Intergenerational Relations

First of all, everybody can just relax. Intergenerational relations are fine. We see a lot of click-bait articles to the contrary, but most of those articles reveal their prejudices within the first few sentences. Always keep in mind that all generalizations are wrong, so if someone begins a sentence with a phrase like, “Baby-Boomers,” or, “Millennials,” whatever follows can be discounted as a generalization. That's just one of the fallacies that people are throwing around these days. It's a rhetorical jungle out there!

All talk of “generations” is unreliable to begin with. Babies are born every year, and it is generally true that even a few years makes a big difference in that individual's experience of life. Grouping birth years into generations is something that appeals to journalists and social scientists. Having been identified as a “generation” by Life magazine did not change the experience of so-called Baby-Boomers. It was simply a convenient way to catalog some annoying articles. The bracketed years are never really useful. For instance, the definition of Baby-Boomers may begin in 1945 or 1946, both years are fine, but it always ends with babies born in the early 1960s, often 1965. Those later births may indeed be part of the high birth-count years after the war, but those children shared none of the post-war Baby-Boomer experience. Anyone born after 1954 would graduate from high school after 1972, thereby avoiding the draft for the war in Vietnam. After 1958 and they would know full well as high school freshmen that the draft was off the table. Children born after 1955 were culturally totally different from true post-war Baby-Boomers, because their experience of music, race, sports, the police, magazines, politics, drugs, literature, TV, and the cinema, was totally different. It's hard to find anything useful in characterizing individuals into generations.

Having said that, let's take a look at a typical grouping of recent generations:

1. Generation Z. (Born after 2005.)
2. Millennials. (Born between 1985 and 2005.)
3. Generation X. (Born between 1965 and 1985.)
4. The Baby Boom. (Born between 1945 and 1965.)
5. The “Silent Generation.” (Born between the Greatest Generation and the Baby-Boomers.)
6. The “Greatest Generation.” (The guys and girls who came of age during the Great Depression and got stuck with World War II.)

The Silent Generation is often overlooked in these discussions, and it's not 100% fair. Many of them did get stuck fighting the Korean War, which was awful while the pot was really boiling. They had a lot of advantages, though. They graduated high school in the 1950s, when you could get a decent job right away, get set up very easily, and start a family without anything in particular to worry about. For that matter, you could get into a free university very easily, and even the best universities were surprisingly affordable. So they had it pretty good, as long as they avoided the one year when Korea was a hot ticket.

The Greatest Generation, a ridiculous and hyperbolic description of a bunch of average Joes, is beyond blame for anything, since they are all dead.

So, let's see, the world is in a mess, young people are getting screwed into the ground by cynical governments and market forces that are stacked against the young people, behaviors that no one ever gave a thought to, like having a lawn, accepting plastic bags at the market, or eating steak, are now identified as having destroyed the world, yes, let's see, whom can we hang this mess on? And we need an answer in a hurry, too, because the world only has thirty or forty years left to figure out who is responsible for this situation. Hey Sherlock! Analysis, please!

The world was doing fine up until about 1965, so the guilty parties must be (drum roll), the Baby-Boomers!

I find it revolting that so many people buy into this dubious analysis. It is the hat-trick of fallacies, a triple-header: a generalization; an oversimplification; and a post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. That last one means, “after, therefore because of.” Applied to the Baby-Boomers, it means things were fine until they came along, now things are screwed up, therefore the Baby-Boomers screwed it all up. You'd think that people would be smart enough to see the error in that thinking, but you'd be wrong.

The evil forces at the heart of this kerfuffle have not only deployed public relations forces to drive these bad feelings towards Baby-Boomers, but also are the very people who screwed up the world in the first place. Not wishing to be blamed for their selfish disregard for the public good when it was they who had their hands on the tillers of power all this time, they seek to focus blame on an easily identifiable group that is not able to defend itself: Baby-Boomers.

We old-timers cooperate in our derision, we play into their hands. Whenever a geezer on Facebook says, “nowadays people want free stuff! Nobody gave me anything! I worked hard for everything I've got!” a Millennial recalls that young people in the 1960, 1970s, and even into the 1980s, got lots of free stuff. We got free stuff, like university educations and health insurance, and more importantly we got AFFORDABLE stuff, which was damn near everything else. Sure, we worked hard to make a living and provide for our families, but it was possible in the first place because things were much easier then. Today's young people need to work multiple jobs to afford any kind of life at all, they need to double up to afford the rent, and the odds are that they are foregoing health care because they just cannot afford it. Get married? Buy a house? Have kids? Sorry, no, they are sufficiently challenged to deal with their student loans, much less worry about planning for the future.

But are today's young people so royally screwed because the Baby-Boomers had an easier time of it? No, not in any way, shape, or form. That was the investment class taking over the world while no one was paying attention. Everyday people from every generation should be burning luxury cars outside the mansions of the investment class, and not harping at each other about the minutia of our problems.

Most importantly, what I actually see is people from these different generations getting along fine. Sure, you see some, “okay, Boomer” on the Internet, but not as a general attack, and usually quite appropriately deployed. Old people complaining about young people has been a thing literally forever, and its existence can be proven beyond a doubt from at least the dawn of written language. (“All that we have built will come to nothing because young people today are lazy, privileged little shits.” Written in hieroglyphics on a hidden wall surface inside a pyramid by a worker. I paraphrase.)

In real life, the majority of individuals in both camps, the old and the young, understand very well the old maxim, “as you are, I once was; as I am, so will you be.” We're all on the same road, and it doesn't take a genius to figure that out.

Takeaway time: First, hey, you journos out there! Find some click-bait that isn't hurtful to beloved members of your own families. Lay off the Fake-News style “Baby-Boomers Ruined Everything” articles. Second, everybody, get out there and do more to get to know people outside of your own age group. Learn their problems; walk in their shoes.

Third, and most importantly, know that your anger at the condition of the world is righteous, and focus it where it belongs: on the investment class, what we used to call the “power elite.” As we are having this pleasant conversation, they are out there Hoovering up the last of the dimes and nickels that are within our reach. We, the workers, the drones, the have-littles and the have-nothings, we need to lay off all of the counterproductive behaviors and start pulling together. Age, race, gender, politics, please remember that the problems that we face are much more important than any of these characterizations. Either we do this together or it doesn't get done.

Only together will we have a chance to steer the world back onto a path that includes some measure of social justice. To fail will be to accept the only offer that is on the table: death in the gutter. I'm not ready to accept that failure as inevitable.