oh thank god! genXers finally speak up

Hurrah for GenXers who wrote in to Andrew Sullivan, who was good enough to interrupt the Millennial navel gazing for a moment and post something from our cohort. Daring! Radical! (Seriously, Gen Y. We don’t think you’re all narcissists– neither are all the Boomers– but we’ve seen this excessive media love and generational self-involvement before. –Yrs, the sandwich generation.) I don’t agree with all the responses, but I don’t have to or even want to; I just want the Gen X conversation to happen. I hope this isn’t the last that Sully posts. But note that we’re not on our own thread, just a write-in candidate on Conversation Y, so I’m not holding my breath. With great thanks to this Dish reader who encapsulated so much so well (one of four responses worth perusing):

 

I just want to chime in on the (honestly fascinating) Millennial thread that you’ve been posting for the past few weeks.  As a member of Generation X, born in 1971, I find myself getting irritated when I see Millennials praising themselves for being so much more progressive and iconoclastic than the generation that preceded them. We members of Generation X were and are just as gay-friendly, pot-friendly, pro-equality, information-hungry and skeptical as these kids are; possibly more so.  We just had very limited political power due to our small numbers and the crushing weight of the generations above us. 

There were so few of us that in the 1990s, advertisers barely targeted us, and our mainstream cultural tastes were considered “alternative” – a contradiction I still find pretty hilarious.  I protested the Gulf War in 1991, voted in favor of medical marijuana in California in 1996, and wrote Bill Clinton an angry letter (which I sent via postal mail) when he signed DOMA that same year.  (I have to give him credit for sending back a well-written response, also via postal mail. In retrospect, I kind of wish I’d kept it rather than crumpling it up and throwing it away in anger.)

The recent political shift that so many of us are celebrating is decidedly not a millennial thing.  It’s the product of a combination of factors, including the explosive increase in availability of information to everyone, the fact that both Generation X (approx. 41 million members) and Generation Y (approx. 71 million members) are now of voting age, and the fact that those kids had us, their cool older siblings, to help shape their points of view as they were growing up.

 

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dear millennials: STFU

To be fair, Andrew Sullivan did start it on this occasion. He’s not even a boomer, but seems to have fallen prey to the same infatuation with y’all that so many others have exhibited. Most mysterious behaviour. I didn’t mind that the thread was there at first, but it just kept going and going. And going. Granted, in my increasing aversion I took to skimming the entries, so it’s possible that I missed a mention of Generation X, but I doubt it. Because apparently in Generation Y world there are only Gen Ys and an occasional boomer. Who knew? No, this is not a case of yours truly getting bitter because I’m feeling left out. Cliques were never my style. If I’d seen something more insightful and less self- congratulatory, I would’ve been interested to hear what the up-and-comers had to say.

So imagine my delight and relief when the latest post on Sully’s pernicious thread was from dissenters to the cause. Interestingly enough, from Yers themselves; koinky dink that the most pointed skewering comes from cuspers?

 

I’ve been holding back on writing because I was certain that someone would add some self-critical considerations to all the self-congratulation evident on this thread. Alas, either because of editorial control or because of rampant navel-gazing, no such perspective seems imminent, so in I dive.

I am a grandmother in the Millennial generation, born in 1980. Still, I hardly remember a time without computers and came of political age with Bush, so I place myself in the Millennials. And that’s fortunate, because have you heard how amazing we are? We are socially progressive. We see through the lies of pundits better than older generations. It’s not their fault though, we can do it because we really value “facts” and “analysis” and look things up online, unlike our gullible elders.

To my generational cohort, a plea: get over yourself.

Another:

 

One of your readers says that Millennials are “a little more willing to challenge orthodoxy than those before us.”  This response typifies the problem with trying to use cohorts to explain much at all.  Wow, you guys Occupied Wall Street! Congrats!  Your parents’ generation changed views on whether women and people of color should be treated equally in the eyes of the law.  But you guys stood up to rich people!  Way to challenge orthodoxy.  It’s not like anyone has ever stood up to Wall Street before.

Full post here (wherein you can find a link to the whole thread; knock yourself out). Now if the conversation were to start with this critique, things might start to get interesting. But I daresay we’re looking at a bone thrown to the dissenting POV that will go nowhere.

