The Graying Of The Boomer Generation

It's the never ending party for the generation that's never stopped celebrating itself. And this year the leading edge of those over-hyped baby boomers are turning 60 at the rate of nearly 8,000 a day.

And leading all the 78 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 is Kathleen Casey Kirschling of Cherry Hill, N.J. Born just seconds into Jan. 1, 1946. Perhaps the very first boomer, speculates CBS Sunday Morning contributor Jerry Bowen.

"I know people don't consider us the greatest of generations, but I think we were great," Kirschling says, adding that when she was a child "I wasn't sure I was going to be here. When they said 60, the 6-0, I thought, 'Oh, people die by that time.'"

The population boom began when the troops returned from World War II and started families. It ended 18 years later with the development of the birth control pill.

"It's a generation that grew up in a unique historical moment: at the end of World War II, when there was prosperity, a sense of expectation and hope about the future. So it's a generation that was born with a sense of entitlement," says Steve Gillon, author of "Boomer Nation" and resident historian of The History Channel.

He says the boomers are really two generations.

"Those who are born after 1958 I refer to as shadow boomers," Gillon says. "I think in order to be a genuine baby boomer, you have to have some recollection of the Kennedy assassination.

"The Kennedy assassination is, it's the first event of national significance that people experienced simultaneously and through television," Gillon adds.

Watching television gave boomers across the country a shared experience. "Part of what makes the generation coherent is that it's watching the same things," Gillon says.

But that didn't mean all boomers would follow the same path.

For a certain segment of free-spirited boomers, their most famous crossroad was the corner of Haight and Ashbury in San Francisco. It was the energy behind flower power. The home of sex, drugs and rock and roll. The Grateful Dead lived here and in 1967 it gave birth to the hippie in what became known as "the summer of love."

Those boomer hippies were a cultural curiosity to the older generation, like late CBS newsman Harry Reasoner in a 1967 documentary.

"We would all like to be able to live an uncluttered life," Grateful Dead front man Jerry Garcia told Reasoner. "A simple life. A good life and like, think about moving the whole human race ahead, a step or a few steps. We know what we're trying to do. We're trying to grow up."

As the boomers grew up, they pushed every social hot button and then some. Picking up the civil rights banner. Expanding the universe of choices people have from women's rights to gay rights to abortion. Fighting the war in Vietnam and protesting it at home.

They fought the system and they fought each other. On college campuses across the country the battle lines between left and right were drawn early and shape the red state/blue state political landscape of today.

"I think the debate we're having today between liberal and conservatives is really a debate over the legacy of the boomer generation. There are those who embrace this legacy of choice, the expanded lifestyle choices that people have. And there's those people who believe that those expanded choices have eroded authority in society," Gillon believes.

Whichever side of that divide the boomers found themselves on, there's no disputing the quarter century that followed until 9/11 was a time of relative peace and prosperity.

The boomers became the wealthiest generation in history with spending power of $2 trillion dollars a year. But they've spent far more than they've saved -- much of it on themselves -- especially in their search for the fountain of boomer youth, part of a legendary self indulgence that has a dark side.

"I mean when you look at us, we're the most obese generation, the most drug abusing, the most crime problem. We show the biggest increase in AIDS and new HIV infections," says University of California-Santa Cruz sociologist Mike Males.

Males claims that some boomers -- one in nearly every seven -- never outgrew their wild side, adding that "the conventional wisdom is in their youth we were a wild generation -- I'm a boomer myself -- we were a wild generation.

"You know all kinds of partying, drugs and things like that and political protest and, and all that sort of thing. And then when we got older, we settled down and became very austere and clean living. But that's not happened at all. We've actually gotten worse as we've aged," Males thinks.

Deaths from drug overdoses are up more than 200 percent among 40 and 50-year-olds compared with 35 years ago. And the crime rate is up 180 percent. While the numbers in both categories actually fell among young people.

And yet all across America, from marathons to yoga studios, other boomers are turning the whole notion of aging on its head, or trying to. For all their failings they are still fitter than their parents ever were. And most don't believe old age will actually start until they are 85. That's three years beyond the life expectancy of today's 60-year-olds.

"If you address boomers as senior citizens, they'll refer you to their parents," says Marc Freedman.

Freedman is the founder of Civic Ventures, a San Francisco think tank looking for ways to tap into the boomer talent pool, the generation that won't go quietly to life's sidelines.

"We have no language that captures this group of people. It's, it's the, it's the stage of life that has no name. And that would be no problem if it wasn't an extended period of time for many people, decades in duration," Freedman says.

Surveys indicate that 80 percent of Americans over age 50 plan to keep working in their retirement years either because they have to or because they want to give back to their community through meaningful jobs or public service. And yet there's no getting away from another image of the boomers. That in retirement, they will be a burden.

"People are talking about the Floridization of America. This long, gray wave of greedy geezers who are soon gonna be taking the country to the cleaners," Freedman explains.

Even President Bush took notice this past week in his State of the Union address, calling the influx of nearly 78 million baby boomers reaching 60 years of age a "national challenge."

In short, how will this country pay for them. How will taxpayers support all those government programs: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid when there will be millions more people drawing down on the system.

Gillon says, "It's certainly possible that, that we could see, playing out over the next 20 or 30 years, as the boomers move into their senior years, a cert, a form of generational warfare. As, as you have fewer and few people paying into a system and more and more people taking benefits out of it. So that's certainly a possibility. But my sense is that, you know, we will find some way of accommodating them."

Freedman adds, "We've seen a national hand-wringing over the cost of people living longer lives. But the irony in all of that is that our goal has been to live longer and healthier lives. We've succeeded.

"How could the best thing that ever happened to us, a near doubling of the American average lifespan over the last century be the worst thing that ever happened to us?" Freedman asks.

If you're Kathleen Casey Kirschling, newly 60 and proud to be a boomer, the next phase of life is reason to celebrate.

"Would i want to go back to 30 or 40 or even 50? No," she says, "because right now I really like where I am."

The generation shaped by the 60s is turning 60 and about to shake up America again. It's not their final act, just the next.

Because the one thing boomers still believe they have is time.