The Last Good Days of Innocence

We were a generation free of super-technology. Yes, we had our records and tv and the airlines for speedy travel. And yes, there had been wars throughout history, but we had never lived ourselves through wars’ horrors. WWI, WWII, and Korea were the wars of our fathers and their fathers before them. Even Viet Nam was not ours. Our boys feared it, but by the time they graduated from high school, it was safely behind us. We were the kids born at the height of 50’s prosperity. McDonald’s, Disneyland and Rock & Roll were our immediate birthright! The biggest strife of our early childhood was for Civil Rights, yet we were too young to participate in things like the boycott of buses and the March on DC. There were pyschedelic drugs and protests by hippies, but most of US were out riding our bikes, jumping rope, playing ball, listening to our 45’s or attending our classes. Helter Skelter, the Beatles’ version of dirty rock, got picked up by Manson as his personal anthem, but the closest we got to helter skelter was just watching the news of it on TV. Same for Woodstock and the killings at Kent State. We watched a man walk on the moon on our black and white television screens, yet still - technology by then had not quite “taken off.” We may have taken a toke or attended keggers in our youth, and that would be about the worst that we did - at least in the city I grew up in. Most of us by the 80’s had married, and what was coolest from the 80’s through the 90’s we viewed through the eyes of our children. A wall in Berlin came down and there were conflicts in the Middle East; in the midst of this, we were busy working at our jobs - the majority of us not doing so bad! After the new millennium, 9/11 happened. We were too old by then to enlist in the military. We came a little close to understanding the Depression of our parents’ era during 2008. We saw a black man later become president. We saw a woman nearly take the seat herself! We had got on computers and cell phones at the turn of the new century and tried to compete with kids born to it like fish born to sea. Some of us today are still minnows in the sea of technology, causing our grandkids to chuckle at our naivety. On the other hand, many of us are right up to speed with nearly everything, but today we face a threat that might annihilate even the semblance of society the way we lived it though all our many years. We are on the verge of merging with the baby boomers before us - as collectors of Medicare and our hard-earned social security. We could likely be the straw to break the camel’s back rapidly draining the economy if Covid-19 does not do it first. We are myriad – we are the last of the baby boomers, and behind us now are the last good days of innocence. April 26, 2020 For Edward Ibeh's Pick-A-Title, Vol 16 - Free Verse 2 - Poetry Contest Line chosen for title: #2: The Last Good Days Of Innocence