The Baby Boomers:

When I arrived in Toronto during the late '60s, the young folk here were busy re-inventing society to their own specifications. The Hippie revolution was in progress.

This was significant because it included a more numerous generational group than is usually the case. They were the offspring of a society that had survived the Second World War and came home to make love, not war. They were the Baby Boomers.

I landed at the Mississauga News, one of the Farm Clubs as Ray Argyle of the Telegram put it, spreading their influence into Toronto's rapidly expanding suburbs. The Star and the Globe were doing it, too.. 

Among the many wonderful people I met here was a young man from a prominent Toronto Township family who impressed me as a well-educated, well brought-up personality full of potential for success. In no way was he a spaced-out Hippie. At least, not yet..

When Toronto Township electorate was offered a choice of name, we at the Mississauga News naturally campaigned to name the new town Mississauga, as opposed to Sheridan. That alternative was proposed and heavily promoted by a social element that appeared ready to name everything north of the US border after Sheridan, an Irish expatriate with no verifiable claim to fame in Canada.

When I left Mississauga News and went to work at Maclean-Hunter, I got to meet an entirely new galaxy of individuals. 

The Hippie era was still rampant in Toronto. It appeared to be centered upon Rochdale College, another hopeful experiment in effortless education. It collapsed in '75, apparently because weed, speed, magic mushrooms and LSD were found to be ineffective as learning tools..

This was not unusual behavior among the young Hippie crowd. At the time, the Beatles were searching for new religious experience throughout the Far East and the Hippies tried to do everything the Beatles were doing.

One day, in the middle of my noon-time walk along Yonge St., I came upon my impressive young friend from Mississauga whom I hadn't seen since the election that elevated Pierre Trudeau to the top ministry. Too many things were happening too quickly for me and I needed to do a quick think in order to place him in my mind.

First thing he said to me was, "Have you met the Mahareej Ji?". 

The way he said it was like "Have you met God?"

I searched his face for evidence that he was joking, but found none. He was deadly serious. There was no evidence that the bright, presentable young man I had met three years earlier was still in there.

The conversation was short, since he appeared to be so full of Mahareej Ji that there was no room for exchange of any other information. 

Later, I checked with an associate who appeared to have been keeping track of what was happening in the Hippie world. He said the Mahareej Ji was one of several religious cults that sprang up in the city core to take fiscal advantage of the Hippie hunt for new religious experience.

There were all these spaced-out Hippies ready to mentally accept anything at all that bore no resemblance to what their parents believed. That, of course, included the by then well-heeled Beatles who, in their own way, were the high priests of the new world order as the huge mass of Baby Boomers viewed it. 

They, and Elvis Presley, were the music of this generation, and some of it was not too bad. There was Joni Mitchell, the Girl from Saskatoon; Ian and Sylvia; Rompin' Ronnie Hawkins, the Supremes and other very tolerable sounds. Actually, it was a lot better than some of the cacophony that passed for music for some succeeding generations.

Society has been more-or-less temporarily re-constructed by every succeeding generational group leading up to the present. Each succeeding de-construction and re-construction has been made easier by the enhanced communication of the internet and the rapidly evolving electronic gadgetry adopted by each generational group since.

With each re-construction, it became easier to de-construct traditional thinking and replace it with the half-formed thinking of the immature element in the electorate.

Social guidance has migrated to the hands of people who no longer base their decisions on something that was known to have worked before. 

Befores are very limited for people too young to have experienced many. The electronic evolution has enabled generations that were easy to ignore before to be heard loud, clear, and often to no one's advantage. 

Like it or not, that's where we are today.