Tomorrow something quite dramatic and historical will happen on New Year’s Day.

On January 1, 2008, the oldest and first baby boomer will be able to draw early Social Security benefits.

That person is Kathleen Casey-Kirschling, a retired teacher from New Jersey, who was born one second after midnight on January 1, 1946.

Nearly 80 million of us   followed her during the post war years of 1946-1964.

We’re all known as baby boomers, a term I have personally loathed ever since I could remember. 

But we changed just about everything we touched and  not always for the better.

No one seemed prepared for us either. In fact, we’re still baffling.

There were so many of us at David Lipscomb Elementary School, some of us were stashed in the basement of a dorm. (I attended elementary and high school on a college campus).  One of  the three sixth grades was actually in a closet, or what I perceived as a very small room without windows.

So now our eldest brothers and sisters are  joining the Social Security rolls and I am  hoping  they have a better  private retirement package saved instead of the one the government has promised.

So Kathleen, heed the warnings. 

Social Security may not hold up if the younger generations have anything to do with it.  Seems they’re getting quite upset about having to pay funds out to us.

In fact, some of them online are getting downright hostile.  Cassandra Devine is saying in her blog that we should be paid to commit suicide.

(Can’t, Cassandra.  We’re too busy taking care of our parents).  

And others  are  also saying we deserve their resentment.

After all we were the generation that went crazy.

But I must have missed most of that foolishness and misbehavior  during the 60′s since a lot of it happened way past my bedtime.  As for the rest of that decade, I was playing with Barbies and  Monopoly, while reading comic books and eating Captain Crunch.    Woodstock still sounds more like a  furniture company to me.

But finding out we’re not particularly loved by the younger generations is still kind of a shock.

They can observe us while we serve "The Greatest Generation" that won the war and gave us our lives and 60 years of relative peace and prosperity- with  help from the Lord, of course.

We’re only  trying to give  back with the tactile daily management and help for our parents’  later years while we work tirelessly to keep them as happy and comfortable as possible.

Some days we’re more successful at it than others, but we’re not giving up.

So when the clamor that we’re bad and always have been, gets louder and more deafening, we can politely keep working, doing our service for our parents and other elderly people  hourly and daily. 

Because deep down we know the best gifts 2008 will bring us will be more opportunities for serving the ones we love. 

And perhaps just maybe our  examples for doing good  will rub off on young  people like Cassandra.

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