...to PP&M and '60s folk in general. Indeed, any '50s and '60s music generates no warm fuzzy nostalgia with me. I was but a child in those two decades, so it isn't my world to remember fondly (I was a teen and young adult stepping out into the '70s, and there wasn't much to be nostalgic about.) Nothing was meant to be negative or disrespectful to you personally, old friend.

I never took the whole folk-music, flower-power, communes, peace & love, hippy thing remotely seriously as a young man, and it turns out the reason might be the few years of age difference between us. Please, there is nothing pejorative intended, but you and your peers experienced something we never were fortunate enough to experience. We never got the chance to be idealistic.

We were a grittier, angrier, and far more cynical group than the true Boomers. We never experienced the idealism the 1946-54 crowd knew; to us it was all unrealistic and almost childish. All we knew as we started adult life was defeat after a long meatgrinder of a war, the oil shortages, longterm economic malaise, double-digit inflation, and mortgage rates pricing us out of some bullshit called the American Dream. Nixon and Watergate crushed any faith there might have been in our government, then we dared be optimistic like you guys, risked a bit of idealism just once and rejoiced at Jimmy Carter, only to be so cruelly disappointed it was the last time we ever dared be idealistic. More energy crisis, entering a job market that didn't exist, stagflation continued apace, the cynical pragmatism of the '70s formed us like the idealism of the '60s formed you.

There wasn't one thing or two that made us angry, it was the mental crush of everything gone wrong. I always wondered if I was odd man out in the Boomer generation and why I never identified with it, why I don't feel nostalgia for the era, why I loathe "oldies" programming, never lusted after a muscle car, just didn't get it.

It was only very recently I learnt of the division some socialogists have advanced between the Boomers of the '46-'54 timeframe and those from '54-'63. Indeed some have written that the Boomer generation is perhaps too broad a span and those two decades worth are so different they render any conclusion that starts, "The Boomers think..." or "The Boomers are..." completely nonsensical.

Some have even advanced the idea of calling your decade the true Boomers and renaming mine as a completely different cohort called "Generation Jones". Google the term and they can explain this far better. I had never heard of this until a friend of mine pointed me to it, and suddenly there was clarity as to why I never felt the idealism you lot did, and how two very very different social climates in so short a time framed me to think so differently from you. You still have that idealism, bless you, but it is something I never had the chance to experience.

I also understand why I identify with and understand Gen Zed and their frustrations, for they are repeating ours of Gen Jones (if we accept that term). My wife is a decade younger than me, Gen X, and her perspective is differently formed from mine; she can't relate to what these Gen Zeds are being released into after their student days.

It all looks so familiar to me, though.