Silent Generation - We Are Not Baby Boomers!

Somewhere between a third and a quarter of all people living in America today were born between 1946 and 1965 ?? Anna Quindlen
The first of the Baby Boomers are turning sixty this year.? Over the years, I thought I was a Baby Boomer? and behaved like one. However, I was wrong. Born in 1943, I am a little too old Streamyx Package be a Baby Boomer.

A "Baby Boomer", per Wikipedia, is someone born in a period of increased birth rates, such as those Tmnet Streamyx the economic prosperity following World War II. In the United States, demographers have put the generation's birth years at 1946 to 1964, despite the fact that ?according the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services - the U.S. birth rate (per 1,000 population) actually began to decline after 1957.

Cast out of the elite Baby Boomer club and feeling abandoned, I sought to discover a new generational home. Initially, I thought that I might belong to the Lost Generation? After all, it would make sense. Id certainly lost them Lost Generation? a term originally used to identify a group of American literary expatriates living in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, is used nowadays to describe the generation, who came of age in the United States during and shortly after World War I.

After further research, I found that I belong to the Depression and War Generation? those born in the period between 1929 and 1945, and sometimes called the Pre-Baby Boomer Generation? Now, theres a confused and slightly insulting designation. It lacks its own catchy slogan, and is named in reference to another generation. I prefer the term the Silent Generation, since it has not been written about extensively, and it has become my new home.

Why is the generation we belong to related to our birth year when our formative years occur later? Born in 1943 in Scotland during the darkest days of World War II, I did not appreciate the poverty, misery, and fear of those times, or the great courage of those times, until I learned about them though the stories told my old Granny, Mother, and other family members ?uncles and aunts, and cousins.

My formative years were spent Post-War in a coal-mining village amidst the dying embers of the British Empire as it withdrew messily from the colonies, such as India, Malaysia, Cyprus, Aden, and Kenya. For many years after World War II until the 1960s, Britain continued to hold on tenaciously to its rigid social class structure and post-Victorian traditions. I grew up in the era of huge nationalized industries such as railways, coal, steel, and the famous Clyde shipyards that built the famous transatlantic liners. This was the heyday of militant socialist trade unions fighting for popular causes on our behalf against the greedy and evil?capitalist bosses. Over time, the class struggle was finally starting to tear down Britains obsolete institutions, and about time too.

As a generation, we were just starting to become aware of the world at large and the Cold War. Then, the evil of Soviet communism was revealed by its brutal suppression of the Hungarian revolution. As young teenagers, we listened nightly to radio broadcasts from Budapest full of brave exploits and courage, and first-hand tales of nasty secret police, torture, and violent death. Later, we heard about the lucky escapes to Austria by some of the revolutions leaders, famous athletes, and soccer players. With others of my generation, I wanted to volunteer to fight with the brave Hungarians against this brutal Soviet tyranny. At thirteen-years of age, we lost our political innocence. We were forced to face political reality. Evil men still ruled in the world.

In the end, I am not a Baby Boomer. The Silent Generation is my adopted generation. However, weve seen important events with our own eyes and have our own unique viewpoint. The Big Baby boomer era is coming upon us fast. If we do not speak out before it arrives, the story of our generation will be quashed under its media juggernaut. Its high time that we spoke out. The Silent Generation must be silent no more!

I rely heavily on email for my various communication needs. In fact, I have a Yahoo! email account that I have been using for years that it would be a real disaster should it suddenly go kaput! And last weekend, I thought it did.

I woke up last Saturday feeling really good and my first thought was to go online and start replying on those long-overdue emails. I went to Yahoo! and tried to log in on my email account, but I kept getting errors. I was immediately worried thinking that my account had been hacked and that I have lost total control of my email. That would be disastrous indeed, since part of my life is contained in that email.

My worries were a bit alleviated when I learned that Yahoo! was just doing a maintenance and that I could check my email again later that day. And I did.

Perhaps it's a lesson learned that I should start using Outlook or Thunderbird so I could automatically download my emails. But I have to upgrade to Yahoo! Plus to be able to do that and I think it's a bit pricey for me.