Generation Wars

These days people of every generation are vilifying other generations. Generation X is a bunch of ne'er-do-wells who were still living with mom at age 35, Millenials are coddled brats with helicoptering mothers, and Baby Boomers are self-involved ex-hippies who are going to destroy the entire economy by sucking Social Security dry.

Atlantic's The Wire has the definitive guide to the generations. Well, as definitive as you can get.

Because, honestly, all this stuff about generations is nonsense. Take, for example, the Greatest Generation. Ostensibly these are the people who suffered through the Depression, fought WWII and saved the world for democracy. But that generation is defined as ending in 1946. 1946! How could someone born after WWII ended have done spit to save to the world for democracy?

For that matter, how could anyone born after 1928 contributed in any material way to our victory over the Axis? My dad, born in 1933, was 12 when the war ended. He joined the army in the early 1950s but spent the Korean War in Germany. This Washington Post story does a better job of splitting up the generations, calling my father's cohort the Silent Generation.

It's the same with the Baby Boom: it's really at least two different cultural cohorts. Supposedly, it's characterized by the anti-war, free-love, acid-dropping turn-on-tune-in-drop-out, women's lib and civil rights movements of the 1960s. I was born in 1957, smack in the middle of the demographic bubble. But I was 12 when the 1960s ended. All that counter-culture stuff was completely alien to me.

The idea that the tens of millions of people born during the same 20-year period all have some kind of personality traits in common is even sillier than the idea that everyone born in the same month shares the same horoscope. George W. Bush and Bill Clinton were both born in 1946, but that's about all they have in common.

What's salient about generations is not what year you're born, but what cultural events affected you when you were impressionable. But it's more complicated than that, because kids of different ages are impressed by different things.

Kids 5-12 will be influenced by things such as video games, the space program, cuddly animals, dinosaurs, fire trucks, and so on. Wars in far-off lands, sex, booze and drugs will never enter their minds -- if their parents are doing their jobs right. Kids 13-17 will be affected by the opposite sex, booze and drugs because those things concern them directly. Eighteen- to 25-year-olds are leaving home and entering the wider world, but are still quite impressionable, and are now being influenced by greater concerns like fighting in wars, earning a living, taxes, raising children of their own, politics and so on.

Your parents also affect your development: two children born in 1957, one to a 45-year-old WWII vet and the other to a 17-year-old single mother, are going to have completely different influences.

Even where you live can make a big difference: social trends starting in California or New York may take 10 or 15 years to reach Memphis or Topeka.

In my case the sexual revolution and drug culture of the 1960s completely passed me by, but the space program and moon landing on the 1960s captured the interest of a 5- to 12-year-old. My politically formative years were the 1970s and early 80s, the tail end of the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Oil Crisis, the Iranian hostage crisis, and Iran-Contra. According to this website, that puts me squarely in Generation X. I was born at the height of the Baby Boom, but culturally I'm a Gen-Xer.

The problem is is trying to define generations as lasting 20 years, apparently conforming to the active reproductive years of the human female. But people don't fall into neat little 20-year boxes. They're being born constantly.

If we're going to talk meaningfully about generations, we have to give up the idea of all parents belonging to one generation and the kids belonging to the next. Instead we have to talk about smaller cultural cohorts that may not be the same length. Thus, the turmoil of the 60s lasted about 10 or 12 years, but the relative stasis of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s endured for almost 30 years.

I would divvy up the cultural cohorts this way:

The Greatest Generation was between 1910 and 1928. They came of age during the Depression and fought in WWII. These folks are mostly gone now.

My father's generation lived through the Depression as children; they knew deprivation, but not the desperation that comes with being unable to provide for your children. They came of age during the post-War years, the Korean War, and the height of the Cold War, when in the 40's and 1950s Russia and the United States tested nuclear weapons every other week and people were building bomb shelters in their back yards.

The cultural cohort that corresponds to what we call the Baby Boom were children in the 1950s and teenagers in the 1960s, born from, say, 1942 to 1955. They were affected by the Vietnam war and the sexual revolution and all the other perils of that turbulent time.

My cultural cohort was born between 1952 and 1970, people who came of age in the relatively calm times of 70s and 80s. I'd call it the Computer Cohort. This includes Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, the people who created the personal computer and made computers an integral part of everyday life during the 1980s. This generation were the shock troops in the fiscalization of our economy, where making money became more important than making things.

The next cohort came of age in the boom years of the late 80's and 1990s, when communism fell, America was unquestionably the king of the world, we could snap our fingers and the world would help us take down a dictator like Saddam Hussein and the Internet became widely accessible.

The next cohort comes of age in the 2000s and 2010s, their nights haunted by dreams of 9/11 and their days dogged by endless war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Internet becomes omnipresent and almost omniscient; this generation is the first to be electronically tethered to their peers all their lives.

We blame the children of each generation for their peculiar characteristics, but their parents and grandparents created the world that shaped them.

Baby Boomers are criticized for all getting old at the same time, putting a drain on the Social Security system and forcing their children and grandchildren to pay for their retirements. But they didn't ask to be born, and they had nothing to do with increases in Social Security payments, which are tied to inflation through automatic cost of living adjustments put in place by legislation Congress passed in the 1970s, when most Baby Boomers weren't old enough to be elected to Congress and many weren't even old enough to vote.

Generation X is criticized for living with their parents, but their elders tanked the economy, forcing them into that ignominy. And their parents let them stay in their basements. Millennials are castigated for constantly texting and playing video games, or their parents coming to to job interviews with them. But it's their parents and grandparents who built the Internet, created microelectronics, cellphones and wi-fi, and go to the job interviews with their kids.

In so many ways, it's the parents who are responsible for the way their kids turn out. Yet we always blame the kids for our mistakes.

If you look closely at the criticisms leveled at every generation, they're always the same: those people are selfish, self-involved jerks who don't give a rip about my problems. All of this boils down to the same old-man rant: kids these days just ain't got no respect.

And get off my lawn!