When Woodstock meets Medicare

I was on the front porch when you drove by and I waved just back from a beach vacation where I witnessed an epidemic in this country that threatens to ruin the lives of millions of innocent people. Don’t worry, it’s not contagious --- unless you count Facebook. The only people who can stop this epidemic are the very ones causing it: my generation, the Baby Boomers. Many of us still think we’re at Woodstock, and that we have a waist and a pencil thin neck. We don’t. We are senior citizens.

We came of age in the Sixties and Seventies and latched into some great causes — civil rights, anti-war, environmental pollution, Women’s Movement, Earth Day — and we grew hopelessly addicted to righteousness, and as the causes became widely accepted we found more specialized causes such as homeless Brazilian feminists or non-gender Polar bears with low self-esteem, and inevitably Middle Working America has grown weary of our dissent. We free-loving long-haired teens are now as old as a hippie’s pair of Birkenstocks.

Somewhere along the way some of us became convinced that birthdays are merely government suggestions. Many of us are still partying, riding motorcycles, taking clothes off in public, and running around like 70-year-old love-crazed teenagers who believe somewhere beneath thirty pounds of good living, there are bell-bottom jeans with a 26-inch waist. Cosmetic injections are producing boomers that look like chicken cutlets wrapped in plastic Glad wrap. Spandex is no longer stylish, it’s now very optimistic.

I get it if you do these things in the privacy of your own living room or nursing home, but it’s a different story if it’s done in a supermarket, or on the beach, and among small children. Thanks to modern medicine it’s great we don’t feel old, but this isn’t about how you feel, it’s about what we see.

Boomers have always had conflicting desires of selfishness along with a spirit of community service. It’s time we leaned towards service. Our country and small children need normal old people. Please.

We need traditional old people that walk around wearing fishing hats covered with colorful lures and treble hooks. We need the kind of people that wear long dresses at night and keep small thin sweaters on hand year around. We need grandmothers that play bingo, who knit, teach children how to bake cookies and pies, and talk about the good old days.

We do not need old men wearing baseball caps backwards in sleeveless tank tops flexing muscles with skin wrinkled like a dried-up avocado forgotten in the back of a refrigerator. We do not need grandmothers that hang out in bars lining up Jell-O shots, taking care their hearing aids don’t fall out and get lost.

It’s time we grew up, if not, who’s going to sit in the park and play chess and smoke pipes? Who’s going to teach grandkids the names of birds and give them a good foundation in knock-knock jokes? The young need us to talk to them about patriotism and baseball, without glancing at a cell phone to see the latest Facebook comment about our picture of this morning’s breakfast.

I’m not saying we Boomers stop living a good life, we just need to do the job nature and God has called us to do. We need to show the young that the crazy care-free part of their life will one day come to an end, that God is real and relevant, and with respect and a little planning, they can look forward to a relatively peaceful life with dignity and poise. Life isn’t about bench-pressing the living room sofa into your 70’s or leaving your assisted care unit dressed in clothes suitable for a Black Sabbath concert.

Boomers aren’t fooling anyone by living in a perpetual happy hour. We need to dial ourselves back some. Besides, I think we’re scaring the children.