuller people. It’s how they viewed themselves as always aiming to enhance their lives and the lives of those around them even as they edged toward triple digits.

The Baby Boom generation has similar characteristics. We are famous for our no holds barred approach to life. Where there is a roadblock we leap over it or knock it aside. Where there is a stop sign, we pause for a moment and then speed ahead. We see obstacles as challenges to be explored and sources of innovation. We’ve soared into outer space and delved into the mysteries of inner space.

We created The New Age. We created the Internet Age. We’ve often been mocked and reduced to a marketable “style,” but without us there would be no Title VII (equal employment) or Title IX (equal education). There would be no Roe V. Wade. There would not be an environmental movement or Green Consciousness. There would be no policy or services helping abused children or women or elders. We see a problem. We work to fix it. We don’t always get it right, but we are not complacent. And we don’t give up.

A Boomeranger Example

The key words in the below quote from Third Age Health and Wellness Newsletter are WANTED and ENDURING. Angie Ryan wanted to be engaged in and contributing to the world and suffered from not being so engaged. Her inner light urged her to try for more even while her learned assumptions told her she was too old. To her delight she is now working in a new job.

In other words--she Boomeranged! And now she is vabooming! Lucky for all of us that her skills and intelligence were not arbitrarily discarded.

            Angie Ryan just wanted to work again.
            After enduring five months of unemployment last year, the 60-year-old posted her resume on a couple of Web-based jobs boards, convinced her age would work against her.   She was wrong.
            Within months, she landed a job at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a marketing communications expert.
          "I'm delighted," she says. "Age isn't a factor here. They wanted someone who could step right in, and I could."
          She was the beneficiary of a new federal effort aimed at warning both the public and private sectors of a looming "brain drain" that experts say will accelerate as 78 million baby boomers age.
        "It's going to cause a lot of problems and cost a lot of money to replace these people who know so much," says David DeLong, a research fellow at the AgeLab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of "Lost Knowledge: Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce." "They know how to get things done."

www.thirdage.com Older Workers Once Trashed Now Treasured.

Has Jamie Lee Curtis been reading my mind?

Jamie Lee Curtis must have been reading my mind when she talks about challenging old ideas about ageing in the current issue of the AARP magazine. She is described as va-va-va-booming by posing topless on the cover.  Yes indeedie, that's a quality of the new Vaboomer Generation--its vroom vroom and its vavavaboom!  You can also call these qualities vitality and energy. We have them and to spare.

Stay connected...the regular Vaboomer blog is coming.