Sep 29 2005
Boom, X, and Beyond
During the 90s, when "Generation X" people were in their 30s, it was trendy among them to bemoan the state of their generation and its lack of opportunities and direction. This was often paired with sneering denunciations of the Baby Boom generation, condemning "boomers" because they had it easy when they came of age, with plenty of jobs, cheap real estate, and lots of carefree sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll.
I’m on the cusp of the two generations, with one foot in each. By official accounts, the end of the boomer generation was around 1964 (even though the birth rate’s decline really began after 1957). Generation X is loosely defined as "those who were in their 20s in the mid- to late-80s," although Douglas Coupland, who wrote a novel by that name but did not, in fact, coin the term, was referring to Americans and Canadians born between 1958 and 1966.
I’ve never bought into the griping about boomers. If you ask me, those who complain about someone else’s advantages instead of figuring out how to work their own are either spoiled or stupid, or possibly both.
The other thing that bothered me about this line of belly-aching is that it ignores the broader view of what life was like for boomers growing up in the late 1950s and 1960s. It is true that there were plenty of jobs for people coming of age then, and that houses were cheap and "free love" was, for a brief time, de rigueur among a minority of people. But what about the other stuff?
What about the assassinations? The Vietnam war? The Cuban missile crisis? Those things were not just news stories; they set the tone for a whole generation.
Imagine if 9/11 had been followed by the assassinations of people like the Clintons and then Jesse Jackson. What if the war in Iraq had killed 60,000 Americans instead of 2000? That should give you some idea of what the climate must have been like in the 1960s. Yet some people only think about the hippies, the music, and the low rent.
Put another way, imagine if, in 20 years time the youth of the day were to slag the current young generation because all they (the youth of the future) chose to think about were the dot-com millionaires and the free drinking water.
My thinking about this was prompted by a piece written by Beth Adams and put online at Qarrtsiluni. She describes the political tension of that era, interweaving it with references to music, art, and literature, but within the omnipresent context of war and assassination, and not a mention of the Summer of Love.
There are a lot of parallels with how things are today, with the polarization of left and right, the war in Iraq, and other issues. The essay does not intend to be a comparison, but comparisons are inevitable during times like these. It is pointless to see this as a competition for who had it better, or who had it worse. But it is an excellent personal view of an era, and a rattling good read.
25 Comments on “Boom, X, and Beyond”
I agree and disagree.
At the risk of making a few sweeping generalizations…
The way Boomers express themselves makes them out as narcissistic ponces. They speak of “revolution” and “defining an age” and how “nothing was the same after Viet Nam/Cuba/Kennedy/enter event of choice here”. It’s narrow and crass to speak that way. What about WWI, WW2, The Depression? The Civil War? One could argue that every one of those events marked a place in time after which nothing else was the same. I readily admit that I’m a Gen Y that is sick of hearing them pump themselves and their history up like nothing and no one before or after has any influence or signifigance.
As an aside: I’m SICK of having their culture shoved down my throat, have their needs addressed before all others. Les Affaires newspaper states today that Boomers own 70% of publically traded stock and that decision makers will *of course* make every effort to cater to this group. It takes away my voice, and takes attention and resources away from my needs. Just look at Montreal radio: CHOM, to me, caters to “people who were in their 20s in the eighties” and plays regurgitated, heard-it-a-thousand-times crappy Boomer music. But I have to listen to a static-laden signal from Burlington to hear Rock recorded after 1990. When’s it MY turn?
By the time the Boomers die off and my needs begin to be addressed, the Whatever Generation that outnumbers us will be clamouring for US to move over. I have fought for my job, my income, my place, without complaint. But there are issues that the sheer numbers of Boomers make impossible for me and GenY to fight.
Well, I have to say I don’t find your argument very compelling. I think the only reason why the boomers are so present right now is because they represent a large part of the population, and they are at an age when they are probably at the peak of their social and financial power and influence (both as a group and as individuals).
But every generation gets it’s kick at the can. When you are in your 50s and 60s it will be your generation hogging all the attention, and the 20ish people then will be bitching and moaning about you and yours, saying “won’t they ever shut up about 9/11?”
As for “defining an age” or whatever, I think you’re imagining that. I know a lot of boomer and hardly any talk like that, or at least not as out of proportion as you seem to think. And again, the reality is that they are very present and powerful, as a group, right now. 20 years ago it was a different group. 20 years from now it will be a different group.
This reminds me of an episode of “The Brady Bunch” (a show that I hated, BTW) in which the oldest kid got to have his own room in the attic for a year before going off to college. The second-oldest had a hissy fit, claiming it wasn’t fair.
