Lost Cause

Four baby boomers, who did not know each other prior to school, have enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in 1967 for their freshman year. Change is in the wind. The antiwar movement is taking shape, the drug culture is growing, Jimi Hendrix and the Doors are filling the airwaves. Young people are rejecting their parent's materialism and greed. A generation is rebelling against the status quo which they see as phony and corrupt.These four boomers are no exception. They protest the war, attend a rock festival, experiment with a myriad of drugs, join the sexual revolution yet somehow manage to graduate.But what is to become of them and their counter culture values and dreams? They are baby boomers, better nurtured, better educated and better prepared for the world at large. Dr. Spock helped raise them. Their parents are soon to be dubbed the Greatest Generation but surely these four and millions like them will do so much better at shaping our future. Everyone seemed to think it was pre-ordained. But will they?One of them nicknamed Dizzy starts out helping poor people find housing in New York City. Eventually he becomes a landlord in SoHo and then finally a developer and mortgage broker. Will he have a hand in causing today's sub-prime housing crisis that almost sinks the country?The woman in the group, Janine, starts out in engineering working for a cable company where she invents a way to disable illegal cable boxes using a surge of electricity called a Silver Bullet. The defense department gets interested in this device and wants to use it to disable the vaunted Iraqi Air Defense system at the start of the first Gulf War in 1991. Will the most ardent anti-war protester of the four march off to war?Peter starts his own cable company back in the very early days of cable. He keeps it growing until it is sold in pieces to Time Warner Cable and Comcast. He takes his fortune and starts a video game company that launches at that time the biggest selling video game ever. But will the content of this game make video game history or be his undoing? Finally there is David, the narrator of this book. David starts out working for a not for profit foreign exchange student organization before switching to advertising where he winds up running the Pepsi account from their advertising agency. From there he moves to HBO. After many years at the pay TV giant he gets to head his own enterprise, a dot com company all about the movie business. With a million shares will he equal the success of his friends and find his fortune too? What they all share in common is a slow, innocent evolution into adulthood as they become the embodiment of the people they protested so strongly against in college. How can their generation succeed in this morass of greed?Boomers have overseen the longest and deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression; Made in America had great meaning in the fifties. Now we have our products made in China. Our vaunted infrastructure is in shambles; our debt is mountainous while our government seems dysfunctional. How will history remember us? Although the final chapter has not been written on the Baby Boom Generation, right now the results are fairly dismal.The lives of these four boomers may offer in a small way some insight into how this group with such high expectations and strong moral certainty, failed to deliver a better America. They all achieve some measure of greatness and wealth for themselves but at what cost?Lost Cause is the story of four Americans, their friends, lovers and spouses as they graduate from college and launch themselves in varying ways into adulthood. At the start, full of hope and high expectations they commence their journey filled along the way with love, despair, triumph, failure, war and redemption. These four are but four stories of the baby boom generation.