Sarah’s post about rebellion made me feel sorry for the children of the Baby Boomers. The rebels of the 60s and 70s had it easy in so many ways, not the least of which was how easy it was for them to rebel:
What you are looking at in fact – with the exception of some goth kids and others who do get treated like pariahs – are not the rebels but the good kids. They are doing what mommy and daddy want. They are dressing as their teachers expect them to. They are repeating the opinions and thoughts that are approved of.
Of course, realizing this requires awareness on the part of the older generation. It requires realizing you’ve grown older. You’re the parents now. And both of these are hampered by the fact that the generation that came of age in the sixties was such a massive demographic lump it distorted everyone’s perception and also by the fact we’re a commercial society (not that there is anything wrong with that. No, really.) Catering to such a large demographic group changed the culture as all the advertisers tried to appeal to it, at each of its milestones. (I swear if I see one more add for a retirement program of some sort starting with ‘we’re the most important generation’, I’m going to be violently sick.)
This means the culture froze several concepts, like “behaving like the young people of the sixties is what being young means”, like “speaking truth to power”, like “not selling out to the man.”
Only, to quote the cell phone commercial – at some point you have to realize you ARE the man. And that everyone you think is speaking truth to power is – in fact – appeasing you and catering to your need to feel young and relevant. (Oh, don’t feel bad. It is a perfectly normal reaction to growing older. Fifty is getting close enough for me to eyeball – only two years away – and it’s forcing me to realize that not only am I not going to live forever, but that I’m the grown up, now.)
Of course most of your kids are going to do what you want. Most kids are good kids and well behaved. Outliers are called so because they are. It was arguably easier for the boomers to rebel because their demographic was so vast.
“It was arguably easier for the boomers to rebel because their demographic was so vast.” Their children have it hard, because they want to please mom and dad, who often rebelled.
It’s hard for me to see myself as “THE MAN,” as I never had kids. So it startled me the other night to find myself regarded as a sort of adult authority figure.
I have never really felt comfortable being part of “the” Baby Boom Generation, for it spans a period of nearly twenty years. (1945-1964.)
Which isn’t fair because Generation X (1964 to no later than 1982); Generation Y, (1982 to sometime in the 1990s) and now Z (sometime in the 90s to the early 2000s) all get to have shorter time intervals. Why should the Baby Boomers have to drag on and on in a way that other generations don’t? It would be one thing if it were just because of the demographic blip (the “pig in the python”), but there are huge differences between people born in the real post WWII period (who grew up in the 50s and became adults in the 60s), and those like me who grew up in the 60s and reached adulthood in the 70s. Or those like Barack Obama and Sarah Hoyt, who grew up in the 70s and reached adulthood in the 80s. These are vastly different periods in which to grow up, and this is reflected in the major differences in the people who grew up in them.
Commentators have taken note of these differences, and proposed adding a sub-group within the Baby Boom generation called “Generation Jones.”
Generation Jones is a term coined by Jonathan Pontell to describe the generation of people born between 1954 and 1965 (although some sources include 1966 and 1967). The term is used primarily in English-speaking countries.[1][2][3]
Jonathan Pontell defined Generation Jones as a distinct concept, referring to the second half of the post-World War II baby boom (1954-1964) [4] Its members are still usually identified with either Baby Boomers or Generation X’ers.
The name “Generation Jones” has several connotations, including a large anonymous generation, a “keeping up with the Joneses” competitiveness and the slang word “jones” or “jonesing”, meaning a yearning or craving.[5][6][7][8][9] It is said that Jonesers were given huge expectations as children in the 1960s, and then confronted with a different reality as they came of age in the 1970s and 1980s, leaving them with a certain unrequited, jonesing quality.
While I would agree on 1954 as the dividing birth year, I think there is a much more important issue than the Jones term countenances. The biggest single divide in the Baby Boom generation revolves around the end of the Vietnam War and the related end of the draft. Those born before 1954 had to deal with it, and those born later did not. This is not to say that one generation is “better” than the other, but there was an emotional component to the rebellion of the earlier Boomer generation which faded dramatically — to the point of near absence — among later Boomers. Long hair went from being a protest statement to a meaningless fashion statement. Pot smoking went from being daring and defiant to being mundane and even boring. Denims and tie-dyes eventually became as conformist as the grey-flannel suits they had rebelled against.
