Growing Pains At 40

By Evan Thomas

When Brian Weiss graduated from UCLA in 1968, he was portrayed in beard and mortarboard on the cover of TIME for a story that described the nation's college graduating class as "the most conscience-stricken, moralistic, and, perhaps, the most promising" in U.S. history. As an editor of UCLA's Daily Bruin, Weiss gained notoriety by writing a column calling the Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, "a liar." With the breathtaking cockiness of his class and era, Weiss breezily declared, "I can see myself as an excellent U.S. President."

Today Weiss's beard is flecked with gray, and he is less sanguine about his future. Since bouncing around academe for six years, he has held a variety of jobs, including a brief stint as executive editor of Playgirl magazine. Still single, he is a free-lance writer and editor living in a rented apartment in Santa Monica, Calif. He has an enviable view of the ocean, but what he really wants, he says, "is to settle down and have a family." He feels funny about turning 40 this year. "Middle age sounds a bit strange because many of us haven't attained the goals that our parents attained at that age. I mean, how can you be an adult when you don't own a house?"

The generation that wanted to stay forever young is entering middle age. This year the leading edge of the Baby Boom, the 76 million Americans born in the fecund years between 1946 and 1964, reaches mid-life. Former White House Wunderkind David Stockman and Actor Sylvester Stallone (Rocky, Rambo) turn 40 in 1986. So do ex-Mouseketeer Carl ("Cubby") O'Brien, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency Director Kenneth Adelman, Real Estate Mogul Donald Trump and Comedian Gilda Radner. At the tail end of the boom, the last members of the vast litter are graduating from college this spring and stepping into a not notably waiting world. Members of a generation that has made a pastime out of prolonged adolescence are being forced by the biological clock to face up to the responsibilities of adulthood--to their parents, to their children, to one another.

Middle age is only the latest milestone for a generation that has been relentlessly scrutinized, dissected and classified. The Baby Boomers were the Spock generation, the Now generation, the Woodstock generation, the Me generation. Nor were they exactly shy about all the attention. Through high times and hard times, no other group of Americans has ever been quite so noisily self-conscious.

Better educated (twice as likely to go to college as their parents), idealistic and assertive, Baby Boomers were expected to remake the world. "We wanted to change it all, to do it our way," says Senator Albert Gore, 38, Democrat of Tennessee. In some ways the Baby Boomers have indeed turned old values upside down, revolutionizing the role of women and transforming American taste, music and sexual mores. "Because of their numbers and their approach to life, Baby Boomers are setting standards for the rest of us," says Jane Fitzgibbon, director of research development for the Ogilvy & Mather ad agency. But in other areas, a lot of shadows have fallen between the dream and the reality.

Demographers somewhat inelegantly refer to the Baby Boom generation as "the pig in the python," a moving bulge that distorts and distends everything around it as it rumbles through the stages of life. Locked together in a crowded race, many Boomers have learned to use their elbows. The most outspoken members retain a kind of generational arrogance epitomized by Stockman's egregious assertion in his newly published memoirs (The Triumph of Politics; Harper & Row) that the so-called Reagan Revolution was in fact not Reagan's: "It was mine."

But the Baby Boomers' great expectations have been diminished by a series of rude social and economic shocks, from the Viet Nam War to double-digit inflation. Although the sheer size of the generation provided a sense of solidarity and power, it ultimately proved to be the Baby Boomers' bane. There were simply too many of them to maintain in the style to which millions became accustomed as affluent children of the '50s and '60s. Egalitarianism might have been the avowed ethic of their youth, but competition was, and still is, the harsh reality. Many bravely refuse to admit it, yet the fact is that many Baby Boomers do not live as well as their parents, and may never.

The generation idealized by Madison Avenue for its superior muscle tone and free-spending habits is ruefully discovering that, contrary to the promise of the ads, it cannot have it all. Not only that, long absorbed in themselves, the Baby Boomers are a generation that has avoided or postponed commitment to others. Many have little loyalty to their employers and less to political leaders or ideas. Partly because of the economic squeeze, they get married later and have children later. They also divorce more than their parents. Quite a few, it seems, are destined for an awfully lonely old age.

