Generational Divide or Not?
Newsweek recently ran an article about a generational divide between millenials and Gen Z on one side and the other generations on the other side. This is filled with numbers from various polls, but Newsweek, in my opinion, has drawn the wrong conclusion from the numbers. The magazine points out the disparity in job mobility and economic status between the two sides and claims this is the explanation. While the numbers quoted are, I'm sure, accurate, they don't get to the root of the issue. Notice that I said "Issue" and not "Problem." Newsweek believes the numbers reflect a difference in patriotism; I contend that it is a difference in baseline.do
The article found that each generation going backward in time was more patriotic - expressed as proud to be an American - than the generation that came afterwards. Of course that's correct, and has been for a long time. As one ages, one generally becomes more conservative in life-view. Churchill observed that a man who was not a socialist at twenty had no heart, and a man who was not a Tory at 40 has no head. That is overly simplistic, but it expresses the same sentiment at the referenced polls.
After more than 70 years of observing human behavior, I came to the conclusion that for everyone, history began the day the individual became self-aware. I refer to that as the individual's baseline. The individual has no first-hand knowledge of, perhaps more importantly no first-hand emotional response to, the momentous events that shaped earlier generations. I was born in 1948, and my baseline was established around 1951. The events that shaped my parents' generation included the Stock Market Crash, the Great Depression, World War II and our national flirtation with fascism, followed by a flirtation with Marxism. I only knew this because of dinner-table discussions and my own reading. Those things happened, but they didn't affect me. The events that shaped me included a real and omnipresent threat of nuclear war, the cultural growing pains of the 1960s, the civil rights movement, the Landmark legislation in the 1960s and obfuscated government accounting. The earlier stuff didn't matter, because everything had been in stasis since the Big Bang until the day I became self-aware.
My baseline informed my conclusions that everything that was wrong with the world and with the US in particular had always been this way, and nobody had cared enough to try and fix things. I was the first person ever to discover racism and the plight of black America, and nothing had ever been done about that. I was the first person in history to observe that we needed decent-paying jobs, and that there were people going hungry, and most people could only barely afford to buy a house. Since there had been no progress on any of these issues, others did not care. I was a secret Marxist at 12, and a confirmed socialist at 21. God, I was a self-centered ass.
Generation Z and Millenials are furious about the state of affairs they inherited. They blame Baby Boomers for the malice involved in denying them good-paying jobs, forcing them to take on more debt than can be repaid in a lifetime, in exchange for a college degree qualifying them only to be a barista. The evil generation before them didn't care at all about racism, homophobia, xenophobia or bigotry, and was preventing them from pursuing their dreams. These folks are enraged, just as I was at 20.
Curing the rage is impossible, we can only treat the symptoms. Self-awareness arrives between age two and five. The second great awakening occurs around age 25 when the prefrontal cortex matures, and we are able to raise our eyes from our navels.
Thanks, Bill.
This is irrelevant to the topic at hand (and I am certainly doing my own fair share of navel-gazing) but I have had a tough week -- dealing with the aftermath of a couple of thefts and an unresponsive and indifferent law enforcement system. Measured, rational writing by you and Kathleen makes me feel as if society has perhaps not yet come completely unglued. There are still a few sane voices left in the hooting jungle of Internet discourse.
I think the end of the draft changed a lot. Like you I grew up with WWII images in my world...all the fathers had gone to Europe or the Pacific. American Legion and VFW were my growing up world. Thinking about this.The Vietnam War was the first on TV (before that newsreels) and the educated class did not go. My first husband was exempted as a student; my second was drafted and was in Vietnam during Tet. Most of the people I work with at a university are not Veterans and took their anti-war feelings to the class room.