Duh! I wanted to yell out “when the oldest goes to college he’ll move out and then you’ll get the room you stupid wanker!” That they dedicated an entire show to this issue was retarded, and I hated that character, the writers, and the whole show for being so stupid as to not point out the obvious.
It’s just a matter of waiting your turn. How do you think the boomers felt in the 60s when their world was being turned upside down by wars and assassinations brought on by the generation that came before them? In their case, it was an appropriate lament. What’s your complaint? Old songs on the radio?
Blork, the thing you’re glossing over is that demographically the Boomers are a huge cohort compared to those immediately following and preceding, and that has led to disproportionate opportunity for them. This is something that became especially obvious in academia about a decade ago, as tenured positions were filled with boomers, many of the positions being vacated by retirement were being eliminated, and non-tenured scraps made up the bulk of what remained for anyone born after roughly 1963. (I’m a ‘66er.)
Personally, I’ve adjusted to these realities. I’m a successful freelancer, and I’m making the most of my opportunities. However, even if I wanted a full-time job I’d be in tough, because many positions commensurate with my skills and aspirations are locked down by boomers. And if I wanted to work my way up from somewhere at or near the ground floor, I’d be written off as too old. I have to make my own position whether I like it or not; I’m just fortunate that I like it and, after some years of struggles and false starts, have learned how to be good at it.
It should come as no surprise that there are many people who were indoctrinated with the idea that a full-time job is the ideal, only to find, when they got into the real world, relative insecurity and a logjam of boomers blocking advancement…and became insecure whiners as a result. Many do overdo it, but it’s not completely unfounded either.
Every generation gets a kick at the can, but some of them kick with more force than others.
I was born in 1971, statistically the lowest birthrate year since…you guessed it…my parents’ generation, aka the Silent Generation, the pre-Boomers born slightly before or during World War II. Generation Y / Millenials / Echo kids outnumber us, and they of course are the children of the Boomers.
Too young to fight in WWII, slightly too old for the 60s when they happened, the Silent Generation, with a strong cultural memory of the Great Depression instilled in them by their parents, tend towards duty, family, thriftiness, middle-of-the-roadness, indecision and neurosis at worst. They are history’s middle children.
David Foot argues that they were actually the most financially successful, managerial class - depending on how you define the boundaries of this group - due to their generation’s small size, they essentially walked in to fill the gap created from the many dead / sidelined from the G.I. Generation before them. (Certainly that was much more true in Europe than in North America). But the flipside of that is that the Silents also formed the bulk of the Beat generation - many of those movie directors who did those dark, strange flicks with antiheroes in the 1970s were Silents, for instance, which gives you a hint of their troubled undercurrent.
I think the common socioeconomic thread that links the Boomers and their Millennial kids, besides sheer numbers, is that both grew up in times of relative affluence, with a generally sunnier outlook. The Boomers were raised by Dr. Spock, enjoyed the greatest period of wealth and job creation in the 20th century. The Millennials rode the rise of the dot-coms, the Dow 10K, globalization, and were entertained by myriad techno-toys and occupied by 10,000 scheduled activities where everyone gets a trophy and an ‘A’ for showing up. If nothing else, both groups have, speaking in broad generalizations, an enormous sense of self-esteem. A friend of mine who is a Millennial - but thinks like an Xer - notes with some dismay the Millennials’ general sense of entitlement about everything. That they don’t have to work for anything, because they’ve always been provided for.
By contrast, the Silents and later Xs grew up in immediate postwar recessions (WWII, Vietnam) that didn’t perk up until their teen years (1950s, 1980s) - so there’s more of an undercurrent of ‘have not’ there.
The problem with the “waiting your turn” idea is that when you are the middle child, things tend to focus on the older and younger siblings - the Boomers now settling into retirement (the Silents already retired), and the Millennials now entering the workforce en masse, the Xers are likely to just get lost in the shuffle, maybe only achieving some power or cultural recognition for a brief period in our 40s and 50s.
Still, I doubt film versions of Lollapalooza or even Coachella festivals will be playing indie cinemas in 2020, the way the Woodstock and Monterey Pop ones seem to endlessly circulate nowadays.
Regardless, the point remains that it is relatively pointless to sit around whinging about other people’s advantages. After all, anybody reading this has advantages that others don’t have.
More than that, I reject these generalizations the same way I reject generalizations about race or religion. Perhaps one can speak broadly about some things, but pointing fingers and ascribing attriubutes to individuals based on their demographic is wrong, whether it’s race, color, religion, or generation.
