Those were the great ol’ days

David Sherman

It was the best of times and it was the best of times. If you were white, had a decent home, wanted education or had parents pushing you to get one, the road ahead was well lit and smoothly paved.

Boomers had it all, baby. Born under a great sign. Your parents may have worn the scars of the Second World War but, unlike our American brothers and sisters, we didn’t have to ship out to some far-off place to kill or be killed.

As youngsters, we evaded polio and multiple other disasters with new vaccines. Antibiotics for infections that would’ve killed since time began, kept us doing the limbo.

And, unlike our southern neighbours, school was practically free. Harvard was wealthy whites. McGill University was for those trying to think. It was almost free.

In Montreal, rent for a flat cost what a bag of groceries goes for today.

Young, free-thinking professors for a new system of free junior colleges – CEGEPs – and universities parachuted in from the U.S. to evade the draft and the U.S. itself and to man the classrooms of the Boomer bulge.

In the south, Nixon and his “Rat fuckers” screwed themselves. There was a semblance of justice, at least for white people. African-Americans, in some quarters, were not considered people, but even the president was accountable. Today, a curious concept.

Education and rent in much of Canada were only slightly more costly than free sex, another benefit of Big Pharma. The pill gave women a chance to enjoy themselves without the fear every woman has carried through time.

Gay people demanded rights, African North Americans demanded rights, women demanded rights, the physically and mentally challenged demanded rights. Indigenous people wanted rights. Large questions were debated. And the relatively new medium of TV needed film to broadcast.

Revolution was perhaps in the air, but on the ground, in Canada, was change. On every major street, newspapers were sold and sometimes spread good news.

After Lester Pearson followed Tommy Douglas’s lead on Medicare, Pierre Trudeau advocated a “Just Society,” where people had a right to food and shelter.

His insistence that “The state has no room in the bedrooms of the nation” caused shock waves among the prurient and the voyeurs, the same that found oxygen pondering in which bedroom Trudeau’s wife Margaret was sleeping.

Trudeau was as unique as the generation he shepherded. He was a man with a spine and principles.

Yes, as the troubadour of the time sang, “There was music in the cafés at night, revolution in the air.”

If life threw you a curve, welfare and/or unemployment insurance paid the rent and stocked your fridge. The UIC Ski Team was born. If you weren’t working, why not ski?

The Canada Council sent poets Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen and others to Greece to ponder couplets and paragraphs, ouzo and sunshine. And it fertilized Canadian content.

How sweet it was.

Unions proliferated, salaries paid for a home in that new curiosity, the suburbs. Front lawns and back lawns on a working man’s salary. Women didn’t necessarily need to work, they could stay home and watch soap operas, play bridge and mahjong, wait for the kids to come home and chew vials of “mothers’ little helpers” to get them through the isolation and boredom of the North American dream.

University or not, jobs were a phone call away. Sometime they called you. If you didn’t like one job, there was always another.

Our parents passed but many of us became recipients of record life-insurance payouts to underwrite new homes or lives.

There were shiny new highways, bungalows, clean air and green grass, except where new institutions, dedicated to a new form of recreation – consumption – sprung up like magic mushrooms.

As Joni sang, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot,” though they put up thousands of them. There was broadloom for nearly everyone -- forests and greenery were sacrificed for miles of baking asphalt dedicated to parking Detroit’s latest. And then Japan’s.

The birth of boomers paralleled television's advent and a new culture of rock music, rock 'n' roll radio and Top 100 countdowns between the barrage of jingles.

Music was everywhere, often under the blankets late at night, tinny and delightful as it streamed from the magic of a transistor radio you could hide in your hand and listen to the corruptible “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” If you were lucky, you had someone to do just that.

Wardrobes shrunk to torn blue jeans and T shirts. White sneakers were uncool. They had to be run over a few times before one could be seen wearing them. Hair was in, the more the merrier.

Franchise fast food had yet to take over the suburban diet but diners, often run by Greek immigrants escaping the rule by Junta back home, were everywhere. Coffee ten cents, French fries a quarter, a booth to smoke cigarettes and talk all evening.

Holes appeared in the chimera soon enough. AIDS massacred more than 36 million in the last century. Cocaine and crack and heroin killed more than 135,000 Americans in the last two decades of the 20^th Century and numbers keep climbing thanks to the invention of fentanyl. There was the great job migration to Asia, concerted union busting, job losses, salary destruction, and a new disease, last seen in the Great Depression, homelessness.

Not only was the bloom off the rose, only one per cent of the population had roses. Great swaths of us had to settle for weeds growing through cracked concrete.

Today, we white straight folk, privileged by birth and luck, ran out of privilege and were thrown under the bus.

Today, it is uncool to be a straight and white. It’s uncool to be elderly. Shopping is unaffordable for most. Dementia might call any moment. The world’s deterioration mimics our own. Wildfires and blankets of smoke chewing at our lungs are more than metaphor.

Like my parents, I don’t understand much of today’s music or the shift from portable radios to blue tooth -- plastic antennae, neither blue nor have anything to do with dental work -- sprout from ears. People walking around indoors or out, in public or private, seemingly talking to themselves, is normal. Their conversation is ours. In our youth, people carrying on protracted monologues with the atmosphere would’ve been fitted for a rubber room.

In the U.S., as the Canadian Conservatives would love to do, $1 billion for public broadcasting was eliminated to help reduce contrary opinion and taxes for the wealthy. Instead Washington, D.C., will spend over $1 billion to help finance a $3 billion-plus football stadium and commercial/residential complex. NFL football teams play maybe 10 to 12 regular season and exhibition games a year. Tickets, parking, a beer and a hot dog now run between $150-200 a person. Taxpayers pay for the stadium but most can’t afford a seat.

The good times for many or most, are gone. The magic life of us Boomers has dissolved, along with our hair and joints, leaving behind arthritis, the medical magic of MRIs and joint replacement, preceded by long waiting times.

But, white, het men and women had our time in the sun. It’s been for many or even most white people, a momentous experience. Life, except in Scandinavian countries, was measurably better in Canada than just about anyplace else in the world, better than any time in history. Most of us lucked out. The greatness of the U.S. was exposed as an enduring myth.

Today ain’t what it was. Movements are dedicated to turning the clock back.

But, they can’t take back what was. And, what it was, was beautiful.