As they moodily listen to golden oldies, the members of the Big Chill generation sometimes seem to prefer looking back to looking forward. They often long for a simpler and dreamier time of dates at the drive-in, before real life intruded on their teenage idylls. Yet, as demonstrated in a poll for TIME by Yankelovich, Clancy, Shulman, Baby Boomers have not lost the American birthright of optimism about the future. While they may not live quite as well as their parents, a surprising number think they do, and most feel they have more freedom to choose their own life-styles. In the mid-1980s, as interest rates drop back down to single digits and the work force expands to accommodate their vast numbers, the Boomers may in fact have renewed reason to hope.

It is not quite fair to accuse them, as some have done, of betraying their youthful ideals. Though Boomers have shaken the institutions of family and work, in some ways society is better for the jolts. Women have struggled to end the condescending notion of "women's work," and they have succeeded in winning a measure of equality at home and on the job. Men have had to learn new jobs like diaper changing, and more fathers actually know their children. Baby Boomers remain wary of institutions in general and Government in particular, and their reformist energy surfaces in grass-roots movements aimed at curing everything from drunken driving to the arms race. If some Boomers have resignedly become the organization men and women they once mocked, others have unleashed innovative and entrepreneurial energies that in the long run may provide enough growth and opportunity for them to realize their dreams after all.

From the first, the Baby Boomers were accustomed to instant gratification. Often brought up in shiny new suburban enclaves of middle-class comfort, they were doted on by parents who were counseled by Dr. Spock to dispense with the rigidities of traditional child rearing. Their surrogate parent was the television set. Parked in front of the glowing blue tube for an average of four hours a day, a quarter of their waking life, Boomers became the first video generation. Bored? Just change the channel. Hopping from one instant fad to another--from Davy Crockett coonskin caps to Hula-Hoops --they moved as a single mass, conditioned to think alike and do alike. Trendiness became a generational hallmark; from pot to yoga to jogging, they embraced the In thing of the moment and then quickly chucked it for another.

Maybe, like most other adolescents, they would have rebelled anyway. But the Viet Nam War--and, more precisely, the draft--guaranteed what was called, and what in some ways became, a revolution. Behind the barricades on campus grew up youth ghettos, strange worlds where adult rules were suspended and whirl was king. In reaction to parental values deemed empty and materialistic, a flamboyant and vocal minority known as the Woodstock generation preached rock music, free love and heightened consciousness. Mostly they celebrated youth. "We ain't never, never gonna grow up," yelled Yippie Leader Jerry Rubin. "We're gonna be adolescents forever!"

Rubin was already 30 when he was posturing as a Peter Pan of the left. By 1980 he was a $36,000-a-year securities analyst on Wall Street declaring that "money is power." At least Rubin was able to land a well-paid job. In the harsh economic climate of the 1970s, Baby Boomers discovered that the prosperity many took for granted as teenagers was hardly a given in the grownup world. The shock was particularly tough for the silent majority of Baby Boomers who had quietly supported the war and, when drafted, dutifully gone off to fight. The Viet Nam veterans returned to find little gratitude or employment opportunity at home. "I learned how to fight while they learned how to make money," says Vet Stuart Bridenball, who drifted in and out of jobs after winning a pair of Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart in the Army.

The Baby Boom, says Richard C. Michel of the Urban Institute, was hit by a quadruple whammy: inflation, fierce competition for jobs, exorbitant housing costs and the recessions of the '70s and early '80s. "They grew up with the expectation that they would live better than their parents no matter what they did," says Michel. "The 1970s ended that. It was a time of tremendous economic disillusionment for many people." Between 1973 and 1983 the median real income of a typical young family headed by a person ages 25 to 34 fell by 11.5%. In the 1970s, for the first time in history, the economic value of a college degree declined. An awful lot of physics majors found themelves driving cabs.

