For all you Millennials and Zoomers.

[MineralMan]

31. Yes, jealousy and impatience. I seem to remember feeling both

of those things in my youthful years, too. Soon enough, they will be the older generation and be hearing from their juniors how unfair things are and how the older generation had it easy. So it goes.

I've always found it amusing, though, that something like a concert attended by a tiny percentage of people is somehow emblematic of a generation. Woodstock was interesting, I suppose, but I don't know a soul who was there. I could have been there at the time, but that was not the sort of thing I would have enjoyed, frankly.

Yes, there was a good deal of sexual freedom in those days before HIV, but most people had few sexual encounters and even fewer casual ones, really. I know that was true for me, generally. Only a very small percentage of people were promiscuous, even then. More power to them, I suppose, but for most people, sex was something, still, that required relationships.

Yes, some of us went to college that was subsidized by the state. Some of us, but far from most of us. The percentage of high school graduates who continued their educations or expected to do so was smaller than it is now. The young men at the time were subject to being drafted, and a goodly number were drafted. Some died in Vietnam. Others enlisted in the military to avoid being drafted, and served longer terms, often far from the war. All were eligible for the GI Bill, which was how I finished my college education. A trade-off.

Meanwhile, that generation invented most of the technology everyone takes for granted now. When I was born, airplanes had propellers, TV was rare and in black and white until I graduated from high school. Computers were room-filling machines, even when I was in college. Phones had cords and rotary dials when I was a kid.

Our generation, so much maligned, also was instrumental in the civil rights movement, feminism, reproductive choice, and much, much more. We elected JFK, and suffered through Nixon and Reagan. We saw humans go into space for the first time, for whatever benefit that brought. Many of us championed progressive ideas and went into the streets to make our points.

Did we have it easy? Sure, in some ways. The economy was expanding, so there was work. But, my first job paid $1.25 per hour and did not go up a lot for a couple of decades after that. I drove crappy old cars until very recently. Still, I got married. I bought a house for $20,000 in 1974, which seemed like a lot of money at the time. It was worth a lot more when I sold it, 30 years later to move to Minnesota to help care for my wife's parents. Today, there are people in their late 20s and early 30s who are buying houses, too, just as I did. The numbers are different, but not the possibility.