Reply #25: Folks in our generation did have one advantage [View All]

[Alcibiades]

Which you cite obliquely: we were the last generation to be educated on slide rules, but the first generation to use personal computers. Though my own programming experience left off where you started out (writing little adventure programs in BASIC using lots of stuff cribbed from other sources), lots of folks I know my age have done quite well for themselves, partly because computer technology was growing and changing at the very time we were growing up. The fact that almost no one else was even nerdy enough to be interested made it geek chic before there was such a thing.

I've often had the thought you express about the industrial/education complex in our era, but I mainly saw it as positive. A lot of the boomers expressed their idealism in the 1970's by becoming involved with education, either as teachers, writers or producers of children's programming. I had the thought at that time that there really was some young, smart, liberal clique meeting in New York or Chicago or Boston to guide the progress of education back in those days. To the extent that that was true, i think it was a good thing.

The bad part was the idea that kids could somehow raise themselves. You saw it in the way kids were portrayed in the media. Tatum O'Neill was the iconic child star of her generation, and in some ways I think many of us with slightly pre-boom parents were raised in ways similar to upbringing--they left us by ourselves or under nominal supervision with an unlocked liquor cabinet and a half ounce of weed in the dresser drawer while they went out and found themselves.