Generations

I quibble a little with demographers about their delineations of “generations” and their insistence these granfalloons actually exist and that most of us as members are very much alike. I do get the concept and its occasional usefulness. I am very aware how permanently date stamped I am growing up in the fifties and sixties. I just used “granfalloon” after all.

Most social science practitioners agree roughly on these groupings:

Generation Alpha (Gen A): Approx. 2013 – mid-2020s

Generation Z (Gen Z/Zoomers): 1997 – 2012

Millennials (Gen Y): 1981 – 1996

Generation X (Gen X): 1965 – 1980

Baby Boomers (Boomers): 1946 – 1964

Silent Generation (Lucky Few): 1928 – 1945

Greatest Generation (G.I. Gen): 1901 – 1927.

They also stress a much more extended degree of homogeneity within those generations. Karl Rove and I are both Baby Boomers. And, shockingly, Elvis, Ken Kesey, Joni Mitchell, Ram Dass, and Bob Dylan are not. Enough said.

Within those groupings, there certainly are recurring traits and tendencies, and cultural cues. I concede that. I’m not a Radiohead guy. Nor a Big Swing Jazz fan. More Stan Getz and Herbie Hancock for me.

I am more than merely temporally a member of the Baby Boom. Boomers have been taking it on the chin for a decade or two lately. I remain loyally chauvinistic as to our excellence, despite that we failed so badly stopping climate change, racism, imperial militarism, and so much more. I’ll eschew the “yeah buts”. They ring hollow when our earliest Silicon Valley illuminati, who used to be counter-cultural heroes, have turned oligarchic lap dogs.

In my own family line, we span all these generations, but the Greatests and the Silents are all gone now.

One of my quibbles is that these convenient demarcations are not date certain. Boomers did not begin in 1960. More like with Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, and O’Keeffe. Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin are proto-Boomers. Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, and Joanne Kyger carried us forward to Leary, Kesey, and Tom Hayden.

But a point came when we felt certain we had found it. We knew how to fix the world. Just move out of our way. And with Obama, it was certified.

How utterly wrong we were.

But for a time, there was a sparkling chapter of our story where it looked so hopeful. I lived it. It was either visionary or hallucinatory. Perhaps both.

But they are rolling it all back, now. Full scale democracy regression is underway. And we are tired and dying. So, as Kurt Vonnegut says, it goes. The time has come when those of us who used to do battle will be gone. We will have failed to fix the world. Just like the Silents and the Greatests and those before them.

We are left staring into illness, old age, and death in the cruelest of advanced countries.

The Great Matter is at hand.

I wish you well and a soft landing.

We’ll all land.