There is, in the voices of Baby Boomers whose higher education was not rewarded with higher earnings, a certain bewilderment. "I certainly expected to live as well as my parents," says Audrey Burnam, 35, a research psychologist at UCLA who lives in a rented two-bedroom apartment while her father, who works at a copper smelter in Arizona and never graduated from high school, owns his own three-bedroom house. "I certainly expected to be able to afford a home. I am comforted," she sighs, "that this is happening to a whole generation."

In the '70s and '80s, real estate became an obsession with the Baby Boomers. Demand outstripped supply: while new housing starts rose by only 11% in the 1970s, the total of outstanding mortgage loans tripled. Those who rented in that inflationary decade watched helplessly as the price of homes took off. People born late in the generation found that home prices were out of sight even before they entered the housing market. The tales were particularly grim in fashionable high-priced areas like Manhattan, where would-be yuppies desperate for affordable housing have even moved, VCRs and all, into rundown "single-room occupancy" hotels, sharing the bathroom down the hall with strangers.

Such cocktail-circuit horror stories were accompanied by panicky fears that the American dream of home ownership was becoming illusory. In fact, statistics show that by scraping and borrowing, most Baby Boom families eventually managed to buy at least a modest dwelling. In 1983 nearly half of all young families owned their homes, about the same proportion as a decade earlier. Many a down payment came from parents; Rutgers University Housing Economist George Sternlieb quips that Baby Boomers have popularized a new form of G.I. financing: "G.I. as in Good In-laws."

In many cases, young couples were able to jump into the spiraling real estate market only because wives went to work: by 1983 more than 65% of all first-time home buyers needed two incomes to make payments on their mortgages. In 1949 the average 30-year-old male homeowner spent 14% of his earnings on mortgage payments; by 1983 the proportion had climbed to 44%. For some the sacrifice has meant forgoing additional children. Tom Cray, 36, of Rochester, and his wife Jean, 41, would like to have a second child, but they are not sure their two salaries will stretch to cover the mortgage and two children. Says Cray: "It's depressing to think human life has a price tag."

Advertisements have extolled the rise of the two-salary couple with educated tastes, discretionary income and the willingness to spend it. The image does not square with the facts: the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that young families in 1983 spent 18% less of their budget on home furnishings and 32% less on clothes than young families in 1973. There is, to be sure, a so-called superclass of high-living yuppies, as young urban professional Baby Boomers were dubbed by Syndicated Columnist Bob Greene in early 1983. But according to the U.S. Census Bureau, only about 4.5 million Americans between the ages of 25 and 40 make more than $35,000 a year. More than six times as many--some 30 million Baby Boomers--make less than $15,000 a year. "I see a lot of people using their credit cards and getting into debt," says Mern Wildcat, 30, who has an eight-year-old son and works on an assembly line for the King Radio corporation in Olathe, Kans. "People want a home, two cars and all the new technologies, like VCRs, but it's hard to afford it all."

Though the Baby Boomers have spurred the growth of the black middle class, there are as well an increasing number of unwed black mothers in the Baby Boom generation who must support their children on a pittance. "When you talk about two-parent families," says Frank Levy of the Urban Institute, "blacks have made gains in closing the gap on whites." The median income for a black family headed by a married couple ages 35 to 44 was $29,908 in 1983, not far behind the $35,600 average for whites. But the 43% of black households headed by women ages 35 to 44 earned an average of only $10,480.

Sacrifice and lowered expectations do not come naturally to Baby Boomers. "You deserve a break today," proclaimed a famous McDonald's commercial, and the Baby Boomers believed it. The Depression-era work-and-scrimp ethic that drove their parents was not passed along. Inflation is at least partly to blame, says MONEY Managing Editor Landon Jones, author of Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan). Spiraling costs made savings seem futile and fostered a sensibility of buy now, pay later.

There is a hint of despair to the yuppies' avid consumerism. "If you can't afford a home, you want the best espresso machine you can buy," observes Los Angeles Psychologist Shelley Taylor, 39. Manhattan Ad Executive Julianne Hastings, 39, wears designer clothes and jets off to the Caribbean for vacations. But she lives in an apartment "the same size as the bedroom I grew up in," and confesses, "I don't know anyone who saves now. Probably we're foolish and will all end up on the poor farm."

