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 unscathed and they made a great deal of money furnishing the products the rest of the world required to rebuild their countries.
America was working flat-out in the Fifties and early Sixties and salaries and national prosperity kept increasing. A comparable feeling of goodwill was obvious in numerous other countries, but it was relief that the war was finished and gratefulness that their lives and cities were being rebuilt. This feeling of international joy and abundant 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 numerous returning service men and women, who wanted to take a bigger function 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 started to flourish especially in America were non-Caucasians were still being segregated.
Although it was not called Apartheid, segregation is simply the English word for the same idea and masses of people were starting to find it intolerable and not just non-Whites either.
Individuals after the War were much less respectful of Authority, Governments and the Old Ruling Orders for a number of reasons. It was these people 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 abolish it.
As Marx or Engels said, nobody gives away power, it has to be taken.
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 individuals who had been abroad than ever before in the past.
Even if they were bearing guns 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. At no point in time before had youngsters had their own music and they had the technology to replicate it cheaply, the freedom to transmit it and the money to buy it. A whole new industry was launched in the Fifties - record labels aimed at kids.
Now that the Baby Boomers are becoming old, they are breaking other norms as well. Boomers are questioning why the are expected to feel old at sixty-five and stop work. At sixty-five nowadays people frequently 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 author of this piece, writes on a variety of topics, but is now concerned with the cause of macular degeneration. If you want to know more, please visit our website at Macular Degenerative Disease
(that is the brave one).