Anyway, that’s not even what my post was about. My main point is that we tend to think of the 60’s as being all peace and love and low rent with maybe a bit of trouble in the news, when perhaps it was way more turmoil and anguish than we like to remember. The point of the post was to direct you to Beth’s article at Qarrtsiluni, which gives a different perspective on those times than what is usually presented.
I’m really not interested in discussing generational advantages, no more than I’m interested in complaining that some people in Westmount have bigger houses than I do. But I am interested in reading about and discussing the culture of those times — particularly when it is a different perspective, and when it has some resonance with regard to our present times.
Well, you brought the subject up in your dismissal of “bellyaching,” to be fair, you set the tone!
I don’t think anyone here has a beef with the Boomer generation as individuals, but their numbers and buying power means their tastes dominate the market. In terms of pop culture, our relatively sparse generations’ cultural reference points are rarely acknowledged - there is little space on the dial for the music and programs of our youth.
A steady stream of 80s and 90s movies seemed (apart from John Hughes films) to be Boomer 50s/60s nostalgia pieces - the Big Chill, The Doors, a spate of Vietnam flicks, JFK. The 90s and now, early 2000s are ruled by Boomer US presidents. As a teen and young adult, it seemed - at least via the Boomer media’s incessant trumpeting of the issue implied that the apex of culture resided betwen 1955 and 1967, and anything else that followed could only be a hollow echo.
So I think what we’re both complaining about is not the actual demographic facts, but more the way the mainstream media puts a certain selected view of the Boomer era on a pedestal and prefers we not mention Altamont, Nixon, Charles Manson, and all the other dark stuff.
Blork, you’re comfortably nestled in the wake of the boomer generation and you’ve greatly benefited from that. Because of this it’s possible that you can’t really understand what it’s like to grow up in the shadow of this generation. Boomers were not your parents. In fact, your parents were of the same generation as the parents of boomers and this, more than anything else, likely makes you more like them than not.
You cannot understand the kind of damage they’ve been able to inflict with their selfishness and their narrow egotistical perspective. Vietnam? Americans had Vietnam. Kids like us growing up watching live footage of Vietnam on TV while our parents were off at the disco. WE had Vietnam. My boomer parents and their “hip” Canadian friends were never asked to hold a gun and never lost a friend to war. They didn’t have Vietnam.
If you’re determined to call us whiners and to not understand what we mean when we criticize the boomer generation from a first-hand perspective, then nothing will “make” you understand. We’re nothing but spoiled or stupid, or possibly both to you? This judgment of yours is, in and of itself, very reminiscent of the kind of nonsense baby boomers throw at my generation. Boomers are always very quick to call everyone else “whiners” and to blindly and egotistically blame people for their own problems. Let’s remember that boomers invented the idea of a “gated” community. Their bleeding hearts stop at the electric fence.
I’m not denying that the boomer generation has had a huge effect, but I’m rejecting two things:
(1) The generalizations about baby boomers. My older brothers are baby boomers. One worked on the railroad as a blue-collar worker and got forced into early retirement in his early 50s. He now scrapes by on a small pension. Where’s his selfish and egotistical advantage? The other one is a qualified teacher but couldn’t get a permanent job. Now he manages a retail store in the Yukon. He’s doing alright, but you’d be hard pressed to find anything generational that he’s taken advantage of. You can walk down Ste-Catherine street any day and see lots of down-and-out 50-ish people. Where’s their egotistical perspective?
(2) I reject that it’s worth doing much complaining about. A bit, maybe, and it’s interesting in terms of the study of demographics, but it is pointless to hold a grudge about it. We’s not talking about a concious conspiracy — it’s an act of history and nature (including human nature). You can’t do anything about it. If those circumstances were to repeat, the same phenomenon would repeat.
After all, your generation probably has some advantages over the one that came after it. Those kids coming up now have globalization, global warming, American hegemony (worse than ever), water shortages, more expensive real estate, etc. You didn’t have that when you were 20. So should you beat yourself up for it? Should you feel guilty? Especially given that the perspectives will be shifted and you might find yourself being blamed for things that you feel are ridiculous.
How will you feel if, in a few years, the current kiddies are slamming you and your generation because you had the dot-com bubble and you were already an adult when 9/11 happened (and thus, were “less traumatized”)? Imagine if in 15 years time all the 20-somethings are whining about that instead of worrying about themselves? You’ll probably call them whiners.
I have to admit that your Vietnam reference is confusing. I’m older than you and I barely remember Vietnam. But I suspect that people who were in their 20s then were experiencing it the way we’re experiencing Iraq, only 10 times worse. The fact that your parents “missed” it because they were at the disco reinforces my idea that you can’t generalize so much.
And using the concept of gated communities to slam an entire generation is just silly.
