Lead, Follow Or Piss Off

Dougj, at Balloon Juice, wrote a post that struck a real cord with me.

I do get sick of the way everything revolves around boomer narratives. We all joke about hippie-punching, but when Joe Klein goes off on the “far left” (or whatever he calls us now), that is what he thinks he’s doing. And the electorate is polarized along age lines as never before (since the advent of demographically detailed exit polls), though the greatest divide is between those over 65 (who are too old to be boomers) and those under 30, not between Leno’s generation and Conan’s.

The string doing a reverb in my cranium is that the baby boomers won't get out of the way, and have taken to blaming everyone else for their failure to be what they think they are.  See, lately, I've had this boomer jerkoff bitching a fit to me that people got stuff done in the '60s and '70s because they were organized, ORGANIZED I TELL YOU, and now people can't do things because they aren't "organized".  WTF, you baby booming assholes!  The vast majority of baby boomers are still around.  If they think that organization is the key to social change, why are they being so fucking lame about doing it?  Why are they tasking the generation that represents the lull in the population curve to achieve the mighty heights that they did?  They're still around, right?  Where is the march of mid 50 to 60 year olds on the capital to end the Afghan war or provide a Medicare buy in? 

As Dougj indicates, the boomers will pass their legacy on to their children, Gen X and GenY.  I would think, if their values are what they claim to be, they would be passing an activist legacy onto the youth of today, whatever that ends up being called.  Most of Gen X are Reagan babies, and many support the teabaggers.  They can organize, alright, but they do so at the expense of their parents.  If the boomers are all that, then some and a little bit more, shouldn't they be rebelling against their children instead of expecting us 'cusp' folk to do it for them?

(For the record, Barack Obama, many in his cabinet, myself and most of my friends are 'cusp folk'.  Our parents were born before, during or slightly after the Great War.  Our parents weren't hippy organizers of the sixties.  We are neither baby boomers, nor the children of said.  We have been called the 'forgotten generation', due to the overwhelming might of the Boomers.  For many of us to be tasked now to fulfill the holy orders of the Boomer's quest, just pisses us off.)

Comments

[Dave Merriman]

The whiney Boomers aren't getting their every little desire, and they aren't happy about it. Tough Shit.
Generations X and Y are basically spoiled bratlings that couldn't organize a good case of hemorrhoids. Wait for them to actually do something new and innovative, and you'll likely turn an interesting shade of blue...

[JC]

I always thought that most boomers turned into yuppies and ditched their idealistic ways.

I guess my Gen Y daughter can tell the dif between a boomer turn yuppie and an aging hippy idealist activist boomer. She still listens to me.

[Wulfgar]

Gen Y might actually be our hope. Without illumination, I really think they might be. They have different ways of networking their desires, They have different ways of hoping. Yeah, Gen Y might be the answer.

[JC]

Give them some time. The 60's lasted a decade, and changed the world. Of course, we're still being hated for it, but that's beside the point.

[batgrl]

I always have a hard time with these terms to sum up an entire generation, when things really aren't that simple. Especially when most of those terms were really embraced and bandied about by the marketing folk more than say sociologists - the terms are to lump people into groups in order to sell things to them. When you try to turn it around and make generalizations - besides how these groups buy - it becomes much more difficult to be accurate and much less useful to make any predictions. (Or so sociologists and communication scholars say anyhow.) But of course the same could be said for any group where you try and make generalizations - it's only going to be somewhat true for a percentage of that group. And no one can decide what that percentage is. (It's what mass comm scholars chat about at cocktail parties.)

Frankly I think one generalization that always holds true is that a certain amount of people will always blame the current administration for problems caused by the administrations from the past decade. Americans don't tend to see the big picture very well, or looks at things long term. Problem now? Guy in office now caused it, never mind that the last 4 terms led us merrily on the way to this spot. Also the people who answer the pollsters? Not usually up to date on reading up on the latest news.

Having said that, yeah, where are all these marching, organizing boomers? I do see a few at protests, but there should be a lot more of them. If I was rude I'd say something snarky like "maybe they're all typing in all caps in comments of the NYTimes" - but nah, that'd be rude. Heh.

[GTF652]

Congrats on this blog; just discovered it today, and like much of what I've read already. And yes, Obama and many of those in his cabinet are part of that long-lost generation which finally has a name which has caught on: Generation Jones. Google Generation Jones, and you’ll see it’s gotten a ton of media attention, and many top commentators from many top publications and networks (Washington Post, Time magazine, NBC, Newsweek, ABC, etc.) now specifically use this term. In fact, the Associated Press' annual Trend Report chose the Rise of Generation Jones as the #1 trend of 2009. Here's a page with a good overview of recent media interest in GenJones: http://generationjones.com/2009latest.html

It is important to distinguish between the post-WWII demographic boom in births vs. the cultural generations born during that era. Generations are a function of the common formative experiences of its members, not the fertility rates of its parents. And most analysts now see generations as getting shorter (usually 10-15 years now), partly because of the acceleration of culture. Many experts now believe it breaks down more or less this way:

DEMOGRAPHIC boom in babies: 1946-1964
Baby Boom GENERATION: 1942-1953
Generation Jones: 1954-1965
Generation X: 1966-1978