Baby Boomers are turning 60 now, and I can't take it anymore.
I'm 43, at the tail end of the Baby Boom, and I'm sick and tired of the boomers imposing their trends, their ideas and their fashions on me. I'm
still particularly sore over the David Cassidy haircut my sisters made me get in 1973.
As it went, my sisters, who had a habit of treating me like their personal Ken doll, demanded I get my hair cut like Cassidy. They exploited one
of my chief insecurities to get me to do it.
"If you part your hair down the middle and feather it over the sides, you'll be able to hide your big floppy ears," they said.
And so it was that I did the unthinkable. One Saturday afternoon, I pedaled my bike three miles to the unisex hair salon. I approached the
salon's owner, a cranky middle-aged women with a cigarette dangling from her lip. I pulled out crumpled bills and a pile of change and set it on
the counter.
"Make me look like David Cassidy," I said.
She clipped and she cut, she styled and she set. She applied goops and sprays of every kind. Little did I know that I, an 11-year-old kid, fired
the first shot across the bow of the metrosexual male movement that day.
When she finished, she turned the chair around to show me her work. I was horrified by what I saw. I didn't look like David Cassidy. I looked
like Danny Bonaduce.
I jumped on my bike and pedaled home as fast as I could. I hid in my room the rest of the day, but had to finally come out when the Big Guy
called me down for supper. I took my seat to his right, praying he wouldn't notice my hair.
But he sensed something was off. As he chomped his burger and washed it down with man-sized gulps of Pabst Blue Ribbon, he kept looking
over to me. He had the puzzled look of a dog trying to do calculus.
"What the hell happened to your hair?" he said.
"Got it cut."
"But it's parted down the middle."
"Yes."
"Who the hell parts hair down the middle?"
"The unisex hair salon."
"The uni-what?"
"They cut hair for both sexes."
"But it's parted down the middle."
That haircut was as painful for the Big Guy as it was for me. Our suffering had a common source: Baby Boomers.
Since the first boomer was born in 1946, boomers have been setting the pace. They've foisted their politics, their music and their clothing on
the rest of us. Now that they're turning 60, they're trying to do it again.
Well, nuts to that.
According to social scientist Jonathan Pontell, I have my own generation now. I wrote about him in 2004 when he argued that tail-end boomers
— the 53 million Americans born between 1954 and 1965 — are not Baby Boomers after all.
To be sure, Generation Jones is more conservative and practical than the idealistic, self-centered boomers. Boomers overwhelmingly supported
Kerry, but we overwhelmingly supported Bush.
We voted for Bush not because we liked him, but because we knew it would really agitate boomers. Boy, has he turned out to be the gift that
keeps on giving.
And now that boomers are turning 60, we have another message. We don't care. We don't want to hear about your anti-aging trends or your
miracle supplements or any nonsense about 60 being the new 40.
Your run is over, my friends. You're tired and old, and your ability to influence America is over.
In fact, to celebrate my newfound independence, I changed my hair style a few years ago. I told the hairdresser to do something simple. She cut
it short and combed it straight back.
When she spun my chair around to show me her work, I was shocked by what I saw. I looked like Eddie Munster.