Finally, I apologize for my original “whining and stupid” crack. It was overstated. However I hold fast to the idea that people should pay more attention to what’s going on in their own lives and less to what’s going on in those of others.
I’ve seen a LOT of slackers in my time, and some of them (I won’t say all) liked to use the excuse that they had no prospects because the boomers had taken everything. That is just stupid! All around them, people of the same generation were making something of themselves, but there they were in their little pools of self-pity, blaming the boomers. Give me a break!
That’s like me here in Longueuil complaining about my leaky roof and blaming it on the wealthy people in Westmount because they have better roofs. Forget about the other people, I say. Take responsibility for yourself and fix your own problems!
Ohmigod. And to think my post sort of started this! Thanks for the link, Ed, and for getting what I was trying to say - I hope some of your readers actually went over and read it! This discussion is fascinating, though. Being American, born in 1952, puts me squarely into boomerdom, and I’d be the first to agree with Rachel that many boomers in my culture as well had NO political conscience and made the jump into “the Me Generation” in about the time it took to exchange their bell-bottoms and Grateful Dead T-shirts for a suit and a chance to buy a BMW. For others of us - a minority - that wasn’t the case at all, and that’s one reason it’s so painful to watch current events unfold in the U.S., along with an overwhelming public apathy toward others, a general lack of responsibility, and an equally overwhelming self-protectiveness. The fact that many of us really DID (and still do) believe in something and tried (try) to do something about it makes it particularly annoying to have “the 60s” portrayed as being about rock and roll and drugs and sex and selfishness. One point I’d like to make on the side, though, is that at the time of Vietnam, we blamed ALL of it on the preceding generation of Depression-babies and WWII veterans - and the rhetoric on both sides was way worse than what got dished out in this comment thread!
Denouncing “generalizations” always sounds noble when, in actuality, it’s redundant. Of course criticism directed at boomers is a “generalization”. Generalizations are necessary if anyone is to discuss any topic.
You know boomers who don’t fit these criticisms? So do I. I know boomers who never took advantage of their power and never abandoned their ideals. So what? That doesn’t negate the validity of criticism directed at the many boomers who did and remain completely unapologetic about it.
I don’t have to feel “guilty” about the advantages my generation did have over current generations. All I have to do is openly acknowledge that we did. You’ll NEVER catch me calling any younger generation “whiners” regardless of whether or not they attack my generation’s advantages. I interact with kids of all ages on a regular basis. I respect their issues. It’s all they ever need from me. It’s also far more than boomers ever offered my generation and I know it.
My Vietnam reference is confusing to you? How can you “barely remember Vietnam”? I know that Cape Breton is perpetually stuck in 1952 but even they had TV, radio and newspapers back then. Then again, when you have parents like mine, you mature at an incredible rate (not by choice but by need.) TV raised me. I vividly remember the Vietnam War in our living room.
My brother was also a Vietnam War refugee. Each night Vietnam slept in the bed next to mine. I was awakened by his nightmares and I was direct witness to what the war had done to him. My boomer parents adopted him as a sort of fashion accessory. They addressed none of his issues. Before he reached school age they were already “bored” with parenting. The Vietnam War damaged my brother’s early childhood, but neglectful and selfish boomer parenting robbed him of his future. You would perhaps call him a “whiner” too? Like many people from my generation, I’d call him justifiably angry.
Using the example of gated communities to “slam” the boomer generation may seem “silly” to you, but I see it as appropriate. Gated communities to me perfectly represent the philosophical and political direction taken by a great number of boomers who made their money, got old and decided that protecting their own interests was more important than just about anything else.
And yes, there are “bad”, neglectful and selfish parents in every generation. The difference is… when your “bad” parents are ignorant, uneducated as well as powerless you CAN tell yourself that it’s because of this that they are “bad” parents. But, >>generally speaking
Thanks Beth.
Rachel, I don’t doubt that Vietnam effected you, but I think it’s a bit much to say it effected you more than it affected any random assortment of boomers — who not only witnessed it on TV, but in their draft cards and in almost everything they did (I’m thinking primarily of Americans). In the same way that I think the Iraq war is a bit more “real” to the 20-somethings in Bugtown, Indiana than it is to some six-year old in Montreal. Those six-year-olds aren’t seeing their friends coming home in body bags and aren’t worried about being called up for service. They’re not seeing the Iraq war invoked in everything they do (as I witnessed in Maine last week — you couldn’t get away from it!)
In general, that is. ;-)
You’re right that we need generalizations, but what bothers me is when they seem to become personal. Some of your statements sound like you are blaming every single individual of that generation and not just the phenomenon of that generation. After all, there is a HUGE variation in the individuals found within that group.
