The best of the holiday season for my wife and me was a grandson coming into the world. Medical complications with my daughter forced a longer than expected hospital stay for her, but the insurance company insisted that my grandson was as healthy as a horse and should be tossed out of the ward. The result is a bottle-fed baby. This, as everyone knows, dooms him for jail or worse.

I conducted the 6 AM feedings, during which I would contemplate the upbringing of my generation. When we were in utero, many of our mothers were throwing back G & Ts before dinner. Our emotionally distant fathers were off working and having the odd nightmare about killing Japs and Krauts. Need I say they were racists?

When we became viable fetuses, we had to suck down that goby white formula forced on the world by Big Pharmaceutical Companies, and Horror of Horrors! this often was in the midst of secondhand smoke brought on by Big Tobacco.

Sure, we got Roy Rodgers and Captain Midnight on television, but those weekly shows could hardly mitigate the daily effects of cigarettes and gin in our formative years.

Then we went to college, and got thrice weekly- and sometimes- daily doses of what might be compared to the anti-depressant Welbutrin, changing the label to Zoloft and marketing it as a stop-smoking aid. Call it History, Sociology, Comparative Religions, Theater Arts, even Engineering, it was all just an excuse for most of our professors to preach Marxism mixed with hedonism.

So what did we do? Burned bras and draft cards, and for a lot of us boys, we looked for what we had missed as infants--bare Triple D mammaries.

We were victims. It was terrible, just terrible.