Boomer, wake up. Generations, Part One of Three

I saw this headline on a financial website:

Why The 'Me, Me, Me' Generation Needs Help From You, You, You

In fairness, this categorization was not made by the author of the article, who reluctantly admitted that he's technically part of the Millennials, the generation this article is about.  Indeed, he stated:

Of course, for all of the criticisms and accusations lobbed at millennials, by any standards, they've been dealt a pretty rough hand as they attempt to begin their adult lives. The earliest millennials have already been forced to endure two stock market crashes and multiple armed conflicts (sparked by one of our nation's most traumatic experiences in a century), and they've inherited a world with some of the least-trusted leaders in history, a trend that doesn't seem likely to change any time soon.

Time magazine came up with the " 'Me, Me, Me' Generation" categorization.

It did that in 2013 in an article in which it noted:

I am about to do what old people have done throughout history: call those younger than me lazy, entitled, selfish and shallow. But I have studies! I have statistics! I have quotes from respected academics! Unlike my parents, my grandparents and my great-grandparents, I have proof.

Here’s the cold, hard data: The incidence of narcissistic personality disorder is nearly three times as high for people in their 20s as for the generation that’s now 65 or older, according to the National Institutes of Health; 58% more college students scored higher on a narcissism scale in 2009 than in 1982. Millennials got so many participation trophies growing up that a recent study showed that 40% believe they should be promoted every two years, regardless of performance. They are fame-obsessed: three times as many middle school girls want to grow up to be a personal assistant to a famous person as want to be a Senator, according to a 2007 survey; four times as many would pick the assistant job over CEO of a major corporation. They’re so convinced of their own greatness that the National Study of Youth and Religion found the guiding morality of 60% of millennials in any situation is that they’ll just be able to feel what’s right. Their development is stunted: more people ages 18 to 29 live with their parents than with a spouse, according to the 2012 Clark University Poll of Emerging Adults. And they are lazy. In 1992, the nonprofit Families and Work Institute reported that 80% of people under 23 wanted to one day have a job with greater responsibility; 10 years later, only 60% did.

Well, baloney.

How on earth has the Boomer generation, which authored this opinion, remained so completely delusional about their privileged generational status, let alone their own history?

To hear them tell it, you would think that every member of the Boomer generation walked uphill both ways to school in a blizzard everyday. And now they lament the rootlessness and aimlessness of the following generations, which have failed to follow their examples of hard work and enterprise.

Eh?

Bull.

Now, let me now state that I'm not into categorizing an entire generation; well too much anyhow.  The same Boomer generation that's identified with anti war protests, etc., actually fought in the Vietnam War and it had a higher volunteer rate than the World War Two generation.  So a person can only take this sort of thing so far.

Boomers protesting the Vietnam War.

 Boomers fighting the Vietnam War.

Moreover, the "Boomers" aren't really one single generation, in spite of what demographers might claim.  The generation is supposed to be the one that was born between 1946 and 1964.  Well, baloney.  That may be true in a statistical sense, but when people look at the boomers they're really looking at the generation that came of age in the 1960s and early 1970s.  Indeed, demographers have variously defined people who were born from 1960 to 1965 in various ways, including as members of the following generation, Generation X, or members of their own demographic, the Gap Generation.   What that tells us, and accurately, is that people born between 1960 and 1965 don't fit in well to the Boomers and identify more strongly with later generations, and that''s how we will sue that information here.  Indeed, a kid born in 1960 would graduate high school in 1978, and have very little in common with one who graduated in 1968.  Even at that, graduates from 1980 would have even less in common, and more in common with those graduating in 1988, and maybe even more in common with 88 grads than 78 grads.

Anyhow, having said this, I hear and read shots taken at Millennials all the time, and I think they're very far off the mark, quite frankly.

I just don't see it.

Indeed, what I do see, is quite the reverse.  The Millennials, and the "Gap Generation" and Generation X just ahead of them are sort of uniquely burdened by the Boomers in ways the Boomer just can't seem to grasp.

The Boomers are the most fortunate generation in American history, and they've enjoyed a world, and its resources, like none before it and like none after it. But they don't grasp that all.

Prior to the Boomers, access to college was based on money.  A  high percentage of Americans didn't even graduate from high school prior to their generation, but their parents made sure they did, and having been exposed to university in mass as a result of the GI Bill after World War Two, they made sure that their kids had access to it as well. The entire concept of public assistance going to university came out of the GI Bill and it was the World War Two generation that gave rise to the Boomers that massively expanded the concept. 

The huge difference between then and now is that the Boomers entered life, delayed compared to their parents, in an era of unparalleled opportunity, but they don't realize it. Moreover, they are acclimated to it.  

The 1945 through 1970 period was one in which merely having a college degree was nearly a guaranty of white collar success.  And even though college degrees became exponentially more common in the period, even having simply a high school degree (the dropout rate remained higher than it is today) meant a person could usually find a decent paying job of another type.  Entire classes of jobs that require college now did not require a college degree then.  Europe's economy remained destroyed form World War Two well into this period, and the United States made everything.  All of this meant that it was much easier to be successful than it is now, and much more difficult to fail.  A person with a trade skill or a college education was going to do well, for the most part.

