Generation "Jones"?

Apparently we who were born between the years of 1954-1964 are not quite considered to be real "Baby Boomers" in the sense that our peers born between 1946 and 1953 are. They experienced far more of the trauma of the Vietnam War, the Summer of Love (1967), Woodstock and all the rest of that stuff that we were too young to have experienced. Thus, we are labeled "Generation Jones", as in, our generation's main experience has been the proverbial "keeping up with the Joneses" type of thing: bigger houses, bigger cars, bigger yards and doing our absolute level best to one-up our neighbors and friends with our accumulated wealth. I've never felt compelled to do this, of course, and I suppose I more clearly identify with the older "Boomers" except for the fact that I was too young to be caught up in the "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll" thing of the 60's. The events of 1968 were the one thing that did leave an indelible mark on me because I was old enough to understand that something was radically shifting in our society. The assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were seminal events in my late childhood and early adolescence that caused me to think as I have pretty much ever since. Add to that the tragedy of Kent State in 1970 and it really drove home to me that something was fundamentally wrong with a war that had grown increasingly unpopular and costly in human blood. I was shaped by those years in ways that my fellow "Jonesers" evidently weren't. Their reaction was to rebel against the wild and free 1960's and become conservatives that lifted Ronald Reagan to office in the 80's, who is the politician who came to power about the time our generation was coming of age and who seems to have drawn on our generation's dissatisfaction with the 1960's and the desire to turn the clock backward to the Ozzie and Harriet days of the 1950's. But if last week's Presidential election proved anything, it's that the era of Reagan conservativism is dead and gone, to be replaced by a new idealism that we haven't seen since the days of John F. Kennedy. This can only be a good thing as our generation approaches its retirement years and the waning days of our careers. We tried the unbridled greed thing, bought McMansions in pseudo-Englishy sounding development names with massive garages in which to park our gas guzzling SUV's and somehow found the whole thing wanting. In recent years, more and more of us have been going back to the land and trying to recapture some lost organic sense of life by simplifying and downsizing. Trying to "keep up with the Joneses" isn't exactly all it's cut up to be, it seems. And that realization can only be a good thing for our country's future. The Ronald Reagan Era is dead and gone at last.

WHY NO NEWS MAGAZINES?

Last night I spent an hour and a half scouring local stores for the most recent copies of Time and Newsweek and was shocked to discover that most store newsstands do not include any news magazines or even newspapers. (They do carry plenty of fluff like magazines geared specifically for men and women, like outdoor and gun and hunting stuff for the guys, and home decorating, fashion and crafts for the gals.) It would seem, then, that most folks are getting their news online instead of in hard copy format, but I simply find it too difficult to sit down in front of a computer for several hours to read a news magazine or a newspaper online. I am one of those hopelessly old fashioned creatures that finds great pleasure in sitting down on the sofa, cup of coffee in hand, and spending time holding a newspaper or news magazine and reading it. Perhaps I'm something of a Luddite where it comes to this sort of thing: after all, there are now cell phones that include a GPS, Internet surfing, a digital camera, .mp3 players, e-mail, television and of course, the ability to make a phone call. In short, you can have one small pocket sized entertainment device that does it all and admittedly, I find myself thinking how nice it'd be to have one of these wonder devices, but then, I might get so hooked on it that I'd probably have withdrawal symptoms without it, so my cell phone is your basic, no-nonsense cell phone that only makes phone calls and nothing else. But it would seem that where news is concerned, newspapers are rapidly beginning to downsize to the point where they are close to disappearing altogether, and news magazine sales have slowed to a crawl as well. The print media that I so cherish is rapidly becoming an endangered species in this, our new digital age. And I don't know what to make of it except that I guess it's all a matter of adapt or get left behind. Even desktop computers are becoming a dinosaur as they are being rapidly replaced by laptops and iPhones and other devices that are faster and smaller than a breadbox. So again, I am beginning to be painfully aware of my generation's need to adapt to a rapidly changing world ruled by tech savvy kids with cell phones that can do everything but make your lunch. Admittedly, at times I am beginning to feel like a veritable technological Luddite who is always many steps behind the current wave of new electronic devices. I have an ancient Gateway computer still on 56K dial-up that runs Windows 98SE as its operating system and is pokey slow compared today's lightning fast new computers that can do everything. My cell phone is your basic strip down model. I still carry a hard copy small calendar book in my purse to keep track of appointments. Maybe someday, I'll have enough cash to catch up to the technology revolution, but that's not likely anytime soon. In the meantime, I'm perfectly content to sit on the sofa with my cup of coffee and my newspapers and magazines and read. That, my friends, is something that I don't ever plan to give up, no matter what. Unless, that is, hard copy newspapers and magazine go the way of the dodo, in which case I'll have to figure out what to do. But I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.