Aging gracefully and becoming a radical may sound incongruous but they really aren’t in the world in which we live.

We are bombarded with images of young virile men and women, circuit parties, ads telling us how to fight aging with creams and ointments, Botox, and Viagra. We even have to look at an aging Bob Dole telling us how Viagra is helping his love life with Senator Liddy. That this passes the obscenity test for most of society, or at least they don’t object too loudly, seems amazing.

I find it really interesting to hear what the vast straight population in our nation is worrying about and what they find inappropriate. Their response to the question on what is obscene is what is making me more radical as I grow older.

Our nation was founded on the principles of freedom from religious persecution and the concept of allowing each person the right to pursue life, liberty and happiness. Our founding fathers were clear that we should separate church and state. The real obscenities in our nation that are turning me radical are our right wing religious and political leaders that now say we may only pursue those things if we do them in what they consider is the correct way. We continue to blur the lines of church and state in a direct repudiation of our founding fathers. We pass laws to fund religious institutions with federal tax money and pay for school vouchers for children to attend religious schools. We allow our political leaders to term gay marriage an offense against religion even though we have civil marriage for everyone in this nation without regard to any religious institution. We allow ourselves to be led by a cabal of old white men and their offspring that want to take away rights from everyone else. That is the true obscenity in our culture today. If radicalism can be defined as objecting to all this and speaking out forcefully, then I am becoming an aging radical and urge all other baby boomers to become one as well.

I was very impressed with the recent March for Women’s Lives held in Washington, DC. One million women, and the men that support them, came together to speak with one voice. They called on our leaders to allow women to control their own lives and their own bodies.

A true obscenity is that Gloria Steinem, at the age of 70, is re-fighting the battles she thought she won at 40. We all keep having to fight the same battles over and over because the right wing in this nation won’t allow anyone who disagrees with them to live life in peace. They will continue to try to have each of us live our lives as they see fit, and believe that their interpretation of what their god tells them must be the rule of law for all of us.

I think it’s time that the largest population block in the country, those of us aging baby boomers, speak out and take back this great nation of ours and re-direct all of our power and might into sharing the real values of America with the rest of the world. The real American values that speak of democracy, freedom and capitalism, but don’t foist those values on others, but show them how they can benefit from them.

Many of us grew up in the sixties and spouted the slogan, "Make love not war." It was both simplistic, and if followed, lots of fun. But with all that’s happening today it is again reverberating among the nation’s youth and those of us who have left our youth far behind. How do we ask the rest of the world to speak out against fanatics themselves, if we don’t speak out against our own?