The post Second World War years were an age of prosperity for numerous countries, but particularly the United States because their plant and infrastructure was undamaged and they earned a great deal of money furnishing the products the remainder of the world needed to rebuild their countries.
America was working flat-out in the Fifties and early Sixties and salaries and national wealth kept increasing. A equivalent feeling of goodwill was evident in many other countries, but it was relief that the war was finished and gratitude that their lives and cities were being rebuilt. This feeling of international joy and plentiful employment also led to a boom in babies.
The so-called Baby Boomers were being born in their millions into a joyful time where money and employment was everywhere to be had. Education was seized upon not just by these youngsters but also by many returning service men and women, who wished to assume a bigger role in that bright new world that was stretching out before them.
With a better education and the mood of liberation that the ending of the War brought about, the Civil Rights Movement began to thrive particularly in America were non-Caucasians were still being segregated.
Although it was not known as Apartheid, segregation is just the English word for the same concept and masses of people were starting to find it intolerable and not only non-Whites either.
Individuals after the War were far less respectful of Authority, Governments and the Old Ruling Orders for several reasons. It was these individuals who got us all into wars in the first place and it was these people who were denying Civil Rights. Even if they did not condone segregation they did not do much to stop it.
As Marx or Engels said, nobody gives up power, it has to be seized.
The people alive in the Fifties and Sixties were unlike any generation that had ever preceded them. They had money, education, a healthy disrespect for authority and a higher percentage of people who had been abroad than ever before in the past.
Even if they were carrying weapons at the time. This was a heady cocktail and civil disobedience raged all over the world from America to Europe to Thailand in the Sixties and Seventies.
The new order articulated itself in music and rock and roll was its name. Never before had youngsters had their own music and they had the technology to reproduce it cheaply, the freedom to transmit it and the money to buy it. A whole new industry was started in the Fifties – record labels aimed at kids.
Now that the Baby Boomers are getting old, they are breaking other norms as well. Boomers are inquiring why the are expected to feel old at sixty-five and quit work. At sixty-five these days people often still have twenty years left to live and if the past is anything to go by, they will not merely roll over and die on this one either.
Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on a number of topics, but is now concerned with the cause of macular degeneration. If you want to know more, please visit our site at Macular Degenerative Disease