She may be right. By the year 2030, when the Baby Boomers will have reached old age, 21.2% of the population will be over 65, compared with 12% today. After a life of jogging, aerobics and Lean Cuisine, they will live longer than any generation ever, but who will support them? Providing pensions, health care and housing for this wrinkled cohort "will be as great a challenge as any the nation has ever faced," state Alan Pifer and Lydia Bronte of the Carnegie Corporation's Aging Society Project. Pifer, 65, predicts one major change: the Boomers will sweep away the tradition of retiring at 65 and continue to play a strong role in the workplace. "They are not going to let themselves be put on a shelf," he says.

Employers have already despaired of the Baby Boomers' unwillingness to serve their time as modestly paid drudges in return for future reward and advancement. Certainly, young workers do not hesitate to demand more interesting work and more flexible hours (although, suspicious as ever of large and impersonal institutions, they have proved notably reluctant to join labor unions to press their demands). "We have less loyalty to companies, and we put up with a lot less than our parents," concedes Rick Garnitz, 37, who quit his job as a marketing manager at Xerox and started his own life-planning firm in Atlanta.

Rather than fight the corporate grind, many Baby Boomers have simply moved on to the next job. "People are less wedded to the institution of a career," says Harvard Professor Robert Reich, 39, who was profiled in TIME's cover story on the class of '68, and in 1984 became a prominent economic adviser to Democratic candidates. "Almost all of my friends are doing different things from five years ago, and five years ago, they were doing different things from five years before. Success today is more a subjective condition based in your own head than an objective condition established by society." It remains to be seen how Boomers will define success in middle age, when job switching is a risky business and those who stay put are more likely to earn real responsibility and power.

The Baby Boomers value entrepreneurship over climbing the career ladder. Their hero may be Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple Computer who made a fortune with personal computers and then was forced to resign when he made moves to start a whole new enterprise, Next, Inc. "It's the idea that you can do it in the garage and wag your finger at IBM and get away with it," says Landon Jones. "And then when the company gets too institutionalized and oppressive, you start over."

The beau ideal of the Baby Boomer corporations may be People Express, the cut-rate airline run largely by Boomers in their 20s and 30s in an atmosphere free of a bureaucratic chain of command. But as the work ethic of the Baby ; Boomers collides with accepted corporate norms, and as the younger generation begins to move into top jobs in tradition-bound companies, it bodes an interesting tug-of-war. Will Baby Boomers mold corporations? Or will it be the other way around?

The greatest change that Baby Boomers have brought to the workplace is, in a word, women. Today, 53% of the work force is female. There have always been many women who worked, of course, but increasingly women are breaking out of the old "pink ghetto" and moving into areas that were once exclusively male preserves--in law firms, doctors' offices and the executive suite. Many are continuing to work after they marry. Both husband and wife work in two-thirds of young married couples ages 25 to 34, up from 47% in 1973.

Female emancipation may be the one great achievement of the Baby Boomers. All sorts of kooky notions on the protest generation's agenda, from communal living to extolling "mind-expanding" drug use, have mercifully become memories. But women's liberation, minus its early stridency, has become the status quo. "We were the pioneers," says Reich, "to take seriously the notion that women are equal. That's the social change that's lasted." In TIME's poll of 30- to 40-year-olds, the legacy of the late '60s and '70s that earns the highest approval rating (82%) is simply "changes in the role of women."

But the women's revolution has hardly been won without cost. The clash of children and career can force a painful choice. When Los Angeles Lawyer Kimberly Shaller, 29, had her second baby, her "leave of absence turned into retirement. I used to think I could have both, but now I feel sort of misled." Yet many women cannot afford to quit. "Wives have been working because their families need the money," says University of Wisconsin Business School Professor Dowell Myers. "Most women are still working pink collar. They're not in a career. They're in it because they need the bucks."

