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Saturday, March 05, 2011

The Generation Question

A friend and I were at a birthday party talking about the problems of our educational system, and he posited that the problem -- apply the cranky old man voice here -- with kids these days was that they'd been brought up by children of baby boomer parents. I disagreed with that -- I'm lumped in with the baby boom and my siblings and same-age friends have kids that are still in grade school or have just barely graduated from college and haven't started their own families yet.

A combination of a warmer-than-usual night and having eaten too much high-calorie food caused me to have some weird dreams and to wake up at 4:30 AM, leaving me to thinking about that conversation.

The whole narrative about the baby-boom generation, Generation X, Gen Y, etc., has always bugged me. For years I've watched commentators on TV talk about "baby boomers," attributing various characteristics and motivations to them as though they were some alien species -- even though these same commentators were totally oblivious to the fact they they themselves were baby boomers.

The truth is, people in my age cohort (1957) have little in common with people born 10 years earlier. I was too young to be drafted for Viet Nam (I never even had to register for the draft, though a friend born in February did), I completely missed out on the sexual revolution, school integration was a done deal when I hit junior high. I vaguely remember JFK's funeral (because Saturday morning cartoons were preempted). But I was too young for the signal events of the baby boom generation to affect me the way they affected people five or ten years older.

Perhaps as importantly, my parents were not part of the Greatest Generation. My father was 12 when WWII ended; my mother turned nine the day they bombed Hiroshima. They were alive during the Depression, but they were just little kids. Kids remember hard times, but it doesn't affect them in the same way it affects people who actually have to make the hard decisions about who eats and who doesn't. My dad was in the Army during the Korean war, but he served in Germany at the tail end of the occupation and never saw a lick of combat. My wife's dad is a little older. He joined the Navy but the war ended before he shipped out and they just released him. Like his father, my wife's oldest brother was practically on the boat, but the Viet Nam war ended before he had to serve. Yet my wife and I and all but one of our 10 siblings are lumped into the baby boom generation.

Generations are conventionally defined by demographers who care about the numbers for insurance companies and the Social Security Administration. Other people use those definitions to try to describe social trends. What matters more is what events affected you during the formative period of your personality, plus whatever effects your parents' generational cohort might have on your upbringing. The region of the country you're in is also important, because social change does not occur uniformly: school integration, for example, was a big deal in the south and many big cities, but in places like Hawaii and Wyoming it was mostly irrelevant.

And finally, you have to consider social strata and personal experience. Certain segments of society just aren't affected the same way. Black boomers in the south who lived through all that turmoil in the schools and served in Viet Nam learned a completely different set of lessons than rich white boomers who went to private schools and got college deferments to avoid Viet Nam altogether.

The idea of a "generation" is also too long a period of a time. How long is a generation? My mom was 21 when I was born. I have many friends who were 40 when their first child was born. Is a generation 20 or 40 years?

It makes more sense to segment up "generations" into the decade of your adolescence, the formative period of your life when the outside world is most likely to make an impression. The real baby boomers, born of WWII veterans coming home from the war, who went to high school and college during the 60s, had a completely different experience than people who went during the 70s, as I did. Yet I'm counted as a baby boomer, even though my dad wasn't a WWII vet and I never went to a war protest or experienced free love (dang!).

Maybe a better generational classification would use the terms of the presidents during adolescence. This is in the grand old traditions of Japan and Egypt, where the calenders were segmented up by the reigns of emperors and pharaohs.

We often look to presidents as the bellwether of the times. The mood of the country and its problems are often attributed to the president, though they're often as much victims of the times as we are.

People in their adolescence during the Eisenhower/Kennedy/Johnson years have a different set of experiences than someone who went through the Johnson/Nixon years, or the Nixon/Ford/Carter years. My parents were Roosevelt/Truman/Eisenhower kids. WWII vets were Roosevelt kids. Reagan/Bush kids grew up with "Just Say No!" while Clinton/Bush kids grew up with discussions of semen-stained dresses.

In the end, though, the concept of generations is as preposterous as the sign of the zodiac you were born under. What common characteristic do Bill Clinton, George Bush, Al Gore, Rush Limbaugh, Dennis Kucinich, Barack Obama, George Clooney, Mel Gibson, Jon Stewart, Dennis Miller, and Ann Coulter have that defines them as baby boomers?

2 comments:

juris imprudent said...

Wait a minute - you mean to say we aren't just identical/interchangeable members of a class? That sounds almost individualistic.

Mark Ward said...

I think there is something to be said about the boomlet generation. This would be the children of the baby boomers who were born in the late 70s and early 80s. That puts them as people in their late 20s and early 30s now. This would be the MJG of which I speak. Particularly in MN, these people had children in their mid 20s and we now see their little shits running around with too much power and causing havoc.

These boomlets are themselves very child like in their approach to the world and have passed that on to their kids through basic socialization. The outcome has been very negative and it's one of the main reasons why we have the problems we do.