Identity Crisis? No, We’re In This Together

The 40th anniversary of the moon landing on July 20th brought the whole thing home to me once again: The “Baby Boomer demographic” (Generation B-Squared) includes people born from 1946 to 1964; it covers includes people born 18 years apart. So why is it considered a “generation” with defining characteristics? First of all, the cohort is a product of the United States Census Bureau, which deals in numbers. When you look at birth rates, you’ll see that post WWII, as soldiers came home from war and the nation celebrated an unprecedented prosperity, lots of couples made lots of babies—76 million of them. Then, suddenly, people stopped having sex or something, and number of births dropped precipitously (call that Gen X), until about 1980, when the Baby Boomers began having babies. (Call these Gen Y.) If while my daughter was in college she couldn’t understand how she could belong to the same generation as her very different, but only three years older, brother, then how can we expect someone born in 1946 to be lumped together with a youngster born in 1964?

Well, let’s begin our query with The United States Census Bureau. They say they aren’t interested in the cultural implications of collapsing into one entity this huge cohort. Nevertheless, in 2006, when the first Baby Boomers started turning 60, they released a “fact sheet.” (See http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/006105.html.)

Yes, it’s “just the facts, ma’am,” as a famous TV detective once said. But there’s a lot of cultural information in this “fact sheet.”

For a long time is was my opinion that if a real Baby Boomer would know exactly the TV character to whom I’m referring. And if you didn’t know—well you either recently emerged from the fallout shelter your family retreated to during the Cuban missile crisis or you were born after 1958.

Not that I have anything against people born after 1958. I’d say that considering my niece and nephews, great niece and nephew, my own kids (for heaven’s sake), their friends, and a whole bunch of people I’ve worked with or met through various places were born after 1958, I do not feel at all estranged from people born after 1958. Some of best friends were born after 1958.

Nor do I have any problem with including the 1958-1965’ers in the Baby Boomer cohort. It all has to do with numbers.

However, there’s a strong argument that those Boomers born after 1958 aren’t quite the same as those of use born in the preceding twelve years. Almost none of them were at Woodstock (unless they were small children, and there were many small children there)—another event whose 40th anniversary we’re fast upon. Not that I was at Woodstock. I was still in high school and didn’t have a car or friends adventurous enough to defy their parents and go after being forbidden. (Because our parents knew! They knew what we were getting ourselves up to!) Or perhaps I simply didn’t have enough money for enough gas to get my friends and me to not-Woodstock; as it turned out Bethel, NY. (Again, I didn’t have my own car!) But my sister was there, and in the movie there are many shots of people I knew. After all, to quote Joanie Mitchell, by the time they got to Woodstock, they were half-a-million strong. So that means that 1/38th of my Baby Boomer cohort of 76 million attended, or something like that, which raises the possibility that I would know attendees pretty high.

While doing some research recently, I came across a reference to the name “Generation Jones” to refer the section of the Generation B-Squared born between 1954 and 1965. Evidently, about three people have used this term, and none (including the man who coined it) can pin down whether it refers to “having a jones” for something , “keeping up with the Joneses” or stems from all the times the name “Jones” appeared in 1970’s pop music. (See http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-6452129_ITM for a pretty good article from the Denver Post. Apparently some guy thinks he can garner attention by inventing meaningless terminology. This seems to be a rampant flaw of sociologists and “cultural critics.”) Yes, that moniker makes no sense; the demographic numbers don’t indicate a big shift between 1953 and 1954. But one major factor points up why this is not a good division of the generation anyway:

People born in 1954 can answer the question, “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” They were in their fourth-grade classrooms and have a good memory of the exactly what they were doing. So they were there for seminal incident of the time, something that completely defines the Baby Boomer mentality.

For a while that seemed to me to be the real Generation B-Squared characteristic. And that left out people born after 1958, because only some people who were five years old that day in November 1963 have true memories of being sent home from school or watching the funeral on television and seeing John-John salute his father’s coffin.

However, the more I thought about it, I felt I had more in common with those then-five-year-olds than I didn’t. Newsweek writer Jonathan Alter, born in 1957, argues that the second half of the Baby Boom was influenced by the culture of the 1970’s, not the culture of the 1960’s. (See “Twilight of the Baby Boom,” http://www.newsweek.com/id/107583.) What Alter forgets is that the supposedly defining aspects of the 1960’s happened at the end of the decade, like Woodstock, and that the supposed sexual revolution didn’t really get underway until the 1970’s. (I began college in 1970, and the first couple weeks of school, boys weren’t allowed above the lobby of my dorm.) The critical aspects of the 1970’s grew out of the 1960’s. Nothing much changed—until the 1980’s, when we ran into AIDS and “greed is good.”

True, the later Baby Boomers are a whole bunch younger than I am, like half a generation. But they are beginning to face some of the same issues. Look at Barack Obama, whom Baby Boomers can claim as one of our own, according to the demographic definition of the cohort. He’s going grey. So is Hillary Clinton, born 1947 (though she has a fantastic hair stylist). She worries about an aging parent; so does Obama (his wife’s mother, his own parents being dead). In my book it’s no coincidence that Obama is trying to pick up on health care where Clinton finally threw up her hands over a decade ago. The older the younger Boomers get, the more we have in common.

Back to the moon landing, though: I was listening to the radio on the July 20th anniversary, and the program host, before playing some moon-themed song or another, said, “do you remember where you were that day? Considering it was a summer evening, I must have been home on my couch in front of the TV.” Evidently, she’s a little bit younger than I am, because I was at a friend’s house, with a bunch of rising high school seniors (plus some younger sibs), watching—and having a generally hilarious time until THE moment. My memory is so clear: a man in a space-suit walking slowly (sort of bouncing) and speaking some barely intelligible words about a big step for mankind, Walter Cronkite saying, “wow,” two guys trying to raise the American flag in moon dust. We hung on every movement, every word, so well aware that we were watching history that we stopped having fun for several minutes. (The next morning I left with my parents for Nova Scotia on our last “family vacation.” I spent I week trying to avoid them in very close quarters, terribly embarrassed that anyone would think me their child.)

So does that mean there is a clear division? The last of the Baby Boom babies would have been five or not quite on July 20, 1969. I just said that five-year-olds don’t have reliable memories. For the sake of argument, to bolster my contention that Boomers are indeed a definable whole, do I now take that statement back?

I think maybe I shall. I think that what all of us born between 1946 and 1964 share is ultimately more important than whether one was actually born before the day Kennedy was shot.

Of course, this will make the section of the book I’m writing on Baby Boomers that covers what we’re supposed to know just because we’re baby boomers much more difficult to write. Not only did I miss a lot of that “generation-defining” stuff that was going on right under my nose—my parents were anti-Disney, for good reason, so I didn’t see the original The Parent Trap with Haley Mills until I was much too old to enjoy it—there’s a lot that people ten years younger than I really relate to that I can’t—like School House Rock.

But why, people have asked me, do I even care? Is it just because I want to get a book out of this? Yeah, sure. That’s part of it. This book—and stay tuned as it gets written and published so you can buy it and help its Amazon numbers go sky high—is a lot of fun to research and write, and it will be a lot of fun to read. But the other part is that I’m unwilling to let go of a huge section of a huge cohort that shares a lot of ideals and, because of its size, can have terrific political clout. In other words, whether a member of Generation B-Squared is 45 or 52 or 63, there are a lot of values we hold in common. So let’s use our terrific power to get health care passed, to see gay marriage become legal, to shore up social security (some of us are almost there!), to save our environment, and on and on.

And meanwhile, I’ll have to catch up with The Brady Bunch on YouTube.