By that thinking .. then I guess the next generation will blame ALL the Gen X'ers and Y's for this huh??
NOW DO YOU SEE HOW WRONG YOUR ARGUMENT IS????
It's NOT a generation thing ..
Posted on 07/12/2004 9:38:33 AM PDT by qam1
1946, 1964 classes don't always agree........
There's a great distance between Barry Manilow and Barry Bonds.
Manilow, the singer, was born in 1946, the first year of the postwar baby boom. About 76 million births later, Bonds, the baseball slugger, became one of America's last boomers. That was in 1964, when demographers say the boom ended.
Typically, those born within that period are lumped together as the "baby boom generation," as if their values, beliefs and habits are unified. In fact, as the "late-wave boomers" turn 40 this year, it's clear that the classes of 1946 and 1964 are often very different, at times resulting in alienation and even finger-pointing.
John Dieffenbach, a 40-year-old attorney in Pleasantville, N.Y., says many of the oldest boomers are "a self-aggrandizing" bunch who treat him like an auxiliary member of their generation. "I'm part of their club but don't get the benefits." He doesn't get the "benefit" of nostalgia - being able to say he recalls when Kennedy was shot or the Beatles arrived in America. And people his age might not receive full Social Security benefits when they retire because the oldest boomers may strain the system.
The oldest boomers came of age at a time of affordable housing, easier acceptance to colleges and better job markets. The youngest boomers struggled through deeper recessions, crowded workplaces and, now, outsourced jobs.
Younger boomers also worry that in the next decade or so, their 401(k) values will fall as retired older boomers cash out of stocks.
"I share very little culturally with a 58-year-old," Dieffenbach says. In 1986, when the media declared "Boomer Generation Turns 40," he was just 22. In 1996, when newspaper articles celebrated "Boomers Turn 50" - counting the candles on their cakes (400,000 a day) and the cash spent on their birthday presents ($1 billion that year) - Dieffenbach was just 32.
"I'm waiting for the 'Baby Boomers are Dead' stories," he says, only half-jokingly.
This month, a new book, "Kill Your Idols," features essays in which rock critics who are young boomers and Generation Xers tear down allegedly classic boomer albums such as "Tommy" by The Who, released in 1969, and "Pet Sounds" by the Beach Boys, out in 1966.
"I grew up with the notion that I missed out on the greatest party ever because I wasn't at Woodstock," says the book's co-editor, Jim DeRogatis, born in 1964. "Well, I've seen the movie, and it's a stone-cold bore."
In his essay, DeRogatis slices up The Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." He mocks one of the 1967 album's songs, "Fixing a Hole," which he says embodies the myopia and self-centeredness of older boomers: "It really doesn't matter/If I'm wrong I'm right/Where I belong I'm right."
The song reminds DeRogatis of two boomers born in 1946: Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. In his autobiography, "Clinton takes 957 pages to say he really didn't do anything wrong," DeRogatis says, while President Bush "still won't say he was wrong" about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction.
Dennis Peterson and his daughter, Dee Ann Haibeck, are boomer bookends, born Jan. 1, 1946, and Oct. 28, 1964. Peterson of Bellevue, Wash., says people from his era "opened the door for a lot of discussions America hadn't been having" - about such divisive matters as race, women's rights, the Vietnam War. He says those of his daughter's era "didn't have the testosterone to get involved in social issues. I don't think they had our sense of responsibility."
Haibeck feels some of her dad's hippie contemporaries "changed our culture for the worse" by making society too liberal.
Dieffenbach has a suspicion about why he and others born in the early 1960s are counted in the boomer generation. As the oldest boomers continue to lobby for power and their legacy, they think there's strength in numbers, he says. "They're just using us to increase their volume.'
Is it because you accidentally told them who you have voted for in your wild, impetuous past? ;)
Why don't you name a few FR Freepers who did that.
You are painting us ALL with a broad brush. Contrary to what you may believe, the vast majority of us weren't in the streets in the late '60s and '70s.
By that thinking .. then I guess the next generation will blame ALL the Gen X'ers and Y's for this huh??
NOW DO YOU SEE HOW WRONG YOUR ARGUMENT IS????
It's NOT a generation thing ..