As for gated communities, yeah, a lot of people in gated communities are boomers. A lot of them are not. And a lot of boomers (the majority) do not live in gated communities. In my opinion it’s way more of a class issue than a generational one.
I know you’re going to hate this next example, but here goes: to me, saying the boomers invented the gated community is like saying “generation Y” (the current generation of 20-ish people) invented schoolyard shootings. After all, the phenomenon barely exited before the mid-90s. Then — especially after Columbine — it seemed like it was happening every couple of weeks for a while.
So should get my bee in a bonnet and get all huffy towards ALL THOSE PEOPLE in generation Y because of all those schoolyard shootings? Of course not! I can condemn the acts, and curse the people. I can even wonder about what, in that generation, provokes that phenomenon. But why blame the whole generation? How is that any different from making generalizations about black people based on the crime and imprisonment statistics? How is it different from generalizing about Muslims because of the terrorism thing?
What I’m trying to say is that, while it is useful to generalize to some extent to understand things, it is (in my opinion) not useful to be judgemental of groups of people (be it race, religion, generation) — because by extention that means being judgemental towards the people themselves. And individuals should not be held accountable for actions that are ascribed to their “group.”
I began my rant with “at the risk of making a few sweeping generalizations”. ;)
And I do not, blame 100% of a generation, race, religion or ethnicity for any issue or outcome that coemout of it. But as groups of people, certain generalisations can and must be made. Do all Italians eat pasta? Probably not. But turing around and saying “Italians eat pasta” is not a necessarily false statement either.
My argument was simply that (without whining, without complaining and without being complacent) the sheer weight of the Boomer generation as a demographic drowns out the voices of the generation behind it. It isn’t a complaint: it’s a fact. It’s something that my generation contends with.
And it’s nobody fault.
Don’t twist words Ed. I clearly spoke of Canadian boomers when I talked about Vietnam’s impact. Remember I was the one who first mentioned that, amongst boomers, Americans primarily experienced Vietnam. And I would never entertain claiming that Vietnam affected my own (white, Canadian, semi-educated) generation “more”. Though, the vast majority of orphaned kids adopted out of Vietnam after the war belong to my generation and it could easily be argued that Vietnam did affect them most.
Go ahead and blame our generation for Columbine. Fill yer boots. Many people of my generation openly “own” Columbine and keep it close to our hearts. We know that Klebold and Harris could have been any one of us. There’s no shame in that realization. My generation, unlike some, knows where it fits in to the bigger picture and why. Of course the difference is that victims themselves initiate mass murders in schools, but gated communities are rarely populated by victims (though the glossy brochures will try to push that angle if they think it’ll help sell more wine cellars and swimming pools to boomers).
Hell, we’re not even interesting enough to be considered “X”. We’re just that buffer of shit ‘no name’ generation between points X and Y. We were the first wave of accidental boomer pregnancies. Some of us are only here because the condom broke and our boomer parents were too drunk or high on coke to care. There’s no need to “whine”. We know who we are. We’re not the first insignificant generation to fill societal potholes with our lives, and we won’t be the last. Our depression-era grandparents seem to understand this best about us.
Rachel, I think I had the opposite of your parenting experience. Having Silent generation parents meant they were culturally a lot closer to *their* parents than to me. There was, aside from one Felix Leclerc album and one Ayn Rand book, nothing remotely hip or cool in our house. Literate and art-loving, sure, but not trendy. Readers’ Digest 5-LP box sets of 50s standards was more the order of the day. And Klassiks Go Disko…
Given that we all have different personal experiences of the era - or experiences with Boomers themselves - it seems obvious that from this small statistical sample, we will have wildly differing results that appear opposed or that negate each other.
In aggregate, however, it seems we are agreed on, at least, the economic and cultural impact of the Boomer generation. Statistics don’t lie - you look at what people do, what they earned, where they live, what they drive, what they buy, what they watched on TV, what advertising messages they soaked up. From the perspective of zeitgeist, you look at the literature they produced, the movies, TV etc. Again, there will always be exceptions, but certain things will stand out as “emblematic” of a generation’s tastes. When a statistically significant phenomenon emerges from a demographic group, then that’s of interest. Are ‘gated communities’ just the ultimate form of 80s-90s cocooning? Is that all just an extreme form of the suburban “white flight” of the 60s and 70s? Was it a trend someone picked up on, and decided they could market the idea to a certain sub-group of Boomers? Probably all of the above.
