Even if you were not around when the Beatles came to America for the first time, you have probably not missed the buzz and pageantry that has accompanied the fiftieth anniversary of that event.  Even with the Winter Olympics filling the news, it was difficult to overlook various commemorations of that day in February of 1974 when John, Paul, George, and Ringo flew into New York City.
    For the baby boomers among us, remembering the Beatles stirs up not only memories of that day but of other days of that era as well, days of protest and dissent, of cultural fulmination and challenge, of political destruction and change, days to which some baby boomers look back fondly, for others, as days of harbingers of American decline.  The Beatles seemed part and parcel of a time of immense cultural upheaval whose effects are with us to this day.
     But why the Beatles?  Much ink has been spilled on this topic, and I will not attempt to add to the pile.  I will, however, offer a wish that as the baby boomers move into their seventies and beyond, as the dreams they had for the nation and the world sink ever more completely into the political mainstream and the throes of commercialism, something akin to the excitement of the Beatles will revisit us as well.  As the world continues to writhe in an odd combination of ambition and ennui and purpose and frustration, struggling to find a foothold in the existential emptiness of the cosmos, it needs a breath of fresh air, a breath of something new, a burst of energy that will level its perceptions of capriciousness with the hope that even in the darkness of global wanderlust there is light, the light of path and explanation.  We are not alone.