Us folks in the '61 to '64 window are usually viewed as "on the cusp"; but certainly we were still considered boomers right up to the moment when the social scientists first came up with the concept of Gen X.

Regardless, "Abbey Road" has got to be some kind of dividing line. Our babysitter brought it to our house, and we listened to it over and over and over. When I was in junior high, the most popular albums amongst my friends and me, all of whom had been too young to actually buy any of the original Beatles albums, were the awesome "Red Album" and "Blue Album" greatest hits collections.

Another marker might be the moon landing -- if you're old enough to really remember watching that live on TV, to have understood at some level the significance of it -- then you're tied to the boomer generation in a way that people younger than you are not.

A more basic dividing line is this: If your parents are boomers, you're probably Gen X or Gen Y. If your parents are too old to be boomers, you're probably not a "cultural" Gen X'r, even if you're born in the late 60s -- especially if your parents are old enough to remember VE day. If you remember when your family replaced the black and white TV with a color set -- you're probably a Boomer. If you remember when your family "got cable", you're probably a boomer. If you saw Jaws or Holy Grail in the theater during their first runs, you're probably a boomer. If you learned to play Risk with wooden pieces -- you're probably a boomer. If your first computer program was written on punchcards or paper tape, you're probably a boomer.

The thing is, the "Baby Boom" was originally a concept purely about the demographics of birthrate. Culturally, kids born anywhere from 42-45 were raised in the Boom culture. As children, they enjoyed the explosion in postwar material wealth. They campaigned for JFK in 1960, and were still in college when he was assassinated -- they were the vanguard of the youth-centric culture and economy that we associate with the "Boomers".

Were your parents boomers. That creates a crossover in the early 60s. I was born in 1961. My Teddy bear was named Vote for Johnson, yes really. My first memory is Kennedy being asassinated in living black and white. My outlook on life, attitudes, opinions and such are far different from my cousins 8 and 10 years older more like my younger cousins but not there either.

Additionally I come from a town with a lot of large catholic families that had 8 to 15 children if the younger ones were my age they tended the direction of the boomers. If they were the oldest it was the opposite.

up to the early 90s, when Coupland wrote his book and Strauss and Howe arrogantly reassigned everyone in the 61-64 group to their "13th Generation". the problem is, they did that based as much on self-identification of the group as anything else, and their own cultural reactionaryism played a big part as well. i can tell you straight up, there's an enormous difference in attitudes between myself and my peers and the folks who came up just 3 or 4 years after us, but also between ourselves and those a few years older.

i think that one of the most significant cultural phenomena that sets folks in the 60-65 window apart from our predecessors and successors, is that we were adolescents when the advances of 60s feminism became manifest in educational culture. a small group of guys in the year ahead of me at my junior high were the first I had ever heard of who asked (and were permitted) to take "home ec" -- specifically, the cooking class, now typically titled "culinary arts"; similarly, two girls in my grade were the first I ever knew of who took a shop class (graphic arts). we actually watched the rules of gender norms -- both the formal, written rules, and the informal conventions -- being rewritten for us (and even by us) at the exact time that we were in the middle of that period of sexual maturation and learning how to "relate" to the "other half". my older sister's best friend was the first woman i had ever heard of who joined the Forces as a "soldier" (though not yet in a combat role -- nonetheless, 1979 was the year that Canada's military colleges began to accept women as cadets).

came out. In fact, that might serve as the more significant Beatles demarcation -- not, Do you remember the Beatles breaking up, but Did you care when the Beatles broke up? And did you care about the occasional rumors that they might get back together? Did you care when Lennon was shot?

The most popular slow-dance song at my Junior High dances, the last song played, was invariably the six and a half minute epic, Hey Jude. Think about that: 13-year-olds slow-dancing to a song that had been released when they were 6.

Strauss and Howe reassigned us because we were emphatically not hippies. Of course, neither were most boomers -- but we not only were not hippies, we thought of them as something that came before us, and that was gone before we reached college. As a college acquaintance of mine once said to me, and not very nicely: "Why do you have long hair? It isn't fashionable any more, you know!" Whereas, I thought the whole point of the 60s was that it didn't matter any more what was or was not fashionable -- we all got to grow our hair however we wanted, and wear whatever we wanted, without worrying that we'd be ostracized or classified.

And how Obama is trying to stand down, telling Hillary to get over it and move on, in so many words. And how Hillary stood down, except she didn't, because that nice Green Party lady is willing to go to the mat, and why shouldn't we help her?

I keep reading they're going to try doing the recount so they can "take Wisconsin, PA and (whatever the other state is) out of the Electoral College by insisting that the EC move forward on the appointed day. The allegation is that with those three states not voting, Clinton only needs to flip 8 remaining electors and she's in.

And that's bullshit. I keep trying in my head to discount this--my recollection of 2000 was that Team Florida had to be done by 12/13/00 with any recounts, so the electors could vote on time. Period. No exceptions. What's different now besides desire and will to void Trump and install Clinton? The law is the law. There's no "delaying" or "keeping states from the EC voting", I'm flat out calling bullshit on that unless there's a reasonable refutation my eyeballs haven't read yet...

to violence during the 1968 convention. For example:

Meanwhile, on the streets of Chicago, several thousand anti-war protesters gathered to show their support for McCarthy and the U.S. withdrawal of troops from Vietnam. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley deployed 12,000 police officers and called in another 15,000 state and federal officers to contain the protesters. The situation then rapidly spiraled out of control, with the policemen severely beating and gassing the demonstrators, as well as newsmen and doctors who had come to help.

The ensuing riot, known as the “Battle of Michigan Avenue,” was caught on television, and sparked a large-scale change in American society. For the first time, many Americans came out in virulent opposition to the Vietnam War, which they had begun to feel was pointless and wrongheaded. No longer would people give the national government unrestrained power to pursue its Cold War policies at the expense of the safety of U.S. citizens.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/protests-at-democratic-nation...

I don't think history.com is a radical website. Typically, it's the right that loves to give us its view of history, but that's another issue.

See also things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Democratic_National_Convention#Dan_Ra...

Daley had not wanted protestors in Chicago, refused permits and otherwise acted more like a mob boss than a party boss, instruction the police and troops to treat demonstrators accordingly.

It's difficult for me to imagine that hippie kids whose slogan had "Stay clean for Gene" (McCarthy) (giving up drugs and booze so they could help elect an anti-war candidate) were the ones who started violence in what were intended to be peaceful demonstrations. Much as it was not the OWS demonstrators who started violence in thos demonstrations. The 1968 demonstrators who were getting beaten in Chicago famously chanted "The Whole World is Watching," which seems to me inconsistent with the idea that anti-war demonstrators began the violence.

And what helped Nixon win, IMO, was what my prior post said, on the Democratic side, escalation of the Vietnam War, resentment of the draft, lying about the Vietnam War, etc. and, on the Nixon side, the statement that he knew how to end the war "with honor" and he had the reflected glow of the Eisenhower administration. Eisenhower, of course, was seen as knowledgeable about war, as well as a President who knew how to make the country prosperous during peace time. (Destroying manufacturing capability in Germany and Japan during World War II accounted for a lot of that post-war prosperity, of course, but that's a different story, too.)

I guess it all depends on which prism one looks through.