“Someone coming of age in 1950 lives through JFK, the soaring rhetoric of Martin Luther King, the Mickey Mouse Club and Leave It to Beaver,” says Steven Gillon, resident historian of the History Channel and author of Boomer Nation. “After 1960, their memories are Watergate and oil embargo.”
Yet, they have been lumped into one demographic behemoth (77 million) that has guided marketing decisions, transformed history and politics and reshaped entertainment sensibilities for more than six decades.
As the nation marks the 65th birthday of the first Boomers beginning next month, the millions born at the tail end of the generation are feeling a disconnect.
That is why Strauss & Howe (‘Generations’) defined the Baby Boom as a [i]cultural[/i] generation between 1943 and 1960, rather than a strictly demographic one.
Children born after 1942 had no functional memory of WW2, whilst those born after 1960 had no memory of the Kennedy assassination.
What’s interesting is that Strausss & Howe describe the early Gen X kids (Thirteens in ‘Generations’) as having, persistently, the worst and most enduring social pathologies of any birth cohorts before or since. It seems to fit with a certain high public official born in 1961.
I find a huge fault in defining generations culturally than offspring of another generation. I was born in 1960 and do not remember Kennedy assassination. Vietnam name was vague even though my father left my mother and us kids for a tour in Vietnam. Finally Watergate was this dumb thing that preempted Saturday morning Cartoons.
I do have a better way to define us. In every generation at the tail end, there is a younger sibling group. We at the tail end are the hand me down generation of the boomers. We did not define our generation’s culture we got culture handed down to us. To use an 1960’s analogy, while the older sibling went to the commune, Canada or Vietnam, we were moved in to the older sibling’s room, got the old clothing and the record player with the record collection.
#2 scatcatpdx
[blockquote]In every generation at the tail end, there is a younger sibling group. We at the tail end are the hand me down generation of the boomers. We did not define our generation’s culture we got culture handed down to us. To use an 1960’s analogy, while the older sibling went to the commune, Canada or Vietnam, we were moved in to the older sibling’s room, got the old clothing and the record player with the record collection.[/blockquote]
I think that is very true. You are about my age, what some have called Generation Jones. Our older brothers and their friends played Deep Purple etc to us, and we put up with it.
Sorry, that link should be to Generation Jones
I remember Generation Jones, I never bought into it. It seem all Generation Jones was vehicle for Jonathan Pontell self promotion.
My brother and I are the 13th Generation in North America. Both of us were born before ’64. Neither of us consider ourselves “boomers” and we share almost nothing in common with that demographic. We are firmly GenX.
Interesting thought about each gen coming on the tails of the one before. I was born in 55. While I do remember JFK; and Viet Nam was to reach profound importance with turn of 1970, the civil rights struggle was, for me, with other people in other places. Might as well have been other times. Probably more to the point is that many of the things that are said to typify boomers are real to me, many of them, like “Howdy-Doody†are only real from re-runs. Even for Viet-Nam, I turned 18 just a few months after the actual draft formally ended in January ’73 (we were all classed AH, for A-holding), and all my ruminations were moot as well as wrong. I got to Univ just –after- the protests, the only groups still trying to get any energy out of that were us folks at the Baptist Student Union.
Everywhere, even at the somewhat radically volitional charismatic church (and my first Anglican) I seemed to arrive just as the big noise was winding down. Even 5 years would have been a huge difference. Although I feel a “boomer†identity, it is that of a boomer tag-along, a real boomer’s kid brother.
For my sister, just 4 years younger, none of that makes any sense, and she sees her own coming of age formational period as roughly the ‘80s. In many ways, her cultural identity connects better with my children than with it does with me!