Generations

I'm confused by the labels we affix to different generations in American culture.

After the WW2 generation (retro-actively referred to as the "Greatest Generation"), came the baby boom.  Lots of babies were born around the same time.  Okay, there's a name for that generation.  Got it.

Then all the Baby Boomers started having kids around the same time (late 60s, early 70s).  This generation didn't have a name.

Then in the 90s, people started talking about something called "Generation X."  I wasn't sure what that was at first, but judging from the magazine articles, it seemed to be people born in the 80s, who in the 90s, were now into extreme sports and watching Brady Bunch reruns ironically.  Okay, so what about the people born between 1945 and 1980?  Apparently, these people were ALSO technically Baby-Boomers.

How the hell does somebody who grew up watching Elvis Presley fall into the same category as people who grew up watching the Brady Bunch (not ironically)?  Later, I found a website (back when the internet was new, and discovering a new website was actually interesting) talking about people stuck "in between Baby Boomer and Generation X."  It was a bunch of 70s and 80s nostalgia, and I could totally relate to it, but then again, so could my mother, which I guess somehow makes us both the same generation?  How do you get two generations with enough of a gap between them, to house two LITERAL generations?

Shortly thereafter, I heard about a thing called "Generation Y," which seemed to be kids born in the 90s.  So wait, let me get this straight.  The dates of the last three generations were 1940s, 1980s and 1990s?  How did we skip over forty years, and then wedge another one in after just ten years?  Who is spacing out these generation labels?

After that, I didn't hear much about the subject, but just recently, I started hearing a lot about a generation called the "Millennials."  Are these people born in 2000?  No, apparently, this is the same group of people as Generation Y, just under a different name.  (They've also been called the "Echo Generation," because they're supposedly no different than their parents.)  And to add yet another twist, I learned that all those Gen-X-era magazines and shows had it wrong.  It turns out, that Generation X was born PRIOR to the 80s, and isn't about extreme sports, but is instead, about big hair and all that other cool 80s shit.  Okay, so I was a Gen-X-er all along, and never knew it?  That still leaves a pretty big gap between Baby Boomers and Generation X, but at least now we're sort of spaced out, right?  Baby-Boomers, 1945-1970.  Generation X, 1970-1985.  Millennials, 1985-2000.  Maybe we can space these out even more evenly, and make 1965 the cutoff point for Baby Boomers, and push Millennials up to 2005, then each one gets a twenty-year span.  Sure, some people are still going to be on the cusp, but it's only an approximation.  Sounds good, right?

Well, no, apparently.  Because Generation X seems to have dropped off the map completely in recent years.  Now the big generation gap that everyone is talking about is Baby-Boomers to Millennials.  Wait, so I'm a Baby Boomer now?!  What kind of a "boom" lasts for forty years?!  If I'm a Baby Boomer, then ask me where I was when Kennedy was shot, or during Woodstock.  Nowhere!  That's where!  But I sure as shit remember the Berlin Wall coming down.  I didn't listen the Beatles, I listened to Def Leppard.  I didn't watch Kennedy get shot, I watched the Iran-hostage crisis.  I didn't live in the era of LSD, I lived in the era of cocaine.  How the fuck am I in the same category as the Baby Boom?

I would say bring back the Generation X label, but honestly, I never really liked it.  "Baby Boom" makes sense.  "Millennial" makes sense.  "Generation X" just sounds like somebody couldn't think of a name and just made one up on the spot, like it was supposed to be a place-holder until a better name could be thought of.  Plus, it still makes me think of all the use of the letter X in front of things in the 90s, supposed to make them seem cooler than the actually were.  (Remember the XFL?)  Personally, I could think of about a million better names, like "the Star Wars generation," or "the Reagan generation," or "the Cold War generation," or "the MTV generation" (used occasionally in passing, but never really caught on), or hell, even just flat out call us "80s people."  But no, we just get called nothing at all.  As far as the current social-commentators are concerned, there was a baby boom in 1945, and now we're here, half a century later, with the Millennials.  Nothing important happened in between.  You fought in Vietnam, and your kids are texting, just like that.

In fact, it seems like the commentators are trying to manufacture a sort of culture-war between the Boomers and the Millennials.  Look, we tried this back in the 80s with tired old sit-com plots about parents not wanting their kids going out in ripped jeans, and old people being scared of teenagers with purple mohawks.  Sadly, we never were able to recapture the glory days of the REAL generation war between the Greatest Generation and their kids.  This wasn't a difference in fashion or music.  This was night and day, or more accurately, Barry Goldwater's America turning into Noam Chomsky's America.  (Far right to far left, for those having trouble with the references.)  Today's cultural transition is more like moving from moderately left to moderately centrist.  Even the music and fashion hasn't changed THAT much in the last thirty years, except that maybe things have kind of melded together, like a person in a suit and tie with a few blue highlights in his hair, or a couple of hip-hop verses mixed into a pop song.  Any attempt to pretend that "old folks" and "young folks" are from two different worlds just seems weak.

Oh sure, my generation does have a few things to say about the younger and older generations.  Nothing major, or for that matter, even critical.  Just a few occasional passing remarks like, "I'm sorry you young people never got to watch MTV when it was actually cool and played music," or "Thank you, old people, for fighting for equal rights for women and minorities."  Basically, my generation, whatever the fuck you want to call it, had less of the hardship, more of the style, and... okay, the constant fear of nuclear annihilation, but hey, at least we weren't pressuring women to shave their pubic hair off.  Oh yeah, that reminds me.  We also had more R-rated movies.

My point is that if we're going to have a discussion about generations, can we at least first come to some sort of an agreement as to what exactly those generations are, instead of just skipping around and redefining the terms based on whatever's convenient to create whatever narrative the commentator of the week is trying to put forth?  Call all the generations by their proper labels, or don't call them any labels at all.