Up & Coming Weekly

THIS WEEK WITH MARGARET THIS WEEK WITH MARGARET by MARGARET DICKSON I have always found the Baby Boomer generation most interesting, probably because I am part of it. The Boomers, still the largest generation ever born in American history, are the people born between 1946 and 1964, in the “boom” years following World War II. This is the storied time when millions of American men came home from war, went to college on GI Bill benefi ts, got married and started families that frequently included more children than were statistically necessary to replace their parents. This was the age when families watched the Ed Sullivan Show and Leave It to Beaver on behemoth television sets in our living rooms — often together. Mrs. Cleaver, Beaver’s mom, attended to her home and her husband and sons in high heels with a warm and welcoming smile. My own memories of this period include a charmed childhood, in which my sister and I roamed our Fayetteville neighborhood with our dogs, Sam and Angel, in the company of herds of other children and their dogs, including Blitz and Mr. Henry. Wearing our pajamas, we played “Mother, May I” and “Old Man, Kick the Can” in various yards after dark until the mothers gathered us in. The earliest Boomers, the advance guard of that great lump passing through the demographic snake, are now collecting Social Security and clearly aging. But while women’s magazines aimed at those who do not wear stilettos for fear of breaking an ankle offer tips on aging gracefully, it seems that many Boomers have chosen other, less desirable, paths. it, “our way.” Just as we put our own stamp on everything we encountered from elementary schools to college to women’s rights and the sexual revolution, we are changing the golden years, and not necessarily in a positive way. We are not taking as good care of ourselves as we should. We are too heavy, with more than a third of us between 55 and 64 classifi ed as obese. This is a higher percentage than those people a decade younger and a decade older, and 85 percent of North Carolina’s vanguard Boomers fess up to getting virtually no exercise. You can check out these numbers at our state’s Center for Health Statistics website. Shockingly, to me at least, we are still using drugs that our doctors did not prescribe for us. The generation that heard Timothy Leary say “turn on, tune in and drop out,” is apparently still at it. Research at the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration found that illegal drug use by people in their 50s increased 46 percent between 2002 and 2007. This does not even count the drugs our docs are using to address our aging health issues or how the cocktail stew is processed by slowing metabolisms. And then there is our money, There is still time for Boomers to change their ways and enjoy their Golden Years. or lack thereof. Apparently, we Boomers thought our youth would last The generation that advised never trust anyone over 30, and that sought every adventure from climbing Mount Kilimanjaro to mind travel through chemistry, fi nds itself in not such great shape as it heads down the home stretch. They, or I guess I should say, we, seem to be fatter, to be taking more drugs, and to be in worse fi nancial shape than our parents and their parents. C’est moi? Folks who keep up with this sort of thing in North Carolina tell us that aging Tar Heel Boomers, a growing demographic in our lovely and desirable state as it is across the nation, exercise less and gamble more than other groups. Perhaps worse still, we take more drugs, prescribed and otherwise, than people younger and older than us. Observers confi rm that Boomers, the children of the people Tom Brokow dubbed the “Greatest Generation,” are indeed heading into old age, as Frank Sinatra put Fayetteville’s Weather Forecast August 6 Fayetteville’s Weather Forecast Friday Thursday August 5 Saturday August 7 High 96° Low 77° Isolated Thunderstorms High 91° Low 76° Scattered Thunderstorm WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM High 89° Low 74° Scattered Thunderstorms longer than it did, and we did not save enough for long enough. Then, what nest eggs we did accumulate were cracked, to say the least, in the global fi nancial meltdown. In other words, we are retiring, or trying to, with real questions about whether our resources will be enough to see us through to our ultimate departures. Does the word “denial” come to mind? Every Boomer’s reaction to all this is different, of course, but mine is that nothing is over until it is over. Each of us can eat better and less and begin to move more, even if it is just taking a walk. Each of us can change our damaging behaviors, and each of us can begin working on our fi nancial futures, however limited they may appear. We Boomers, because there were just so many of us, have altered the social fabric of this nation, and in some ways of the world. It is time for us to be real grown- ups, if not for ourselves, then for those who love us. MARGARET DICKSON, Contributing Writer COMMENTS? 484-6200 ext. 222 or editor@upandcomingweekly.com. Call 910.354.1679 Call 910.354.1679 Sunday August 8 Monday August 9 Tuesday August 10 Fat, Poor and Stoned: Boomers Need to Change Forecast available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. High 87° Low 74° Isolated Thunderstorms High 90º Low 75º Scattered Thunderstorms High 89º Low 75 Scattered Thunderstorms AUGUST 4-10, 2010 UCW 5 24 /7 24

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