There are times when perhaps we should retitle our blog just that.
I hadn't realized that what I've been calling "the Gap Generation" has actually been defined as "Generation Jones" and that it's actually pretty well-defined. Indeed, according to Wikipedia:
Generation Jones is the social cohort[ of the latter half of the Baby Boomer Generation to the first years of Generation X. The term Generation Jones was first coined by the cultural commentator Jonathan Pontell, who identified the cohort as those born from 1954 to 1965 in the U.S. who were children during Watergate, the oil crisis, and stagflation rather than during the 1960s, but slightly before Gen X.
Yup, that's about right.
And so is this:
* * *
Key characteristics assigned to members are pessimism, distrust of government, and general cynicism.
Yup, again.
And of potential interest:
If I were to quibble, and indeed I'm inclined to do so, I'd not put the floor in 54, as those folks came of age in 72, when the Vietnam War was still on. Indeed, I'd put the floor in 56.
Having said that, it's interesting to read this short synopsis, and frankly it has a lot of merit to it. Taking a look deeper, I'd add a few things, and then I'll expand on that. Indeed, I think it explains a lot why those of us in this generational cohort bristle at the thought that we're part of the Boomers.
Let's look again.
While charismatic leaders like John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. inspired millions of older Boomers to work for — and witness — positive social change, younger Boomers were in preschool or not yet born. Woodstock was a defining moment for older Boomers; younger Boomers have no memories before the Watergate scandal and the cultural cynicism it begat.
John F. Kennedy was assassinated when I was a few months old. I have no personal memory, rather obviously, of him at all, and the phrase "everyone remembers where they were when Kennedy was shot" might as well be stated about James A. Garfield in so far as my personal memory goes. And, while it might surprise people who are old enough to remember him, for those of us in my generation he supplies no sort of inspiration at all.
My mother, I'll note, really admired Kennedy, and continued to admire Jacqueline Kennedy, whom she followed. My father, however, was never particularly impressed with Kennedy, although a Mass card was among the collection of things in his dresser drawer. If I heard about a President that my parents both admired at home, it was most likely to be Truman. What I was left with, regarding Kennedy, is that he was Catholic like us (which my mother would bring up), that he came from a family that my father regarded as a bit dicey in some ways, that he had questionable personal morals, and that he was responsible for the Bay of Pigs invasion, which was stupid. Lyndon Johnson got better overall marks.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was another matter. Everyone admired him, but he seemed like a character from the distant past. Even with King, however, I'm pretty sure all my memories about King came from learning about him in the 1970s, probably starting with junior high or high school, and from the cultural background after he'd been killed. When he was living, I didn't know of his existence. Dr. King was assassinated in 1968, at which time I was five, and I have no recollection of it whatsoever, other than that I can remember riots being on television from 67 or 68, and these may have been the 68 riots that followed the assassination of Dr. King.
Indeed, the Civil Right Era, which was in full swing when I was born, seemed like something that had happened within recent American history, but far enough back it was very removed from our modern lives. That I recall that shows my very early recollections of the times, times that "Baby Boomers" were supposedly living. The civil rights movement wasn't something I participated in, in any fashion. Nor was the "Camelot" atmosphere of the Kennedy Administration.
The same thing could be said about the Vietnam War, sort of, modified by the fact that it was really long. I have some very early recollections of the war, including that a son of the couple who lived across the street was a paratrooper who was serving in Vietnam. I mostly recall that as he had been dating, literally, the girl next door, and when he went on leave during the war he went to Hawaii, and she flew out to visit him, which was a topic of conversation in my parents home. I also recall a sign on a door that stated "War is harmful to children and other living things", which I recall as it was such an odd thing to see in a place where nobody outwardly opposed the war. I was in school at the time, so that may have been actually observed in the 1970s, however. By the early 70s, and maybe even the late 60s, the background of the war was constant and so even the young were fully aware it was going on. But it was the defeat of South Vietnam in 1975 that I really recall, although POWs returning in 1973 or so is pretty vivid as well.
