On Generations
Nobody Started the Fire, and the Kids Aren't All Right
It has come to my attention that the generational cohort I belong to, the one denoted with the algebraic stand-in, is not well-liked among those that came after us. Millenials think we’re psychos, and Zoomers think we’re Objectively the Worst. For the most part, we ‘65-to-’81ers1 have responded with chortling mockery on These Kids Today With Their iPads and Their Language Sensitivity. You know, exactly as middle-aged people would do.
Because that’s what’s happening. We’re middle-aged now, and it’s our turn in the barrel. To be on the back nine of your lives means the Rising Youth look at us with scorn, confusion, blaming us for leaving them a world completely ruined and devoid of hope.
You know, exactly as we did in our day.
If we’re honest with ourselves, we shouldn’t be mad at it. We shouldn’t expect Zoomers to see us as we see ourselves. They’re our kids, for the most part. Of course they’re gonna zero in on our flaws. Of course they’re gonna look at the world they’re entering, look at us, and say “what did you do?”
And the only answer we have to offer is “we survived.”
Which is not much more than we ever expected, or intended. In our day, ridiculous as it may seem now, it wasn’t guaranteed. Like the Boomers, we grew up under the shadow of Nuclear Armageddon. The Millenials technically did, too, at least the older ones, but they don’t remember it the same. On top of that, American culture was wild and violent during our upbringing. The year of the most violent crime ever recorded in America was 1973, almost dead center of our birthing years. We watched the first wave of deindustrialization. We grew up in the post-60’s cultural wasteland. Boomers might talk of Woodstock, but all we saw was Altamont.2
This, of course, is how we saw it. No one else is going to see it that way. No one else was growing up then. Only we were. Explaining this to anyone else is a non-starter. Millenials and Zoomers came up in a different time, had their memories marked by different things. We don’t — can’t — see with their eyes. Only they can.
So you’re right, kids. The world is full of horror and dread, and your shortcomings at this point are a product of your time and how you were raised. Which was done by us. That’s on us.
But who raised us?
Silents and Boomers, depending on when you came along. The oldest generations that still matter. They’ve had their turn in the barrel already, courtesy of us and the Millenials. They’ve already come to terms with their shortcomings, seen the downside of their youthful ambitions. They know how they fucked up.
So I’m not here to shit on Boomers. That’s obligatory and tired, and besides, Billy Joel was right. We love to say that the world the Boomers entered was a Paradise on Earth, but not many Boomers thought so at the time. The Boomers, too, lived in a time of anxiety and cultural transgression. Sure, many of them enjoyed it at the time, but that also made them the first ones who suffered from it. We can moan about Watergate or stagflation or de-industrialization if we want to, but they watched the President of the United States get his skull blown away, and the guy that did it gunned down before his trial on national TV. Chaos? Bloodshed? None of our times got shit on the 60’s.
You wanna talk about soul-wrenching foreign adventures that killed public faith in the government? I see your Iraqs and Afghanistans and I raise you Viet-fucking-Nam, man. A war that killed not a minor-Civil War battle of guys over the course of a decade+, but 58,000 American soldiers, the bulk of which (52,565) occured in the years 1966-1970, a majority (40,042) just between 1967-69. Plus, unlike today, you didn’t have a choice to not go. Can you really blame the Hippies for kicking up a fuss over getting sent off someplace in the back end of the world, to kill people you’d never met, just to play geostrategic chess with the Soviets and Chinese?
But, as it turns out, most of them did. Approximately 2,594,000 Americans3 served in Vietnam between January 1965 to March 1973. The vast majority of Boomer men answered their country’s call the same way their fathers did in 1942 and their grandfathers did in 1917, and with about the same level of enthusiasm.4 No generation since has been asked to do it, largely because of the noise they made about it. We’ll probably thank them… after they’re all dead.
But surely, this doesn’t cover the Boomers’ flaws, of which we all have chattered about since they hit middle age. Don’t they know that they ruined everything? Don’t they know that they sewed cultural chaos?
Well, they did and they didn’t. As it turns out, most of the tastemakers and trailblazers and troublemakers of the 60’s and 70’s weren’t even Boomers. Ken Kesey (born 1935) was not a Boomer. Neither was Betty Friedan (1921). Neither was Charles Manson (1934). Neither was George Carlin (1937). As it turns out, a lot of the things Boomers loved to take credit for was actually led and organized by the generation before them, The Not-So-Silent Generation.
And what the fuck was their deal?
Other than watching the world go to shit when They were young? A terrible economy in childhood, the world exploding in their adolescence, and a nasty Asian war of their own to fight?5 Sure, good times economically, and with enough martinis and Valium you can stop worrying about the Bomb. They were fine. They didn’t at all feel a need to save the world from horror by dismantling anything that looked like the monstrosities they grew up seeing, and they sure didn’t go too far with it, either. After all, they grew up without running water!
It is literally impossible for someone born after 1950 to really appreciate what the first half of the 20th century was like, and endless roller coaster of war and peace, feast and famine. Nothing any of the rest of us have had to deal with really compares. There’s a reason we call the GI Generation, who raised the Boomers, the Greatest Generation. They went from a prosperous childhood to an economic crisis so bad that it made democracy itself debatable. The Great Depression is the GOAT, sorry kids. You couldn’t get money out of the bank. Unemployment was 25%. The entire country was dotted with tent villages, not just California. It’s the benchmark against which all other troughs are judged.