And do well even with the delayed entry into adult life, which the Boomers (as we will see in a later installment of this series) largely experienced.  Prior to their generation, the entire concept of a delayed adulthood, stretching form the late teens up into the mid twenties, didn't exist.  If you look at old photographs and kids graduating from high school look more adult, that's because, as we will really see, they truly were.  Perhaps they were in the Boomer generation as well, as they sense, but not in the same way.

That's because they were really the first American generation to experience a period of delayed adulthood on a generational basis.  It had always been the case that the wealthy and privileged who were able to go to university experienced that, and tales of youthful college life date back to the Middle Ages.  But most people didn't experience that.  Most Americans, as we have explored in prior threads, by 18 were looking for work. They may have lived at home, and probably did (we'll also be looking at that), but they weren't kids.

Indeed, if a person wants a contemporary movie portrayal of what this period was like, sort of, for younger Americans, a good cinematic portrayal of it is provided in the film Marty.  Another good one, sort of, is provided in the film The Apartment.  "Oh no, those films are about adults. . . ".  Yep, but they're about younger adults than you might imagine.  The stay at home blue collar protagonist in Marty does pretty accurately reflect a common generational experience for the time.  And the fact that slightly wayward Miss Kubelik has immediate resort to her sister and brother in law in The Apartment isn't far off either.

Boomers came of age, for various reasons, at a time in which there was much more slack for everything.  The government expanded benefits to the boomers that they still enjoy today and that they're completely acclimated to without understanding that prior generations lacked them.  The wide latitude given to the generation in social terms meant that the generational reaction to the Vietnam War, which didn't occur with the earlier Korean War, fought by men who were only a bit too young for World War Two but who were kids during the Great Depression, was tolerated and even absorbed by the nation.  The same generation that reacted negatively to the war in Vietnam would send later generations to fight in the Middle East without even noting the sense of irony that created.

And coming into power in the wake of the  Vietnam War, it doesn't seem to recall any sense of irony in a generation that was part of a "youth movement" holding on to power with nearly cold dead  hands even though it is no longer the largest generational cohort.  Indeed, that last fact is amongst the most ironic.  The Boomers started entering government in the late 1970s. And there they remain.  This year we see two out of the three candidates fitting into that generation (Sanders is actually from the prior generation, which probably explains why his views seem different, in part).  No post Boomer candidate survived the primaries.  The Boomers will rule on.

But in ruling on, they've forgotten that when they were younger they were defined by rejection of everything they now grump about, even as they fail to realize that they've failed to come fully back around to the values of earlier generations that they've somewhat adopted but not in the softened form that existed for their parents.  They massively, as a generation, rejected the values of their parents.  They wouldn't serve. They rejected the corporate work life.  They laughed at the value of money.  They rejected much of the tradition of male/female relationships.  They felt no standards should be accepted that existed simply because they did.  Drugs, personal license, etc., were all vices they brought into their generation in spades.

And now they complain that the Millennials don't save and don't work.

In 1973 they made a hit out of Taking Care of Business.

You get up every morning from your alarm clock's warning
Take the 8:15 into the city
There's a whistle up above and people pushin', people shovin'
And the girls, who try to look pretty

And if your train's on time, you can get to work by nine
And start your slaving job to get your pay
If you ever get annoyed, look at me, I'm self-employed
I love to work at nothing all day

And I'll be takin' care of business every day
Takin' care of business every way
I've been takin' care of business, it's all mine
Takin' care of business and working overtime, work out

If it were easy as fishin', you could be a musician
If you could make sounds loud or mellow
Get a second-hand guitar, chances are you'll go far
If you get in with the right bunch of fellows.

People see you having fun, just a-lying in the sun
Tell them that you like it this way
It's the work that we avoid and we're all self-employed
We love to work at nothing all day.

Hmmm. . . .

Well, by 1987 they were watching Wall Street, with its punchline.  "Greed is good".  Indeed, both of the current front runners in the current Presidential election, who are Boomers, have lauded Wall Street in the past, and it's only because of pre-Boomer Sanders, who appeals to Millennials, that this is suddenly in question.

Somehow that generation of the 1960s that went to college but which was for peace, love and dope (keeping in mind that this wasn't a universal view, and others were "pround to be an Okie from Muskogee"), and never trusting "anyone over 30" became corporate in the extreme, and in a way their parents never were, in the 1970s.  1956 gave us The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit about the generation that came home from World War Two, but the focus on money that's present in that representational film falls far below that which came to define the Boomer generation in later years.

As we'll deal with shortly, a lot of this criticism of the Millennials, and the Gaps, by the Boomers, is really unwarranted.  Indeed . . . in the great scheme of things, they probably stand closer to the Boomers parents, and maybe even their grandparents, than the Boomers do.  If Boomers feel that the Millennials don't share their values, well they're partially right.  They might share an older set however, with prior generations. And they have to live in the world that the Boomers have dominated since the 1960s, and that's not easy for generations that are faced with having less of absolutely everything.

Of course, that's true of some Boomers, indeed quite a few of them, as well.  All along there were those who worried about the direction everything was going and have had to live with it.  That's cold comfort indeed.

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Postscript

It's been pointed out to me that I'm not on the only one to make some of the observations here.  Stephen Cobert has done the same: