After being lost for 70 years, one of the earliest feminists and heroines is being heard from again. Amelia Earhart’s name is in the headlines once more, now that a diary of a news reporter stationed on Howland Island has surfaced. Having completed 22,000 miles of her attempt to circumnavigate the globe, Howland Island was Amelia’s next destination after taking off from Lae, New Guinea on July 2, 1937. She never arrived.

Earhart was one of only a handful of women aviators, but it was more than just her sky-high adventures that made Amelia slightly ahead of her time. Amelia believed always in women and men being equal, in life, work and in marriage. Amelia believed that both breadwinners in a marriage had equal rights and responsibilities. Her marriage to George Putnam was viewed by her as a partnership. In a note she sent to him just before their wedding, she advised him that she would not hold him to medieval notions of faithfulness to her, just as he should not have such expectations of her.

Over the last seven decades since Amelia’s plane was lost at sea, numerous theories about her fate have been proposed. One controversial theory has Amelia spying on the Japanese for the US and claims she was captured and executed.

What is saddest about these diaries and the stories now coming to light is that there were probably transmissions sent by Amelia Earhart after her plane ran out of fuel. Two teens in the continental US heard transmissions from Amelia Earhart, giving her location as best she knew it. But these were largely brushed off by officials. Findings of a shoe and a partial skeleton at what appeared to be a campsite at Gardner Island as well as plane parts might be the final clues as to what happened to Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan.

Had officials listened more carefully to those who heard these transmissions, had they further investigated when a plane flying overhead reported signs of habitation on an island, had Amelia been able to receive signals on her radio as well as transmit (it is suspected that the antenna was ripped off the plane at takeoff)… so many “if onlys”.

If only Amelia Earhart had achieved her goal of being the first woman to circumnavigate the globe, her influence might have been a hundredfold what it was. Regardless of the tragic end to her bid to set a record, Amelia Earhart remains a symbol of what a determined and courageous woman can do.

It’s not easy to panic a boomer.

Boomers grew up in the uncertainty of the Cold War. In 1949, The Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear device and the US was no longer the only country with “the bomb”. The government worked very hard at two things: raising public concern about being ready for nuclear attack, and trying to allay public concern by producing civil defense plans. The fact that these civil defense plans advised “Duck and Cover” - the advice to hide under your desk in case of nuclear attack - make them seem laughable today.

But the nuclear attack didn’t happen and as weapons proliferated, the concern was MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction. So far, that hasn’t happened either.

Then we moved on to the population explosion. Overpopulation has been a concern since Thomas Malthus proposed that human populations would grow until they exceeded the ability of the earth to produce enough food for all of them. Of course he predicted this in 1798 and it was supposed to have happened by the mid-19th century. Boomers had their own Malthus in the person of Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, published in 1968. Ehrlich is known for his many accurate predictions such as: hundreds of millions of people worldwide would starve to death between 1970 and 1985; that life expectancy in the US wuold drop to 42 years due to the use of pesticides; and by 1999, there would only be 22.6 million of us left. In fact, the US has recently zipped past the 300 million mark for population and is still growing.

Fast forward to December 31, 1999 as the entire world held its breath waiting for the computer meltdown that would cause widespread power outages, water shortages, possible nuclear warhead launches and financial catastrophe. As the clock ticked over in each and every time zone, those cowering in their bunkers - surrounded by their cans of food, bottles of water and Y2K compliant flashlights - were left feeling mighty foolish.

The popular threat of today is global warming. It appears the earth is going through such a rapid increase in temperature (all our fault, by the way) that scientists have been able to find something to attribute to global warming on a nearly daily basis. Even the fact that the plains states are in the grip of their third blizzard of the season is a sign of global warming. I read a headline on ABC News that read “Unseasonable weather jolts Northeast”. I live in the Northeast and I can tell you that when you walk out of your house in January and are greeted by single digit temperatures and minus zero wind chill factors, you can feel a bit jolted. But walking out today into the sunshine and the balmy 74 degrees farenheit didn’t bother me in the least.

Ah, but you say that these record high temperatures are proof positive of global warming. Consider then, this bit of information available on the Drudge Report:

NYC had record high of 68F on Jan 13, 1932. 70F on Jan 14, 1932 and 67F on Jan 15, 1932…

1932 it was equally as warm during this same month and yet in the early 1970s, an imminent ice age was being predicted.

CNN has a story on their website entitled “Ancient ice shelf breaks free”. It has been up for several days now. Apparently nothing else was happening in the field of science. The truth is, they just want to make sure you see it. In case you missed it, they will leave it there so at some point, curiosity will get the better of you and you will read about this ancient ice shelf breaking free and …

Within days, the floating ice shelf had drifted a few miles (kilometers) offshore. It traveled west for 50 kilometers (31 miles) until it finally froze into the sea ice in the early winter.

It froze again somewhere nearby. Bet you didn’t expect that. Because by now global warming should have taken it out into the ocean where it would melt away, raising sea levels, drowning millions and proving them right. But never fear, the fact that it didn’t do that doesn’t mean global warming isn’t happening overnight.

The doomsayers have been around forever. The fact that things keep getting better doesn’t seem to dissuade them in any way from their dire predictions.

But never fear, the government is putting out a new video about global warming. It seems that if the polar ice caps do melt, you should duck and cover.

The US Mint is gearing up to issue a series of commemorative dollar coins honoring the accomplishment of America’s first ladies.

The first in the series will be Martha Washington, shown mending a soldier’s uniform. Each coin will depict some heroic or patriotic deed performed by the president’s wife for each administration.

Thomas Jefferson did not have a wife at the time of his presidency and so the coin will have the symbol of Lady Liberty to represent his administration.

The government has failed before to generate interest in $1 coins having previously issued coins commerating Susan B. Anthony and Sacagawea. The coins honoring the first ladies are expected to cost more than $300 each and will be gold-colored. They should be available early next year.

At the same time the mint will begin cirulating a presidential series of $1 coins. Both the first ladies series and the presidential series will be coming out early next year.

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…