July 31, 2002     Los Gatos, California Since 1881 Doldrums hit Baby Boomers hard By Carl Heintze We're in the summer doldrums. The temperature is up, the stock market is down and the war—or whatever it is in which we are engaged—seems to have settled down to monotony. I am sitting on a beach in the mountains beside a lake watching a youngish man, probably a late Baby Boomer, as he goes through his stretching exercises in preparation for a swim. I am watching with some fascination and from the perspective of a different generation. Years ago when I went swimming in a mountain lake, I didn't warm up before I got in. I just went in—cold turkey. And got out fast because the water was cold. Really cold. But times have changed. Baby Boomers who spend a lot of time exercising usually stretch their arms or legs before vigorous exercise. That's good. It prevents torn muscles and latent aches and pains. I see Baby Boomers doing it all the time. Unlike me, they take exercise very seriously. That seems to be because they intend never to be out of shape. They intend to always be fit. They are going to live forever—and well besides. They also devote a lot of time to staying in shape financially, as well. That's why Sept. 11 and the decline and fall of the stock market became such a blow to them. The future they foresaw—an endlessly mushrooming economy, a generation that would be forever young, a world in which not only they but also their nation would always be in ascendancy—seemed so certain. Then suddenly one day, it wasn't. It all ended. Well, actually it hasn't ended. It just seems much less certain. It didn't really happen in a single day, even though we tend to think so. There were signs that the wonderful decade of endless profits and rising expectations was losing momentum before Sept. 11. The first signs were the sudden demise of dot-com companies, most of them built on venture capital and a lot of them, unfortunately, on a single idea. But they didn't end because of a lack of imagination. They died because they really didn't have much to offer their customers and because they couldn't turn a profit. Getting rich didn't mean getting rich quick. Sept. 11 was succeeded by the corporate greed that has come to be known as Enron and that, too, has been a blow to the generation behind mine. It seems impossible that corporate executives—who, after all, have fostered the decade of excesses—should be so crass and greedy as to be financially irresponsible. The Baby Boomer generation was raised on the premise that American capitalism had succeeded, where communist inefficiency had failed. I have sympathy for them and for what's happened because disillusionment seems a part of every American generation. In mine it was the assassination of John F. Kennedy that brought our dream to a screeching halt. JFK was, after all, one of us. He had been tempered by war. He asked not what our country could do for us, but what we could do for our country. He faced up to the Cuban missile crisis. He was of the generation that fought and won World War II, that bested the Depression, that was bound to inherit the rewards promised us by an earlier president, FDR. His death was thus also a death to all this. For us the light had gone out and the sacrifice of years from our lives to defeat fascism and communism seemed not to be worth it. In time, of course, we discovered that, like all heroes, JFK had warts and blemishes. I think we also concluded he was more promise than fulfillment and that while he may have set us on a path (to the moon, at least with the space program), it remained for others to make the dream happen. And I think that's the message that Baby Boomers need to hear. The message is that nothing is guaranteed in life or in the political or economic future. Hard times follow good ones. The measure of a nation is not how fulsome its economy but how it is able to move its citizens to greatness. Just as we will never know what might have happened if John and Bobby Kennedy had lived, so we'll never know what our national future might have been without Sept. 11. The truth is that the world is wide and unfortunately filled with some who neither love us nor want to emulate us. It is up to every generation of Americans to find the ways necessary to ensure both that these people don't succeed in hurting our country. That's the challenge the generation behind me needs to address. And the generation behind that and the generations to come.