I was trawling through Baby Boomer sites the other day (yes, having a look at the competition) and I noticed that most of them concentrated heavily upon music. This brought two thoughts to mind almost simultaneously:

1. The Baby Boomer generation spends a lot of time listening to music and is almost defined by the music of the sixties and seventies.

2. Is that really all we are - just an explosion of music?

After some weighty pondering (it’s what I do), I decided that there is some truth in the charge but it is not the whole truth. Yes, music was and remains very important to us. If any generation is going to insist that we had the best music, it’s the Boomers (and we’re right, of course). Music was our battle cry, our rallying point and our standard. It makes perfect sense that Boomer sites will look back to those songs and tunes, stirring our nostalgia and memories.

Yet that is not the full story. If music was our outward expression, what were we expressing? The answer has to be that we were reaching for something beyond the world our parents had built, that we wanted more than the material goods and chattels that seemed to be their driving motivation. Perhaps more than any generation before or since, we tried all sorts of ways to live differently, nothing was sacrosant and everything subject to scrutiny.

Of course, the energy and desire for change faded eventually and we wandered back into the great machine called society, retaining only our dreams of what might have been. But in those few years we had changed the world and made it possible for it to be as it is now.

Many of us look at what we have wrought and wonder where it all went wrong. Somewhere along the line things became less than we had hoped and much has changed for the worse, not the better. So we look back to our youth as a golden age and the music is the most direct expression of what we were striving for.

But that music is only the product of our generation. The real explosion happened in our thinking, as we threw everything out and started again from scratch. And that willingness to see things from another angle still pervades the attitude of the Boomers; we have not forgotten and are still striving for a better world, even if our efforts are less noticeable now.

At least, that’s the way I see it…