The Portal to Boomeranger World

Globalization, the Challenge for the New President, and Boomer Brillance

I've thought for years that the whole approach to education and to employment is wrong headed.

Instead of education being aimed at nourishing the brilliant creative that is in each of us, it systematically crushes that spirit in the service of turning out corporate cogs who will "man" the corporate factory line. 

  

And that factory line grinds along and grinds along--albeit increasingly less and less here and more and more elsewhere. Globalization offers a poignant opportunity to Americans.

On the one hand we are witnessing the last days of industrial society here in our country. That machine has moved elsewhere. The hound of fear is abroad in the land, because as a people we have yet to create the new organizations and embrace with joy and optimism the new ideas that will foster and rekindle our national brillance.

The American Industrial Century is definitely over, but that does not mean that a new era of unprecedented creativity and national

reFIREMENT

cannot emerge. I often feel as if I am a lone voice in the wilderness encouraging boomers to become boomerangers by entering their creative cores and reFIRING instead of retiring. Now more than ever, America needs all its creativity and will to grow. Boomers have this soul--battered and discouraged a bit by the conservative wars of recent years, but there simmering nontheless.

A Moment for National REFIREMENT! Americans Get Creative and Get Busy

Rich Lowery's article The Taint of '68 is filled with stereotypes and falsehoods ( Lowery Article ) that serve to blind Americans to the true task of re-envisioning our country and making our economy and society anew. We have an exciting and daunting challenge and opportunity ahead of us.

By Lowery's criteria of Boomer activists, the US would never have come into being --having been founded by VIOLENCE.

Ummmm....didn't our revolutionaries fight a WAR to liberate us from British rule? Since the majority of us were peace-niks, I can only go HUH?!? to his reduction of thousands of American's desire to stop the war in Vietnam to violent fighters. Thousands nowadays want to stop this war that is draining us and has reduced Bush's approval rating to about 23%.

Revisionists like this dope, are nothing new to long time activists. The Women's Movement has been  declared stupid and dead and feminazis for about 30 years and is still perking along strong. Civil rights workers were called dangerous to the country and "our" blacks are happy and "like things how they are". Well, look who is running for president! The Peace Movement filled the streets with hundreds of thousands of ordinary people, moms with strollers, old folks, young ones, soldiers.

This kind of backward flimflam is just that. It is intended to inflame opinion and throw dust in the eyes. All it really does is syphon off energy that could be used to deal with the real issues of our current situation. 

Our country is in transition to an entirely different place in the worldwide scheme of things and an entirely different economy. This change is as powerful and profound as was the industrial revolution. We need to gather our strength; stop fighting over who can be part of the full life of the country and who needs to be excluded. We need to look forward with all our creativity and energy to create America anew.

It is time for the entire country to take a deep breath, go inward for a reflective time and then reFIRE. We need all our creativity and energy to envision ourselves anew. Flimflammers get over yourself! America get ready to Boomerang.

And, RL, it is all about the economy, stupid!

Resources: 

Boomer Blog Carnival #69

 

The New Yorker Profiles Phil Schaaf, Master of Jazz Info--Charlie "The Bird" Parker and Other Greats

I remember a limpid spring day in 1966, when I first heard Charlie "The Bird" Parker--in PERSON. Hundreds of us Chapel Hill undergrads and grad students were sitting on the verdant ground of the Old Quad at UNC-CH . The Cherry trees were blooming and we were a bit high on the delights of lilacs, spring grass, young love and the lilting tones of "The Bird."

1966 was also a year bringing amazing political speakers to Chapel Hill. Some were not allowed on campus, but they spoke through megaphones while perched on step ladders planted on the public sidewalk that paralled the campus.

                         

We were stirred to action on many issues. I marched down the middle of Franklin Street (Chapel Hill's main street that paralleled the old campus) for increased civil rights.

Mine was the first university class that had admitted women and minority students to the university as full-time on-campus students since 1789. 

                                  

Now some 40 plus years later it is really hard to grasp the revolutionary nature of that time. It is hard to apprehend just how ordinary it was to go to your local doctor, one of my hometown secondary school friend's dad, and sit in the White Waiting Room. Yes, indeedie it was clearly labeled such. And the other much smaller waiting room was labeled "Colored Waiting Room."

Sometimes I had a fleeting moment of empathy for the administration--thinking surely they regretted their decision to admit us. But then given that Brown vs. The Board of Ed ending segrated schools, had been ruled in the late 50's, it was certainly time for UNC-CH to get with the 20th century!

We also marched and rallied to end the Vietnam War.

We were a noisy and agitating group.

But that afternoon we were peaceful and drowsy with spring and with Charlie Parker's soaring notes.

It was beautiful.....  Our heart's took flight with The Bird's artistry.

Tune into WKCR, Phil Schaap's weekday morning program that honors Charlie Parker and other jazz musicians who have added such sonorous beauty to American life--liftng our hearts and helping us fly with them even when as a nation we have struggled with our rivening social issues.

Thinking about Charlie Parker, Every Day Author, David Remnick, profiles Phil Schaap in "Bird's Flights."

The current issue of the New Yorker (May 19; p. 58) profiles Phil Schaap, who has hosted the jazz program “Bird Flight,” on Columbia University’s radio station, WKCR, every weekday morning for the past twenty-seven years. “There is no person in America more dedicated to any art form than Phil is to jazz,” Stanley Crouch tells Remnick. A “master of history, hierarchies, personalities, anecdote, relics, dates, and events,” Schaap taught himself about jazz by hanging around with many of the great musicians of the twentieth century, and “has provided an invaluable service to a dwindling art form” through his radio show, compilations, and lectures. While his obsessive attention to the minutiae of jazz blurs “the line between exhaustive and exhausting.”

“Phil is a walking history book about jazz,” Frank Foster, a tenor-sax player for the Basie Orchestra, tells Remnick, and Wynton Marsalis calls him “an American classic.” “Sometimes,” Schaap tells Remnick, “I think I know more about what Dizzy Gillespie was thinking in 1945 than I do what I was thinking in 1967 or last week.”

In addition to keeping jazz alive in his radio show, Schaap has provided aging musicians with performance venues and has restored rare recordings, such as Charlie Parker’s “Benedetti recordings,” which, he tells Remnick, “increased the volume of live improvisations of a great artist by a third.” His goal, Remnick writes, is to develop “knowledgeable and passionate listeners.”

Schaap tells Remnick, “I’m not trying to teach you to play the alto sax. No. I’m trying to get you to learn how to listen to Charlie Parker.”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/19/080519fa_fact_remnick
http://www.newyorker.com/online/2008/05/19/080519on_onlineonly_remnick

 

Calling All Boomerangers: Come Visit and Tell Your Story of reFirement

I want to hear from you boomerangers--I know there are millions of you out there who are rethinking their lives, reFiring in new and wonderful directions, and letting your light shine. Come visit and tell us your story--how you are redefining yourself, what kind of life you are creating for yourself, what you are doing with your creativity, your love life, your relationships, your new directions, your challenges. When you share we all benefit.

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.