An excerpt:
Some have suggested that Generation Xers are proud to not be from the baby boom generation and actively rebel against the idealism the baby boomers advocated in the 1960s. Some would also argue that it is not merely the idealism of the 1960s which Generation Xers are rejecting, but a deeper cynicism of the fact that such "idealism", inevitably doomed in its gratuitous naïveté, so quickly gave way to an era unequivocally focused on commercial and industrial progress; a period which incubated many of the problems facing their, and coming, generations. They fantasize about how the 1960s and 1970s supposedly offered Boomers easy sex without consequence while resenting the lasting damage done by an era in which they now realize they were the babies adults were trying so much not to have.
Other people born in the described time period reject the labels as not particularly useful, and point to social class, geography, and other factors having far more influence than chronology. The fuzzy boundaries of Generations X and Y give some credence to this argument; though perhaps, more obviously, such facts underwrite the very problem central to the definition of Generation X, and alluded to in the title itself—namely a crisis of identity.
The problem may be that this generation lacks a core. While Boomers couldn't escape their generational center, Xers struggle to find one. Generation X is the most immigrant generation born in the twentieth century.
Generation X has survived a hurried childhood of divorce, latchkeys, space shuttle explosions, open classrooms, devil-child movies, and a shift from G to R ratings. They came of age curtailing the earlier rise in youth crime and fall in SAT test scores -- yet heard themselves denounced as so wild and stupid as to put The Nation At Risk. As young adults, maneuvering through a sexual barricade of AIDS and blighted courtship rituals, they date and marry cautiously. In jobs, they embrace risk and prefer free agency to loyal corporatism. Politically, they lean toward pragmatism and nonaffiliation. Sometimes criticized as "slackers", they nevertheless were widely credited with a new growth of entreprenuership and the resulting dot-com boom.
The really freaky think is the devil-child movie thing. I never realized until i read '13th-gen' just how anti-child most of American society was in the late 60s and throughout the 70's. Looking back, I do remember restaurants without high chairs, adults-only apartment complexes, and the like. We were the first generation whose parents took pills not to have. And hollywood subconsciously viewed us as evil (see devil-child link above).
No wonder so many of us are messed up. And no, xsm, I don't blame you personally.
That works for me!
A large portion of the generation may not have been at Woodstock, but a large portion did buy into the culture.
Who holds power today and what are the consequences of the culture they bring with them?
You are correct, but don't overstate your case. All polling data shows that your generation was far more liberal as incoming college freshmen than the current crop. You may wish it weren't so, but conservatives were definately in the minority when the boomers were young.
Geez.....give it a rest.
You're sadly mistaken if you believe that those of us who sat through the Vietnam draft were liberal.
Again, you paint with too broad a brush, so you diminish your point.
And as a gentle reminder, take a look at that picture Mo just posted to you; do you plan to deny that that is YOUR generation?
I'm an X-er.... and consider this thread sewage.
Assigning "blame" for cultural changes to groups of individuals simply by the date they were born is even junkier science than John Edward's cerebral palsy propaganda.
"Fantasy" is a good word to describe that passage.
Generation X has survived a hurried childhood of divorce, latchkeys, space shuttle explosions, open classrooms, devil-child movies, and a shift from G to R ratings.
Good god, do you think it was all roses for us? We had TWO wars, a presidential assassination, and all the things THEY lived through.
Unless you are of the group that contends that once you reach 18 you stop learning in life.
Why .. you didn't cause it
And just like in Vietnam .. there are WHOLE BUNCH of Good Honorable Brave people fighting for Freedom today
Should they be blamed for what bunch of Liberals are doing??
IT'S NOT A GENERATION THING .. IT'S A RIGHT vs. LEFT THING
You know I was just thinking the same thing.
Perhaps the legacy of the Generation Xers is that they are the first generation to be so damn ungrateful that they blame everything wrong with their lives on the people who did the best they could before these whiney babies came along.
Blame should be assigned participation, not solely by a few numbers on a driver's license.
Do a little research into who runs and funds those anti-war groups, while your at it look at the funding of the environmental groups. I think you will be surprised.
Nobody here, certainly not me, expects anyone to believe that 99% of all boomers where/are bad people. Just a large portion where decidedly more liberal.
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