For many working supermoms, a psychic guilt tax is deducted from the paycheck. After visiting the day-care-center manager who would look after her newborn child, UCLA's Burnam lamented, "I was really depressed to think that this woman would spend more time with my child than I would." After putting in the kinds of long hours required to succeed in almost any profession, working mothers return home wondering how they will muster enough energy to give their children more than just a good-night kiss. It helps that more men are willing to lend a hand with housework and child rearing. Even so, men are far more likely than women to have it both ways, both flat-out career and kids. Anthropologist Patricia McBroom, who teaches women's studies at Rutgers, cites research that shows that 60% of executive women have no children, vs. only 3% of their male counterparts.

The men who do juggle a child in one hand and a career in the other can hardly be blamed for feeling a touch of envy toward their fathers, whose role as sole breadwinner entitled them to dinner on the table and uninterrupted sleep at night. "We can't be pioneers without looking wistfully over our shoulders at jobs that seemed easier, when career paths were clear, when women were subservient, when men could commandeer the heights of established power," says Reich with a wry grin. "There is some real tension in our generation over this phenomenon."

Whether by choice or from economic necessity, the Baby Boomers produced in the late 1970s a baby bust. In 1976, when the first Baby Boomers hit 30, the total fertility rate in the U.S. dropped to a historic low of 1.7 children per married woman, less than half that posted by their parents. Furthermore, as many as half the generation's children will wind up in broken homes. As Boomers married in the 1970s, the national divorce rate doubled. For the youngest age group, the divorce rate tripled in a decade. Many women--up to 10% of all female Baby Boomers--are choosing never to marry at all. Indeed, the word spinster has lost its stigma and largely vanished from the vocabulary.

The disturbing by-product of the Baby Boomers' quest for personal freedom, for what the "human potential" gurus call self-realization, has been lack of commitment to others. In the 1979 movie Kramer vs. Kramer, Meryl Streep, playing the mother who wants to see more in life than a diaper rash, writes her young son, "I have gone away because I must find something interesting to do for myself in the world. Everybody has to and so do I. Being your Mommy was one thing, but there are other things too." The fact that she comes back later to try to reclaim her son only makes the movie a more wrenching testimonial to the conflicts that racked the Boom generation as it coped with adulthood in the '70s.

If their parents tended to regard happiness as an almost incidental by- product of living by the accepted values of hard work and family obligation, the Baby Boomers have relentlessly pursued happiness as an end in itself. Few found it in the dizzying array of self-help movements like est or cults like Synanon and Scientology, which proliferated like weeds in the 1970s. Nor was the sexual revolution the answer. "Casual encounters and open sex left most Baby Boomers with a sense of emptiness, of personal isolation and loneliness," says University of Chicago Psychologist Froma Walsh. The spread of herpes and AIDS in the mid-'80s further diminished wandering lust.

Today many Baby Boomers have renounced the lonely pursuit of self. Increasingly, they are groping to find a sense of worth in selflessness. The gurus and cult leaders are hard up for new recruits these days; the divorce rate appears even to have slipped a little. Though church attendance rates have not increased noticeably, some Baby Boomers speak of a "new spiritualism" and grope, often privately and quietly, to regain the faith they lost in the secular '60s and '70s. In the '80s the Baby Boomers are not exactly generating a new Baby Boom of their own--the total fertility rate remains a low 1.8 births per woman. But because of the sheer number of Boomers who have finally decided to procreate, parks are full of strollers again, and many neighborhood schools, darkened during the baby bust of the '70s, are once more crowded and noisy.

For men, playing Mr. Mom has meant more than learning the way to Toys R Us. They have discovered, somewhat to their surprise, the private joys of daily child rearing that women have always known. In the Yankelovich poll for TIME, 63% of 30- to 40-year-olds stated that "raising children is a main satisfaction in my life." Revering and caring for children has served as an antidote to some of the egocentric tendencies of the Me generation. "We were taught that we were the most important people in the world," says Columnist Greene, who became a father at age 35. "If you have a child, someone is more important than you."

Baby Boomer parents, it must be admitted, can be almost as obsessive about children as they were about sex and still are about real estate. Romanticizing their little creations, they have scorned traditional names like Bob and Mary Sue in favor of more precious monikers like Justin and Kimberly. Keenly aware of the terrible competition that they had faced for college admission and jobs, Baby Boomer parents often start their children on absurdly premature cram courses for the college boards, turning out pint-size superachievers stuffed with scientific nostrums and violin lessons. It would be no small irony, of course, if their children responded to the pressure by turning into adolescent rebels--just like their parents.

