But the fact is that "generations" don't do things and it's facile to look at the world in those terms. Indeed, in the case of the "millenial" vs the "boomers" it's downright self-defeating. The "boomers" who are failing to "make the hard choices" are actually saving their grandkids from the twisted logic of Pete Peterson who is using generational warfare to agitate for the "millenials" to defy their parents by ... cutting their own retirement benefits. After all, Peterson's not talking about cutting off grandma. He's talking about cutting off grandma's favorite grandson. And grandma is the one fighting to stop it.
When I read
this widely praised op-ed linked above, like everyone else I was moved by its passion and its deep sense of disillusionment. Who wouldn't be? But then again, I'm from a generation that said "never trust anyone over 30" so it's not unfamiliar territory. I get it.
But over the years, as I learned about my own parents experiences and their particular challenges I realized that things get confusing when you start thinking in terms of "generations." Truly, nothing could be more sweeping and imprecise. Every major political, social and cultural battle has people of the same generation fighting
on both sides. It's a nonsensical perspective, which history tends to expose in some fairly embarrassing ways.
I'm reminded of
these exchanges between readers and Rick Perlstein in the Washington Post online chat a while back:
Baltimore: Sir: I just finished reading your excellent Outlook piece, and agree that the '60s won't be "over" for quite some time.
Like you, I was born in 1969 and, perhaps unlike you, have spent much of my life being repulsed by the antics of the Boomers. I used to think that perhaps once the Boomers started graying (and dying) that perhaps people our age finally would be able to not hear them relive their lives over and over again. Unfortunately the next generation (Generation Y, or the Millenials, I think the media generally call them) seems quite taken with the Boomers, or at least the liberal history they offer. Do you see this? If so, do you think they'll find a way to reinvent the '60s yet again?
Rick Perlstein: When people start making generalizations about generations, they drop 50 IQ points, I'm convinced. What the hell are "the antics of the Boomers"? Are you referring to the majority of new 18- to 21-year-old voters who went for Richard Nixon in 1972? They were "Baby Boomers," too.
We understand so little about the complexity and richness of the '60s. We see everything in cliches. That's what my work is about fighting...
Chevy Chase, Md.: As a woman born in 1963, and thus officially a Baby Boomer (although the Obama candidacy has people questioning the 1964 cutoff as too late), I am sick and tired of the self-congratulating navel-gazing of the real Baby Boomers. Give it up, people, it's a new millennium, and there is so much excitement in the world. I truly think the boomers are dragging down the U.S. in more ways than just sucking up Social Security -- you are keeping us in the past and creating a drag on momentum towards the global future. The '60s weren't that great for a lot of the world's population, and we are sick and tired of all the aging white people reminiscing about drugs, protests and free love -- now that you've all bought SUVs, I guess the rest of the world needs to fix global warming?
Rick Perlstein: Like I say, people drop 50 IQ points. Generations are not unitary entities -- they are defined by their conflicts. In 1966, it was teenagers and people in their early 20s, massing in crowds of thousands -- Baby Boomers -- who threw rocks at Martin Luther King when he marched for open housing in Chicago.
We hardly know what the 1960s were.
Anonymous: Do you examine the general values of the generations? I have read commentary about how the youth of the 1960s rebelled against the fear that their parents -- who went through the Depression and World War II -- instilled, and how ironically many of the children of couples who got married in the 1960s have taken the message of the 1960s of more freedom and openness, and because of that are more conservative in attitudes than their parents.
Rick Perlstein: They main factor, I think, was economic. The economy was prosperous and unflappable, like it had been probably in no other society in human history. Many young people could afford personal experimentation in a way unimaginable to today's students, saddled as they are with massive student debt (remember that at Berkeley, one of the epicenters of the student uprising, tuition was free!).
By the same token, this increased the resentment of less-privileged young people for the dalliances of countercultural and antiwar folks who were seen, accurately for the most part, as more financially comfortable than "traditional" young people. It wasn't uncommon for working-class youth to hear "come back when you have that draft thing out of the way," at the factory gates, while richer kids had no problems getting out of their military obligations.
A lot of the resentments were class resentments. Fortune magazine did a huge poll of college students' attitudes in 1969 (like I said, the society worshipped youth; can you imagine a business magazine devoting a whole issue to such a survey now?) and the respondents from the more prestigious tier of schools were considerable more left-leaning than the lower tier.
'60s and the Boomers: To what extent can one separate the psychology of the Boomers from the events of the '60s? Isn't some of the residue of the '60s the self-involved, self-important mindset of Boomers? Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think other generations were as inclined to bloviate about all the great things they learned growing up in Buffalo or to agonize about politicians' "character" the way Boomer journalists do.
Rick Perlstein: Once again, which Boomers? A 1969 study from the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center found that twice as many voters under 35 had voted for George Wallace in 1968 than they had Barry Goldwater in 1964.
Of course, a lot of the Baby Boomers who were radical in 1968 were radical in a very shallow way, and shamefacedly reacted against their former selves and overcompensated by moving right, or by developing a visceral loathing of phantom hippies they see lurking around every corner even in 2007.
It's complicated stuff.
The same complexity can be said for the 2000s. But maybe nobody knows how this shakes out while it's happening and it takes an historian to sort through the data at a later date. And maybe this sounds like stale "get off my lawn" crap from an old person. I get that too. And I'll own it. You get older you see things differently, for sure. (Mostly you see your parents as human, which comes as quite a shock because well ... ew.)
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