The earliest thing of the "60s" I really directly participated in was the July 20, 1969, moon landing, which we watched on television. Kids were fascinated with space at the time, and we all participated in that. For me, personally, the next thing I really recall was the televised scenes of Jimi Hendrix playing at Woodstock. But you really have to get into the 1970s, with the US invasion of Cambodia, that I was old enough to be aware of what was going on in the world and the culture.
That in turn means that it was really all the way into the 1970s before people like me were aware of what was up, and had a feeling about it, and that came with the backdrop of the 1970s. Indeed, the experience is depicted really well in the television series The Wonder Years, which is specifically set from 1968 to 1973. That means that it involved children who were older than I was, but the setting was pretty accurate. And keep in mind, that I'd place the high school graduating class of Generation Jones as starting at 1976, whereas The Wonder Years is dealing with the class of 1974. I debated where to put that line, but 74, the year after the active participation in the Vietnam War for the US ended, would be another good place to put it. All in all, it has the feeling right, and the characters would have a little more of the late stages of the Vietnam War whereas folks in my line would have a little more of the rampant inflation of the 70s.
In any event, The Wonder Years does a really good job of showing how the "60s Generation", the real Boomers, were observed from Generation Jones from the outside. We didn't participate in the events of the 60s, but they were background. I've touched on this in a way, in a long thread regarding my early years, Growing up in the 1960s. Indeed, in that I noted:
In really real ways, the central events for the Baby Boom Generation, that defined that generation and its view of the world, were like a hand grenade thrown by that generation and its events into a room we were in. It blew up on us.
We didn't fight in Vietnam, but might have known somebody who had a family member who did. The impact of the war on us wasn't the lost cause in Vietnam, but an ineptitude and uncertainty about the American place in the world that followed it. If it was more direct, it was the Laotian kids at school who showed up and kept to themselves, strangers in a very strange land, guest of the nation that had helped wreck their nation. Experimentation with drugs wasn't something cool and enlightening, but a cancer that had crept into society and was wiping out the minds of the young, including kids who were hauled out of junior high and high school as they were them. The revolution of the 60s had torn things down, but it didn't build up anything in its place. We hadn't participated in the counter culture, but by our early teens we were aware of it, and it had its remnants in the girls who still wore elephant bells after their time had passed.
And we didn't participate in an American economy that was the strongest in the world as the world was still recovering from World War Two. By the time we were young enough to be aware of the economy, it was suffering from inflation
And all of that gets back to something noted above. General skepticism.
Like the entry noted, we have memories of Watergate, the Nixon resignation, the failed Carter Administration, the fall of Vietnam, the withdrawal from Saigon, boat people, the Iranian hostage crisis, and rampant inflation.
We're not looking back on that with nostalgia.
We also have memories of lives wrecked with drugs and a drug culture that never went away. We watched the 60s promise of a "counter culture" kill its members and then continue on to the present day and keep on killing. We heard of the "sexual revolution" and then grew up to watch it continue to corrode society and carry on to the modern era in which all that some think about is their glands.
And we graduated into an economy with no jobs. Unlike our older Baby Boomer predecessors, we never enjoyed an economy in which simply holding a college degree meant that a "good job". We had to scramble to find work, and going to college, in our era, involved none of the revelry that the college experience supposedly had come to mean in the 1960s and 1970s, but a landing approach on an economic carrier in stormy seas . . . maybe you were going to make it, or maybe you were going to wreck.
Indeed, we ended up resembling The Silent Generation more than any other. That generation came after the "Greatest" Generation that fought World War Two, and experienced that horror, and the Great Depression, as background to their childhood, like we experienced Vietnam, the Counterculture, and the like. And we were focused, like they were, on getting by.
Also, like the Silent Generation, we didn't have a sense of rebellion against anything. We'd seen that, and it didn't work out, and we bore the brunt of its failures. The Silent Generation hadn't rebelled against the Greatest Generation or the Lost Generation, the two generations that its parents were drawn from. Generation Jones didn't rebel against the Silent Generation or the Greatest Generation, which its parents were drawn from. We mostly hoped just to get by, and were very much aware of what had been lost.
We still are.
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