We think in stereotypes. This is not necessarily a bad thing: stereotype is a negative term for template , Templates are valuable for making quick sorts in the vast field of data that the brain receives every moment of its life. Without templates, such as Business Man, Student, Nature, Political Issue, we wouldn't know how to behave in a given situation without going back to first principles, thinking the whole thing through, and formulating a response -- by which time most situations would have changed beyond recognition, often for the worse.

Stereotypes are templates we don't like. This is not an unjust distinction. They are templates used out of mental laziness, when there is time and evidence to suggest that the template we are applying is false, even injurious. They evolve either because we lack the discrimination to notice important details in the reality we are analysing, or because there is something in that reality we do not care to acknowledge, and can hide by overlaying a preferred stereotype. In the latter category fall the racial, economic and ethnic stereotypes we apply to people we meet in almost any peacetime context, the romantic Nature stereotype of the environmental zealot, the economic development stereotype of their capitalist opponents, the Frankenstein stereotype laid on scientists by those who fear the changes they may bring to our understanding of the world.

The Boomer stereotype falls into the first, rather than the second, category. It probably wouldn't bother me, had I not been born between 1948 and 1956, in North America. But I was, which makes me a Boomer. Thus, throughout my life, I have been confronted with analyses telling me who I am, what I do, what I think, what my values are, what I am going to buy this year, where I am going with my life. The fact that these analyses have never had the remotest relationship to my life, or to those of my friends, at first amused, then irritated, and finally infuriated me. This vast wash of words is going to determine what the future thinks we were: they are lies. Having run through my fury, I have done a little analysis of my own, to understand how it came to be that the Boomer Stereotype came to overwhelm lives that had so little in common with it.

The first thing that struck me was that the baby boom was not an international phenomenon. Almost all the nations that participated on the victorious side in World War II had a short boom in births after the war, but it tailed off within three or four years everywhere but in North America. Boomers are one cohort of a regional population that covers only about 5% of the world's population.

The second thing I noticed is the influence of an assumption: individuals affected by the same events will tend to react in the same way. This assumption, questionable, as it posits that the affected individuals are without minds or histories, is then applied on the global and national level. Thus, a defining moment for all baby boomers is, apparently, the assassination of the American President, John Kennedy. Another influence is supposed to be the content of early U.S. television; a third, the postwar American Dream of generational advancement; a fourth, the Viet Nam war and the Hippie moment. And so on.....

That is all very well, but I am not a U.S. citizen, and, even as a child, was never a big TV watcher -- I was already able to read by the time my parents bought a TV, and never really made the switch. The American Dream did not apply in our neighbourhood, although my parents did place a high value on books, records and educational attainment. Most of the kids I grew up with were working class, some lower middle classes, and some underclass, as it is now called. Oh, we had dreams, but they tended to revolve around a good union job or a small construction firm or the like. Of all the families in our neighbourhood, with their two to five boom babies, only two thought their kids should go to university, and, of all the twenty plus kids on the street, only two ever went.

Viet Nam was someone else's war. The Hippie Movement did not pass us by -- the first place I rented on leaving home was in a rooming house full of hippies, and the least expensive clothes generally left one looking more like a hippie than like Twiggie. I do remember demonstrations at the universities I attended -- I lost a significant amount of time and money because one of them went on strike for several months when I was in second year. Another had something or other to do with Canadian complicity in the Viet Nam war, but I only caught a bit of the speechifying between classes. As for drugs, well, I admit it -- I inhaled. Lots. So did my friends. It did not all pass us by.....

Despite popular assumption, these defining moments do not apply to every North American born between 1948 and 1956. One asks, what set us apart from the others? Why were we not affected in the same way?

A third thing that stands out reading th analyses of Boomer evolution is that, while the term is defined by birthdate, not all boomers are created equal. When was the last time you heard of a black Boomer? Blacks had a birth boom in the same period, but it is not part of The Boom. Does anyone even know whether Canadian aboriginals had an increased birth rate? What about Chinese-Canadians? Hispanic Americans? You won't read about them: Boomers are lily white.