Now that the Baby Boomers are beginning to create families, will they begin to care for others as well? Will they undertake the obligations of citizenship as well as parenthood? It is hard to look at the Boomers, moving back to the suburbs they once described as soulless, struggling to pay off their inflated mortgages, and detect any ground swell of public activism. The Boomers themselves admit this: in the TIME Yankelovich poll, 69% of 30- to 40- year-olds said they do not feel that they are as politically active as they should be. Yet small, perhaps telling signs of renewed social conscience are abroad in the land. The personal odyssey of Joyce Maynard, 32, is one:

Maynard was noticed before she turned 20. A precocious New York Times Magazine article she wrote in 1972 titled "An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life" made her a minor figure of her generation and led to a frenetic reporting job on the Times after a year at Yale. Only a year later, however, she fled the bright lights and big city and moved to New Hampshire. Married, living in an old farmhouse at the end of a dirt road, she began baking pies and making babies. "I dropped out," she says. "I wanted to do nothing but raise three children, make a good life for them and preserve their safety and sanity as we moved into the 21st century." But three months ago, she says with a sigh, "the (Federal) Government announced that it has chosen my town as a proposed nuclear waste dump site."

Now, says Maynard, "I do nothing but talk about nuclear waste all day long. I have come to realize there is no way to tend just one's own backyard. There is no escape, even in New Hampshire." Her children are not always understanding of Mom's new obsession. "On my daughter's eighth birthday," she reports, "the first thing she said when she got up was 'Mommy, can I please not hear the word nuclear all day?' They see I'm not baking pies, the house is looking a mess, but I'm a different kind of mother now. I have to be a mother and a good citizen."

There is a social conscience to be tapped in the Baby Boomers, asserts Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, 42. "But at the moment it is nascent. It * has yet to be rekindled." Not a few politicians are casting about for ways to fan the embers of Boomer activism. The under-40 generation represents some 60% of the electorate, and a leader who wins its allegiance could easily land in the White House. "If you could find the right formula," says Senator Gore, "you'd unlock an awful lot of energy."

But what is the right formula? Not everyone is threatened by a nuclear waste dump in his backyard. The Baby Boomers remain exceedingly leery of conventional politicians. Though Eugene McCarthy's "children's crusade" helped speed Lyndon Johnson's departure from the White House in 1969, the slow wind down of the Viet Nam War and the depressing revelations of Watergate, not to mention images of assassinated heroes burned into their brainpans by TV, turned off many Baby Boomers to politics just as they were reaching voting age. Voter participation among Baby Boomers remained well below the national average into the 1980s and only caught up in the presidential election in 1984.

Like the rest of the population, the Baby Boomers, particularly the younger ones, voted heavily for Ronald Reagan. It may seem peculiar that the Now generation went for a 73-year-old conservative. But Reagan said what they wanted to hear: boundless opportunity is theirs for the taking. To a generation pinched by high inflation and low wages in the '70s, the President's feel-good message was reassuring. Walter Mondale, on the other hand, came across to many Baby Boomers as the very sort of old-style, special- interest-pandering politician they distrusted.

The G.O.P. looked at the 1984 results and prayed for a substantial realignment that would make young people lifelong Republicans. The Democrats were heartened that 30- to 40-year-olds were slightly less likely than other age groups to vote Republican. But the fact is that while 38% of 30- to 40- year-olds told the TIME Yankelovich poll that they are Democrats and 24% said they are Republicans, 38% called themselves independents. "The Baby Boomer vote is never going to be in either party's hip pocket," says Republican Political Consultant Lee Atwater. Their political views tend to be a mix: they are conservative on economic matters and distrustful of Big Government. Yet they are liberal on social issues like women's rights and abortion, and wary of the moral preachments of the New Right. Nor has the generation that marched for civil rights entirely lost its zeal for racial equality. Though Boomers & oppose strict quotas in hiring, they favor affirmative action to overcome racial discrimination.

