Willie Nelson’s sings advice to a guy whose wife has left him, “don’t start believing that your rock’n roll days are gone.” As a member of the “boomer” generation, I think the same is true of us as well. Social Security is reaching out to take hold of our lives but as Willie says our “rock’n roll days” were not left in the past.

This weekend is the 40th anniversary of Woodstock. I was not there but I wish I had been.

I can hear the chuckles through the pages of the paper. “You in the long-sleeve shirt and tie? Woodstock!”

I loved the music. I owned a VW van. If this year was 1969, I would still not have gone but today, in 2009, I think back and wonder, “why not?” With the criticism and disbelief by our elders of our generation, all we wanted was for the world to be a better place.

When our president was still a senator he said, “baby boomers need to get over themselves.” Recently, I read a story written about Senator Barack Obama by John Broder in 2007. “Mr. Obama calculates that Americans of all ages are sick of the feuding boomers and ready to turn to the generation that came of age after Vietnam, after the campus culture wars between freaks and straights ...

“Mr. Obama, who was born in 1961 and considers himself a member of the post-boomer generation, said Americans hungered for ‘a different kind of politics,’ one that moved beyond the tired ideological battles of the 1960s,” wrote Mr. Broder. I doubt Mr. Obama had any idea of just how “sick” he would get of the boomers in 2009 at all the Health Care Town Hall meetings.

In the same article, the writer wrote about the senator’s second book, “The Audacity of Hope.” “Mr. Obama,” he wrote, “is critical of the style and the politics of the ’60s, when the psyches of most of his potential rivals for the White House were formed. He writes that the politics of that era were highly personal, burrowing into every interaction between youth and authority and among peers. The battles moved to Washington in the 1990s and endure today, he says.”

Yep! That was us ... “burrowing into every interaction between youth and authority....” We still have a problem with “authority” and it is still directed mainly at Washington. This time, it is not us in our youth but us as old folks, but we have not forgotten how to burrow. Steve Kluger wrote a column this week in USA Today of “The Aging of Aquarius.” He said of Mr. Obama’s thinking when he was a senator, “Pride dies hard when your leaders call you irrelevant.” And to today’s generation, he writes this reminder, “... it takes more than an iPod plugged into one ear, a cell phone glued to the other and a sense of entitlement that doesn’t require a struggle first.”

Remember this, and Willie sang it best: “Diamonds are forever and these old cars keep rolling on. And all those ‘I love you forevers’ they’re just words that can’t be depended on ... cause nothin’ lasts forever but old Fords and a natural stone.”