In any case, what I think we’re really reacting to is not the experience of Boomerdom itself, but the self-generated media image of that generation, as seen in fawning nostalgia programming, etc. etc. Our generation (or, as Rachel notes, we caught in the valley between large demographic mountains, x and y) hasn’t been represented well at all. Even those “Back In…” shows on MTV poke fun at the 80s and 90s more than they revere it. I swear, if Guitar Player magazine puts Hendrix on the cover again (the guy’s been dead for what - 40 years? why not give Django Reinhardt a chance?) I’m gonna set fire to the newsstand…
AJ, I wonder if one of the reasons for the stuff your’re talking about (the apparent hegemony of boomer culture) isn’t at least partially due to that generation having been quite homogenous in the 60s and 70s. Of course there was lots of variety, but there was also a large shared pool of experience.
The music, the sense of having lived through some tough times (mentally, due to the insane political situations), and the sense of having been involved in (or at least witness to) several simultaneous “revolutions” (civil rights, sexual, etc.). Because of all that, and because there were many of them, those people probably have a large sense of a shared experience — and there are lots of them. So naturally there will be fawning nostalgia programming. There’s a huge market for it.
The generations that came afterwards, however, are fewer in number but more fractured and subdived culturally. Expecially now. There is so much media, and so many different musical and cultural movements that there is a much smaller sense of a shared generational experience, which means (perhaps) we won’t be so subject to fawning nostalgia programming in the future because there won’t be a market for it.
No, really. There was a lot of “progress” in the 60s — a huge shift from the war-era generation in terms of culture and politics. I think that almost all boomers felt they were a part of that.
But what huge progress did we have in the 80s? Sure, there were plenty of smallish movements, but very few that everyone felt a part of.
Slight topic shift: I was at a wedding this weekend. There was a band playing at the reception. They were quite good performers, but their set lists were terrible. Virtually all the songs were from the 70s, with the occasional 60s song (and only one from the 80s — none more recent). I was losing my mind. I swear I do not ever, ever, need to hear “Mustang Sally” again.
So I’m sitting there, otherwise having a great time, and I’m thinking “Rachel is right! Those damn boomers are even ruling this wedding!”
But then I took a look at the band. Most of the musicians were in their 20s, with one guy maybe mid-30s. I also noticed that during their breaks, people were dancing to the iPod music (which was contemporary). So it’s not like the people at the wedding needed that kind of music to have fun, or were insisting on it. No, it was a percieved market that the Generation Y people in the band sought to exploit.
Which makes you wonder — all this boomer presence that we’re blaming on the boomers. Is it really their fault? Are they the ones producing this stuff, or simply the ones buying it? In fact, in many cases it’s the younger people simply exploiting them to make a buck.
In other words, is it fair to attack people when the only reason their presence is felt is because there happen to be many of them?
So lets say a convention of goth girls invaded a town for three weeks, and all the local businesses switched their products to meet the demands of goth girls. How should people who are not goth girls react? Should they blame the goth girls, when their only “crime” is being present in numbers? Or should they blame the non-goth girls who are sychophantically bending to meet the goth girl market?
(Yeah, that’s pretty retarded, but I think it’s worth thinking about. And you can easily substitute “goth girls” for “train spotters,” “bird watchers,” “head bangers,” boomers,” “Linux geeks,” or any other group.)
Good points, Ed, about the shared experience, even though we all participated to different degrees and in different ways. What we did live through was major societal change.
I wonder how many of the commenters actually read my essay that started you off on this topic…? One of the comments on that piece was this: “One of the very weirdest turns of time for me has been to see the 60’s turned into an object of nostalgia, into the good old innocent days — a time, as I experienced it, so heavy with loss and guilt and fury and divided loyalties.” I couldn’t agree more, especially when I see retro fashions on 19-year-old kids. The look was bad enough back then, but the reprise is nothing but empty. At least some of the music still holds up.
A slight addition to Blork’s comment, my daughters are 13 and 14 and the most popular bands at their high school are AC/DC and Led Zeppelin.
Let’s tweak this scenario a little. Imagine that Ed’s wave of ‘goth girls’ hits a small depressed town with high unemployment. So basically, let’s say Sydney N.S. (lol) Now, are those people who hurry to commercially cater to the wave of ‘goth girls’ actually fans of all things ‘goth’ or are they just fans of things like eating and not being homeless? Are they sycophantic or hungry?
And what if some citizens of Sydney decide to become ‘goth girls’? Does that mean there’s nothing tragic about the loss of the traditional N.S. culture that may have thrived in Sydney, if only necessity hadn’t driven some segments of society to abandon it for the sake of ‘goth girl’ culture?