 

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the downside of liberty (and boomers)

An interesting op-ed by Kurt Andersen, worth the read even if one doesn’t necessarily share his conclusions (and in fact, it’s not entirely clear what those are… his framework raises more questions than it answers).

 

What has happened politically, economically, culturally and socially since the sea change of the late ’60s isn’t contradictory or incongruous. It’s all of a piece. For hippies and bohemians as for businesspeople and investors, extreme individualism has been triumphant. Selfishness won.

From the beginning, the American idea embodied a tension between radical individualism and the demands of the commonweal. The document we’re celebrating today says in its second line that axiomatic human rights include “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” — individualism in a nutshell. But the Declaration’s author was not a greed-is-good guy: “Self-love,” Jefferson wrote to a friend 38 years after the Declaration, “is no part of morality. Indeed it is exactly its counterpart. It is the sole antagonist of virtue leading us constantly by our propensities to self-gratification in violation of our moral duties to others.”

Amen to that. As a GenXer with Silent Generation parents, and ideological gaps aplenty between us (me: Democrat/parentals: Republicans), I must say we do share a level of disgust at what level of bounty the Boomers inherited and ran into the ground for future generations. I think it’s interesting that Andersen talks about the Me Decade without actually talking about the Me Generation that wrought it. GenX had front-row seats to the excesses of the Boomer era and a great many of us entered the job market just in time to enjoy the fallout of the stock market crash of ’87, the S&L crisis, and early ’90s recession. But to back up for a moment in the author’s narrative:

 

Then came the late 1960s, and over the next two decades American individualism was fully unleashed. A kind of tacit grand bargain was forged between the counterculture and the establishment, between the forever-young and the moneyed.

Curious– as though the counterculture and the establishment were totally different sets of people, as though the halls of yuppiedom weren’t well populated by former hippies who had moved on from the pursuit of pot and protest to profit. Not all, to be sure, but that counterculture didn’t exactly settle down to live happily ever after in one big commune after the Viet Nam protests faded away. The Boomers by and large went and got themselves some big helpings of establishment pie.

Towards the end of his essay, Andersen declares, “Thanks to the ’60s, we are all shamelessly selfish.” Well no, actually, we aren’t all. Please speak for your own generation (b. 1954, he’s soaking in it). In my experience, one of the defining characteristics of GenX is a strong sense of personal and societal responsibility (along with a varying dosage of cynicism/despair at the Establishment’s lack of ethics). I can imagine any number of readers giving a derisive snort that claim, but then we did grow up in the shadow of the Boomers and if we warranted any attention at all by that outsized group it was just enough to get dismissively branded as slackers. After that all eyes were on the darling potential and genius of GenY. Given that generation-skipping affinity, what comes next? GenY seems to carry much more of the Boomer DNA of ego and entitlement, yet they shall inherit a really crappy earth from their forbears, and in that they’ve got more in common with us Xers. Here’s hoping all their youthful drive will help turn this ship from its current iceberg collision course. And also figure out how to keep the iceberg from melting.

Andersen mentions the pendulum swings of the past:

 

Periodically Americans have gone overboard indulging our propensities to self-gratification — during the 1840s, during the Gilded Age, and again in the Roaring Twenties. Yet each time, thanks to economic crises and reassertions of moral disapproval, a rough equilibrium between individualism and the civic good was restored.

and presumably envisions another swing towards civic good, but through what means exactly? “Moral disapproval” certainly raises all kinds of red flags for me because it conjures strange visions of economic recovery being tied to some kind of return to Leave It To Beaverism, which the GOP is still so fixated upon. But in whatever sense he means it, does Andersen really believe that we are currently “overboard with indulging our propensities to self-gratification”? We’re not exactly in a hedonistic age at the moment as far as I can tell, except for the filthy-rich 1 percentile. Further, what is the civic good of which the author speaks? In a homogenous society, the “civic good” might be easily conflated with the “common good,” but as diversity increases and along with it differing senses of priorities and values, things get a lot more complicated.

Yes, there’s only so much room in an Op-Ed, but I’m disappointed that Andersen didn’t make better use of it. I’d rather have had substantive opinion to agree or disagree with than spend my time poking at holes (very annoying holes, obviously, for yours truly). Once more unto the breach, with better editing this time?

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