And after history’s greatest economic collapse, history’s greatest bloodletting6. There’s only one war that’s The War, and that’s World War II. Sure, its utility as a lens to view world events is rapidly diminishing, and that’s a good thing. But it reshaped the way the world and Western Civilization viewed itself. And it killed more members of the U.S. military than any other conflict.7 The men who fought that war saw things no man should see, over and over again, relentlessly without end, for Four Fucking Years. I see your 9/11 and I raise you Pearl Harbor.
And no one had any idea of how to help you deal with it.8 Show any psychological weakness or fatigue and you might get a general slapping you around and calling you a faggot. Time to get together for the big win, boys! Take that hill, boys! Torch those Japs with a flamethrower, boys! Liberate the hell out of that French village, boys! Take another dose of meth for today’s incendiary bombing run, boys! America is counting on you!
Yeah, World War II was the Amphetamine War. Hitler loved the stuff. The Wehrmacht was issued it in daily rations, and some German troops went days without sleeping during the invasion of France. That whole era had a quaint, almost naive devotion to Science and Progress and Medicine to solve all problems. If a doctor said it was good, why, it was good! Out with Old Ideas like Sleep and Elections and Negotiated Treaties! It’s time for Drugs and Authority and Total World Domination Peace! For the People!
So what the fuck do you think those men were like when they came home and settled down and raised families? You think they were the best parents ever? You think they knew the first thing about building a stable society that would survive their era? Or were they so drunk and tweaked on pain pills and Dr. Feelgood’s injections that they were just managing to hold it together, hoping to God they could build enough missiles and arrest enough communists to keep the hammer from falling again? You fucking kids don’t know how good you got it! Now fill the car with leaded and put some scotch in this glass! I need something to wash down these bennies! Make it strong, goddamnit!
The point of all this isn’t to repeat the line that the Old always throw at the Young. The point is to realize that all of us are running the marathon from whatever starting point we’re given, and all of those starting points suck. The ones you didn’t start from might seem good, but that’s because you can’t really see them. This cuts both ways and in all directions. You know your time. The rest is guesswork.
And that’s why I don’t get defensively butthurt when Zoomers grumble at their parents. Not because they’re perfect little angel-victims, or because they have the world figured out better than any other age bracket. It’s because they just started the run. They just hit the moment when it gets really hard, and they have not yet begun to fuck up. They know their struggles better than I do, and I have sympathy for them. But the race is long, and whatever they do, either carry the whole ugly mess forward, or try to fix it and knock something else loose, everyone who comes after is going to give them shit for it.
Every generation, every single one, has over-corrected for the horrors they saw in their formative years. GI’s reached for the chintzy “How Much Is That Doggie In the Window” 50’s culture like a dying man in the desert reaching for water. Silents and Boomers ran from it like zeks departing the Gulag, empowering every Hellish human impulse with Good Intentions. Gen-X gave their souls to Wall Street and the Military Industrial Complex just to be anchored in something that was real.9 Millenials tried to insist that everyone reorder the way we think about everything, so that we could have nice things again. All of it failed, all of it sucked, all of it passed the buck downstream.
You kids today will not be any different. Whatever you do, however you do it, Generation Beta or Gamma or Whatever will look at you sometime in the 2040’s or 50’s and say “What did you do?” and call you the Worst. And you will tell them that they weren’t there and they don’t understand.
And you’ll be right.
That was the original culling, before some demographers tried to dial it back to ‘79. I know it’s all vague, but come on, pick a year and stick with it.
In the same year as Woodstock (1969), The Rolling Stones on the final leg of their US tour decided to to a free concert at Altamont Speedway in California. A bunch of hippies built a stage, gathered bands, and it was supposed to be a whole free trip. But they designated the Hell’s Angels as “unofficial security”, and the bikers got drunk and high and started abusing people, and it kept going and going until someone pulled a gun and the Angels stabbed him to death in front of the stage as the Stones were playing. You can see the whole story unfold — including the murder, which was caught on camera — in the documentary Gimme Shelter.
Source: Vietnam War Statistics
Don’t believe Woodrow Wilson’s or FDR’s propaganda machines: nearly 11 percent of draftees in WWI failed to show, and while the percentage was lower in WW2, it still accounted for 373,000 investigated cases of draft evasion, of whom some 16,000 were imprisoned. Whereas the vast majority of men sent to Vietnam and killed in Vietnam were volunteers.
As it turns out, Korea was not on par with Vietnam, killing a mere 35,500 American boys. No big deal.
You can argue this on percentage of world population, but in terms of sheer numbers…
We always say that the Civil War killed more Americans, but that’s because we count Union and Confederate dead as Americans all. But the Civil War only killed 358,000 United States Military personnel. World War II clears that with plenty to spare.
Apparently during the First World War the US Army had psychiatric consultants study Shell Shock and devise a pretty effective treatment program for it, involving light duty and exhortations to recover your pride as a soldier. As with everything else the Allies did in the First War, the Germans copied it and did it better for the Second. Meanwhile the Americans decided that they didn’t need no head-shrinkers no more and threw out all that noise. So guess which army had the lowest rate of combat fatigue in WW2?
We had one war, Desert Storm, the great football-spiking of the post-Cold War era, the geopolitical equivalent of a drive-by that misses its intended target.