Jenifer’s Shelter Island Journal: Late-blooming Boomer 

The first wave of Baby Boomers, Class of 1946, has been turning 80 all year long. It will sweep me up next month, as impossible as it seems, at least to me.  

I’m a Boomer, and so are you if you were born between 1946 and 1961. Yes, a member of a behemoth of a generation who, just through sheer strength of numbers, had begun to change the world by the time the first of us were entering kindergarten. Inspired by our huge profit potential, corporate America responded en masse to our every need, and, if no need yet existed, one was created. 

Consequently, the more privileged of us often grew up spoiled and entitled, while our less-privileged brothers and sisters grappled with the wages of inequality in a nation purportedly founded on its opposite.

As we grew, technology recognized the benefits of keeping us “babies,“ “forever young” and was dedicated to our staying that way. The “Youth Culture” was born (and now refuses to die). In any event, we reached our chronological adulthood having been fed a bizarre stew of Disneyland fantasy, cowboys and Indians, nuclear bombs, rock and roll, and just in time for some of us to die in Vietnam. 

Yet somehow, we’d also developed, as a group, a kind of naïve, super-sized idealism — some of us  fighting for integration, voter rights, women’s rights, and against racism and the Vietnam War. 

Yes, many of us — standing up, not standing by.

So, the decades have whizzed past at warp-speed, and that shiny idealism has, in many cases, dulled to the color of lead. You know what, though? Apparently, for many Boomers, it’s still there. I know, for me, that in the unlikely event I ever approached 80, I certainly never would’ve imagined that I’d be any kind of activist. I think it may have started with the 2008 presidential election, when I was just a few years shy of 65. So much horror had attended the birth of the new millennium — 9/11 and two wars in its first decade — that when the seemingly impossible candidacy of an African-American caught fire and was ultimately successful I, along with millions of my fellow citizens, felt a rekindling of that idealism. 

In retrospect, those eight years between 2008 and 2016 now feel like a hard-to-remember dream. What followed has been a level of anger, division, chaos, cruelty and the shredding of democratic institutions that’s been almost unimaginable for many of us. And yet, this terrifying period has also highlighted for us, as nothing else could, the exact points of vulnerability in our system that have actually been in desperate need of repair for decades, if not centuries.

And what have we Boomers done about it? We haven’t stood by, we’ve stood up. Not just for our special-interest causes of Medicaid and Social Security, as crucial as they are, but for our precious country, for all our brother and sister citizens of all colors and for our sacred rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. 

Regarding the recent demonstrations leading up to the mid-term elections that took place last week, a June 2026 article in the New York Times says this: “While younger crowds under 30 were more visibly active in dense urban areas, the median age spiked to around 65-plus in small-town, suburban, and rural rallies, where retirees mobilized heavily in response to targeted cuts to safety-net programs like Medicaid as well as threats to democracy … the conspicuous ‘youth absence’ and the overwhelming presence of Baby Boomers in many local chapters led to significant public and media discussion about why the protests skewed so heavily toward the older generation.”

For all our generational “deficiencies,” we have been here before. Maybe it’s a kind of muscle memory, but the results of Tuesday, Nov. 3 indicate how key we were and will continue to be in nurturing the re-birth of this nation — showing up at demonstrations, donating, writing letters, making phone calls, manning the polling places and speaking our truth. As an article on sagecollective.org expressed back in 2021: “Older adults are invaluable community members who command respect and have much to share and teach others. Whether doing a favor for a neighbor, having conversations with family members or joining a local grassroots organization in a capacity that best suits your abilities, older adults’ engagement in politics is an important, powerful, vibrant part of living …”

Our work has just begun. Many exceptional and motivated young people have flooded the ranks and because, in this existential enterprise, perhaps we are “forever young,” and we can work together with them as equals in order to, one day at a time, transform this tattered American dream into the more perfect union it is meant to be.