HOW DID WE GET HERE?

What a long strange trip it’s been.

I recently retired, have a few years to go before 70, but I feel the footsteps approaching of the stalker I don’t want to think about. It will pass. When I first became a father I had about 2 years of flying anxiety. So I’m getting used to this new phase.

Boomers have wisdom to impart, and not because we’ve lived x number of years. We have tried a lot, seen success and failure on grand scale. We had the incredible ’60s, from Kennedy to Altamont, from moon landings to civil rights to Jimi Hendrix — in one decade! I don’t know that it will ever be topped, but when hip-hop culture and rap music exploded, I recognized it right away: the voice of youth, unfiltered, real, with the power-backbeat of the urban night — the ’60s kept me open-minded enough to see that.

In my own article on retiring, I made the statement that Boomers had one more big collective moment left. Woodstock 50 was canceled because the requirements to hold a large concert were now so convoluted and dense that you needed an armada of lawyers and a trillion dollars worth of insurance — I don’t know that I want to deal with that any more either. But what will be our legacy? We have pieces of greatness dangling in the wind, and one more reinforcing statement of purpose, one moment of transcendent accomplishment, may put a spotlight on the very things we thought mattered — peace, and truth, and acceptance and authenticity. With a dash of our irreverence and mischievous nonconformity, we have something up our sleeves, I’m sure. I just don’t know what it is.