Wouldn’t some folks from Sydney be justified in resenting, criticizing or even hating some aspects of ‘goth girl’ culture thereafter? Or would we need to chastise them for “generalizing” about ‘goth girls’? After all, not all ‘goth girls’ are the same right?. I mean it’s not like the generations that exist under the boomer shadow have much choice but to make the best of it. Still, do we call them “whiners” if they can’t or “stupid” if they outright refuse?
And the ‘goth girls’ themselves. They can’t be entirely clueless as to the extreme effect they’d have on Sydney’s culture. They’re not mindless zombie ‘goth girls’ are they? They have some responsibilities right? They do have a part to play in this, and conscious choices to make before they besiege a depressed town and lay waste to its culture.
Ah but what if the ‘goth girls’ respond to criticism by claiming that Sydney was a useless shithole anyway and that it should be glad to be getting their business? What if they claim that they put Sydney on the map and that Sydney should be grateful, or they’ll just pack up and move to another town?
Are we to blame citizens of Sydney for their own demise? After all, who wants to emulate losers? (Isn’t it common for people to strongly identify with their abusers?) Can you really blame citizens of Sydney if some of them choose to become ‘goth girls’ or wish they could? (Personally I want to see Rita MacNeil dress up as a goth girl in order to promote her tea room and latest CD.)
So basically, once played out, I guess Ed’s ‘goth girl’ wave scenario outlines just how the boomer generation effectively gentrified their children right out of their own birthright, and yet somehow expect them to be thankful for it.
Rachel, a few things:
First, if a wave of goth girls moved to Sydney I’d probably move back there. :-P
Your example essentially makes perfect sense, but it breaks down in two places. I’ll address the second one first, just because I’m from Sydney and I like to do things backwards.
You said “what if the ‘goth girls’ respond to criticism by claiming that Sydney was a useless shithole…” That’s where I have a problem. If every single one of them said that, then yes, they Sydnoids (what the heck else do you call people from Sydney?) would be justified in getting angry at them as a whole. But if only SOME responded that way, then I stand by my assertion (prejudice 101) that you should not hold a group accountable for the actions of some within the group.
Similarly, your assertions about boomers crapping on GenXers is only partly true. SOME do that, but not all, so I say don’t blame them all. Blame the individuals, yes, but not the group.
The other problem is the example overall is not a perfect analogy, because in this case we’re talking about goth girls (possibly) REPLACING an existing culture, but boomers did not replace GenX culture because GenX culture did not exist before the boomers.
One could argue that GenX never got to develop a culture but that’s crap. There is definitely a GenX culture, although it was defined in the shadow of the boomers. Just as the boomer culture was defined in the shadow of the WWII generation (which is increasingly being referred to as “the greatest generation”). Generations always develop in the shadow of the one that came before it.
The difference is that the boomer generation was huge in numbers, so they were able to tip over the cart from the previous generation — which is a good thing, because otherwise we’d still be living like Archie and Veronica.
GenX (and Y) don’t haven the numbers and they don’t have the same level of shared experience to tip over the boomer cart. Yes, I can understand why there may be resentment about that — quite natural — but just because one feels resentment does not give one license to be prejudicial and judgemental. Otherwise you could argue that the white people in South Africa are perfectly justified in resenting blacks for tipping over their cart.
And in fact they are justified in feeling resentful. Again, that’s natural. But does that mean it is ok for them to swear at blacks and to harbour resentments and prejudices? I don’t think so.
And that’s what it’s all about to me. Recognizing that natural patterns might give people in certain groups certain advantages, and but being civilized enough to not hold each person in that group accountable for the group (unless that person actively and knowingly asserts their hegemony — that’s a whole other thing).
After all, should you feel guilty because you are white? How would you respond to someone hating you because you were born in Canada? Do you feel a burden because you grew up in a bilingual environment? What do you say to someone who spits on you and screams “you got it easy you fucker because you’re creative!”? Those are all advantages that you have over others, none of which you had any control over.
People with those advantages squeeze out those who don’t have those advantages. Do you feel guilty? Do you call “bullshit” when someone tries to blame you (bilingual) because only bilingual people can get government jobs? Do you flip the bird at anyone who blames you personally because most of the MPs in Ottawa are white?
If you don’t, you ought to!
Furthering Beth’s and Ed’s comments —
Yeah, the fracturing is a real component of the difference between boomers and x-ers (or late x-ers, of which I am one). The earliest boomers had radio and no TV, they can actually remember ‘getting a TV’ the way that I remember ‘getting an Apple ][ computer’. But yes- programming was unified, there weren’t many channels to choose from unless you lived in a big metro area like New York, Chicago or LA. You watched and listened to the CBC, mostly, at least here.