Some of the most politically active Baby Boomers are true-believer conservatives. "When I went to college, all my professors were insipid liberals," says John Buckley, 29, who went from being a rock critic for the Soho News in Manhattan to conservative Congressman Jack Kemp's press secretary. "The only way to inject any energy was to rebel from the right." Says Peggy Noonan, 35, who voted for George McGovern in 1972 but now writes speeches for President Reagan: "We are idealists without illusions." Of course, many more Baby Boomers--indeed, the large and silent majority--show little or no sign of social activism or ideological commitment and remain cynical about the promises of politicians.

Even so, Baby Boomers can be found quietly agitating for change in small, direct ways. "They are on the local school boards, the neighborhood committees, the grass-roots movements," says Atwater. A striking example of grass-roots success is Mothers Against Drunk Driving, founded by Candy Lightner, 40, after her teenage daughter was killed by an intoxicated motorist in 1980. MADD is largely responsible for toughening the drunken-driving laws and raising the drinking age in 38 states. Arlene Joye, 35, took a $15,000 pay cut when she left her job as a director of a pay-TV subscription service in Los Angeles to work full time for MADD as an executive assistant. "I take so much from life," she says. "Now I finally feel I'm putting something back."

Still making a social statement out of rock 'n' roll, Baby Boomers in huge numbers flock to concerts like Live Aid and Farm Aid. "Instead of running for office to abolish hunger, they go out and feed somebody," says University of Massachusetts Public Service Professor Ralph Whitehead Jr. "Baby Boomers are highly skeptical of institutional tools. They believe in J.F.D.I.--just frigging do it." And even if charity concerts have not proved to be the most efficient or speedy way to channel money to the poor and helpless, for many Baby Boomers joining hands and swaying to the music of a megarally evokes the good old days, when it was possible to have a social conscience and fun at the same time.

As the Baby Boomers reach the age of responsibility not only for their families but for the country, their leaders are disconcertingly difficult to identify. The heroes of their youth, Kennedy and King, are gone, and their charisma and idealism sometimes seem to have died with them. When the Princeton class of '69 was asked ten years later whom they most admired, the leading choice was "Nobody." To be sure, the generation has produced a few able young politicians like Senator Gore, but he is still very much a junior Senator in a minority party, hardly a national figure. The presidential aspirants who most openly court the Baby Boom voters--Democrat Gary Hart and Republican Jack Kemp--are 49 and 50 years old, respectively. It would not be surprising if a Baby Boom leader emerged from outside the political realm, but none pops to mind--even if Bruce Springsteen might carry the young blue collar vote.

Yet it is worth remembering that as John F. Kennedy turned 40, he was still a somewhat callow politician being maneuvered by his domineering father. When Kennedy was elected President in 1960, he was 43, and his generation, the Baby Boomers' parents, was just coming to power.

The Best and the Brightest of Kennedy's day fought World War II to save the possibilities of freedom, helped rebuild war-ravaged Europe as a bulwark of the West and launched the world's free-market economies on the greatest surge of growth ever. Even if the tragedy of Viet Nam is entered on the debit side, this record of achievement remains a challenge for their children to match.

Perhaps, after the tumult of the '60s and the restless hard times of the '70s, the Baby Boomers will be more realistic, more tolerant, more wary but less dogmatic than they were in their headstrong youth. There is among the survivors of the Viet Nam War, both those who fought and those who protested at home, a large body of "wounded healers," says John Wheeler, president of the Project on the Viet Nam Generation. Though scarred, they have been strengthened and made wiser by their ordeal, he believes.

The Baby Boomers always wanted choices. Now they are a generation that can choose America's future. The decisions, like so many faced by Baby Boomers, will be hard. But as they dreamily insert the video of The Big Chill into their VCRs at night, they may once again find inspiration from the Rolling Stones tune that serves as the movie's anthem. As the song says, they can't always get what they want. But if they try, they just might find, they get what they -- and those who depend on them -- need.

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With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington, Cathy Booth/New York and Jon D. Hull/Los Angeles