I first heard Santana’s “Black Magic Woman” in 1970 when I was in college. Today I have the CD in my car. I never graduated to Lawrence Welk or whatever “adult” music is.
The song, one reviewer says, “is propelled by the voodoo rhythms of seduction and darkness.” Another writes that, “Were we to scour the globe in search of the most aggressively, malevolent and unmistakably evil music in existence … nothing would be found anywhere to surpass voodoo.”
Yikes! I had no idea.
The passions of our youth stick with us. Today, many of my fellow Baby Boomers are finding their way to re-hab – the acceptance of drugs by my generation held on in adulthood and has caught up with them. Boomers bring all kinds of baggage to treatment, as our story on page XX details, not least of which is rejection of au-thority.
The mores of the generations affect us in other ways. Those having babies in 1970, a let it all hang loose time, produced a generation that is today mystified that its teenagers are unabashedly using alcohol and drugs. And drunkenly driving cars into trees. And overdosing on heroin in towns that resemble the one The Beaver grew up in. And ingesting designer drugs hardly anyone has heard of that produce paranoia and suicide. You’ll find those stories in this issue.
Yet you’ll find an equal measure of hope in our pages – the power and well-being that come 
from helping others in this season of giving, and an ancient religious practice that can give all of us today a much-needed gift of rest.
And this, from a fellow Boomer: “Now and then I look longingly back at my carefree days before drinking got bad; we had some fun, we surely did. How different it might be if it had stayed consequence free. But it did not, and the time came to put away childish and ultimately very destructive things. So I did and do and turn each day over to a higher power I don’t understand and don’t feel the need to. Life is good. The view from here is excellent and getting better each and every day.”
Life is good. I’ll try to shed some childish things – maybe we Boomers can learn something after all. But when I’m alone in the car, I’ll still turn up the volume on Santana.
Terry A. Kirkpatrick