Not only are they Caucasian, they are overwhelmingly, in the eyes of the analysts, from a salaried background. Their parents were Ward and June Cleaver, he went to the office daily, she stayed home to keep house and raise the children. One does not have to read scholarly tomes to discover this bias, just peruse the articles in TIME or Maclean's. Even before the Boomers can speak for themselves, the parents being interviewed for illustrative quotes are company employees, lawyers, doctors, civil servants, sales managers. Not one shift worker, wage earner, unemployed male, working female. This bias persists as the Boomers mature and begin to speak for themselves. Overwhelmingly, the selected subjects are university students, then young professionals, business graduates, civil servants, journalists, social workers, managers, not-for-profit administrators, artists, and so on.

This is where my neighbourhood group missed out. While most of us are Caucasian, the number of salaried employees can be counted, easily, on one hand, and that includes the artist. (Okay, she is not salaried, hell, she isn't even paid decently. The turnout is so pathetic I include her to pad the numbers.) Among us, or those I can track, there are five carpenters/contractors, two cab drivers, a real estate salesman, a couple of convicted criminals, a policeman, a union activist from the healthcare industries, an insurance underwriter -- quite senior, she works in government -- a disabled single mother, at least two retail saleswomen, an electrican, a man on welfare due to mental disability, and a handful of mothers. Of those of us who got past high school to any form of post secondary training, there is one computer geek, a teacher, and a civil servant. Period.

I cannot believe that we are the last, lone outpost of the working and lower middle classes in the entire North American baby boom. Although it is hard to confirm this because neither the U.S. nor the Canadian census record information simply enough to do a quick and dirty analysis, I suspect that people like us make up a hefty proportion of the boom, if not the Boomers. So, why are we left out of consideration?

Well, pollsters and modern journalists are members of the middle and professional classes: could they be more comfortable talking to their own? I know that pollsters claim that their sampling techniques compensate for personal bias, but when was the last time you read a poll, sample or article that included non-Caucasians, working class women, unemployed men, unless they were the topic in question? Think hard, now.

Then, there is the relative openness of people to being questioned, polled or interviewed. In my various careers, I have noted that the chattering classes are well named: professional people are much more likely to fill in a questionnaire than tradespeople. Apparently, this is a common phenomenon, pollsters and social scientists know it can bias samples, and that is why the more reputable ones put so much effort into constructing samples. The press is under no such compulsion.

Finally, we tend to find what we look for. Somewhere before I became a legal adult, someone had begun to construct the Boomer stereotype and, by dint of media repetition and sloppy thinking, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nuances like working class boomers mess up a good story, so, gradually, we got marginalised, in the words of those who see themselves as the mainstream. The stereotype of the selfish, driven, Boomer professional in his/her BMW/Sports Vehicle, with his/her Reganite/Thatcherite/Mulroney politics and cell phone took over. We were left voiceless, because no one wants to hear us.

Is it the end of the world? No, although it has damaged us in our lifetimes. The mainstream Boomer has political weight in relation to his/her economic weight, and, with his/her support, governments have demonised unions, disembowelled social services, and penalised the poor and working classes for not being good Boomers. And many of us have gone along with it, put constantly on the defensive by the demands of making a living and raising a family with nothing much to rely on but ourselves. In the end, we will be as invisible to history as we are to the media and the analysts of our time.

But maybe we will have the last laugh. Because the Boomers and the boomers have something in common: we are not reproducing, and for similarly economic reasons. Boomers postponed having children to pursue careers, and then limited those children to maximise their ability to invest in them. The working and lower middle classes also had fewer kids. They could not afford many in the economic climes of the 70s (inflation), the eighties (downsizing), and the 90s (restructuring). Manufacturers went abroad, and everyone worried, but not much, because we turned into a service economy, and the downs were not forever.

But even a service economy needs workers. Suddenly, workers are getting older: young people are scarce. Already wages, as opposed to salaries, are beginning to rise. Perhaps the new century will see them skyrocket -- supply and demand, you lot, supply and demand. And this is not an area where supply side economics will help you at all.

Forget your Boomer stereotype, folks. S/he is not the future: s/he wasn't even the past. Will you be surprised when unions, or their descendants, return? Probably. Will you search for an explanation for the re-emergence of worker power and theories of social responsibility? No doubt. Will you be outraged when a new generation attacks capitalism, materialism, bureaucratic rule, personal greed? Yes. Will you wonder how these old ideologies survived in the Boomer era to adapt to new times? You bet. And, being professionals, you will run to books, or pontificate on the effect of the Internet, or declaim on millenarianism. All of which will satisfy the need for large, important explanations. All of which will be beside the point. You will miss, as your modern forebears have missed, the main menu.

We are here. We never went away.