So I would call the pre-1954 Boomers the Draft Boomers (er, perhaps the Draft Dodger Generation), and I don’t know what I would call the later ones (maybe the No-Drafters), but I am one. I well remember the sanctimonious attitude the older Boomers had about everything, how it was always how We Were There First! We braved the barricades, we burned our draft cards, we had long hair when it meant something, and we, we. we. They seemed to take themselves so much more seriously than the post-drafters, who tended towards irreverence, self-deprecating humor, punk rock, and even rebellion towards the culture of their slightly older brethren. (Hippies, meet yuppies! Har har.)
Even now I try not to care about these things. But then odd little things happen that I can’t easily explain, like kids being afraid of me at a party. And because of her experience as a mom, Sarah understands dynamics that tend to be invisible to me.
Nothing like moving to a college town to make you realize you’re getting old.
FWIW, I felt more comfortable with Generation X than with the Baby Boom Generation. (In this town, they’re equally old.)
Comments
7 responses to “Rebelling against the rebels just keeps getting harder”
Eh … I was born in 1954, so at the tail end of the Boomers, and I’ve always had the feeling that I was spending my life cleaning up and coping with the wreckage which the big surge of Boomers created and left in their wake … starting with working to help resettle Vietnamese refugees in 1975.
My long nightmare is over, I’m now part of a named generation.
I’ve always been kind of upset that all the other generations had names and mine didn’t.
So I’m a Joneser huh?
Eh, it’s better than Gens Y and Z, they only got their name because they followed Gen X.
“the Draft Dodger Generation”
Nolo contendere. Most of us gamed the system in some form. I gamed it. Bush gamed it by going into the NG. Kerry gamed it by getting medals for wounds which, had he accrued the wounds playing sports, would have been laughed at for not brushing them off. Getting out after four months of combat is also gaming the system.
Look, until recently the “boomers” ended in 54/55, with the tail end either fitting with my generation or with the boomers, by choice. I always called us “We Came After” but I suppose that’s clunky.
I don’t think the sixties babies (hi there!) can fit in any way with the boomers — our parents are not WWII vets, we were not political activists (okay, most of us) and well… we didn’t sit at the consciousness raising sessions… we took boomer gospel with a spoonfull of doubt. Heck, for a lot of us — the president — we were the children of boomers. (I wasn’t.) However, generations are a slippery thing. Though he’s only a year and a few months (?) older than I, the president is a member of echo-boom, being the child of boomers, and he belongs to a widespread category in the echo boom: “the worshipper.” I was thinking, as people said his reality is “dated” that he sounds exactly like Robert’s classmates who were raised on stories of the glorious sixties and seem to think society remains exactly the same, their boomer parents are powerless and they’re fighting “the man”. This explains the Sputnik, I think…
Born in 1964 here. Never felt a part of the Boomers or their politics (though their music is largely my music); growing up in a military family might have had something to do with that. I don’t consider myself sufficiently disillusioned & cynical to join Gen X, so I guess I’m a Jones.
I’ve seen other stuff on the squishy period between Boomers and Xers concentrating on a narrow slot of ’61-’67 or so, but my Google-fu is weak at the moment.
Oh good, I just make it into the older Jonesie group. Nice to have an alternative. ’56 here and I agree with Captain Ned. Let’s expand that slot.
Well, my opinion is for all the PR, the early Baby Boomers were just foolish children led astray by the pre-war babies, mid 1930s to 1945. Really, look at the birth dates of the “leaders.” The Boomers became terrorist, although we shouldn’t ignore the largest contingent who went to war, went to work and generally didn’t go to Woodstock. And really, the deserve our eternal derision for Disco.
Now I graduate high school in 1980 and I’m glad that that marked the death of Disco. It wasn’t a pretty transition but at least Disco died. They couldn’t even sell it as a Sounds of the Seventies album. And Disco dancing looked bad when young but now those who persist in trying to salvage it are just pathetic. Every once in a while someone tries to sell Disco or hippy clothing and it basically dies after the 13 yr old girls have their fun.
I’ve always considered my self part of the lost generation. We came aware in the 1970s to bad politic, bad music, bad dancing, bad economy and bad handling of a hostage crisis. We had to look at what college degrees might lead to a job rather than doing the overflowing humanities. We had to find a job in the last hard down market with all the manufacturing dying and the trades filled with displaced Boomers (and pre-boomers). On the plus side, we had Reagan and Reaganomics to really make Morning in America hit a chord. But we weren’t so disillusioned as the Gen X but then the early Boomers hadn’t taken over education…yet. Although I did envy the Gen X, etc., they thought jobs grew on trees and for a while they did till the tech boom busted. In many ways they were optimistic simply because they had only had 2 years of true Democrat rule since 1980. But in others ways I feel sorry, the current administration has to feel like the end of the world from their perspective.