Xers grew up with colour TV and cable as a given, an entire panoply from no-budget cable access programming to CBC, CTV, local stations, French stations, the Big Three US networks, PBS, TVO….we had video games since childhood, VCRs and video stores, PCs and BBSes since at least our teens. We are used to having choice, and also used to - at least if you are of that mindset - being free to create your own personal canon of culture, or at least augment the official canons with your own findings.
That does lead to more of a split in pop culture sensibilities. Whereas in 1965 it might have been Sinatra vs. the Beatles, in 1985 it was more like Huey Lewis vs. Depeche Mode vs. Iron Maiden vs. Miami Sound Machine vs. Run-DMC. The food court approach to pop…vs. the monolithic Top 40 playlists of yore.
What about responsibility Ed? Tell me, why is it “prejudiced” to demand responsibility from a powerful yet non-homogenous group of people? Not all individuals within a group are directly to “blame” for a problem so in turn NONE of them are responsible for the problem?
And your “tip the cart” or “natural patterns” defenses could well apply to the way the English language is quelled in Québec. So, I guess Anglophones should just put up and shut up because they don’t have the numbers to out-vote those who support the language laws? It’s just the natural order of things? Majority rule? That’s too bad. No point in holding a grudge though right?
I suppose you could demand that Québec society take responsibility towards protecting the rights of their linguistic minorities (as they demand similar rights from Canada in turn), but it’s not ALL Québecois who fail to see the need for this protection, so you can’t blame or resent them ALL for not instituting it, and therefore none of them need to take any responsibility for it, right?
Do I feel guilty about being white, etc? Frankly I can’t see where you’re going with this. I don’t think anyone is asking boomers to feel “guilty”. I don’t need their “guilt”, I need their humility and for some of them to find the sense of social responsibility they lost along the way.
And Ed, other people’s anger and resentment towards my generation, my culture or any of my advantages does not at all harden my heart but it almost sounds as if you think it should. I don’t reject, dismiss or resent people who accuse me of benefiting from my advantages. They have a perfectly good point. I do have certain advantages. And if it’s shown to me that I’m making decisions that lead to those advantages being denied to other people, I’ll surely do all I can to re-examine my actions.
At this point, Rachel, it comes down to this:
Pies, at 12 paces.
That’s the only way we’re going to resolve this. :-P
As so often happens in a case like this, it almost sounds like we are arguing the same point, but with nuanced differences that makes it sound like we’re in opposition.
The only quibble I have with your last comment is from the first paragraph. I think it is impossible to expect “responsibility” from a group. Only individuals can be held responsible for things.
Exceptions include things like a board of directors (who are speaking for an individual — the corporation) or a political party. But those are specific groups that exist as legal entities, and the individuals who belong to the group can choose to leave the group if they don’t like it.
The boomers are only a group in the most abstract way. There is no individual who can speak for, or take responsibility for, a demographic group. Nor can people “quit” a demographic.
And that’s what my whole argument is about — the ascribing of blame or responsibility for a group that (in my opinion) can not possibly be held accountable because there is no unified voice. There is no “one.”
Hm. I agree with both Rachel and Ed (blork) here - at the same time I think Rachel’s personal experience with boomers, specifically her parents who maybe represented the extreme end of the mythos, is perhaps colouring her perception unduly, and Ed isn’t acknowledging something - which has sort of gone unstated - I don’t think you’ll ever find a Boomer who finds their portrayal as the Chosen Generation unflattering. Certainly there are those who are more humble about it, on the personal level - Beth’s simple chronicle of events being a prime example - but we’ve had to grow up, as has been said over and over again by boomer-friendly or boomer-owned media, that the Boomers were the Best Generation Ever(tm) and if you had the misfortune to be born too late, well, sucks to be you. I remember that horribly condescending Time magazine cover story, “twentysomething” which was like the cast of Singles made into a puff pop culture piece, that got everything wrong. The only honest chronicler of the experience - both as a generational cohort and an observer of the Canadian side of it in particular - is still Douglas Coupland.
frintstance: There is no mainstream music magazine or guitar magazine that doesn’t put the Rolling Stones or Hendrix on their cover at least once a year. Why don’t they put Johnny Marr, Ani DiFranco or Graham Coxon on their covers - ever? Aren’t they equally influential? Well, at least Mojo magazine is now starting to cater to 80s / Madchester nostalgia, they seem to have realized all the Grateful Dead fans’ eyesight is collectively too poor for their fine print anymore ;) (he said, tongue in cheek.)
May perhaps be of interest:
“Les boomers finiront bien par crever: Guide destiné aux jeunes qui devront payer les pots cassés” by Alain Samson. 164p. Les Éditions Transcontinental.
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