03-11-2019, 01:30 PM
I interpret the generational cycle as a consequence of the norms of the lifetime of human development from birth to either death or senescence (the latter two having much the same role in making people finally and permanently irrelevant except for fossil influence). To be sure, someone like Vincent van Gogh or George Gershwin (both of whom died rather young) could influence the creative activities of people beyond even a normal lifespan, but they could not participate.
The ages to which people not only live but have relevance because they have cohorts of constituency have gone from sixty-something to eighty-something. An additional twenty years of relevance to a generation means that it can have influence longer than it once did. Such ensures that there will be four active adult generations in place instead of three. So contrast 1939 to 2019:
Progressive 80-96 Silent 77-93
Missionary 57-79 Boom 59-78
Lost 40-56 Thirteenth 38-56
GI 15-39 Millennial ? - 37
These generations are relatively well aligned 80 years later, but you will clearly notice that the Progressive Generation was almost completely gone as an influence by the late 1930s. The second-most-powerful person in American politics, the Speaker of the House, is part of the Silent generation, and two people who have some significant chance of becoming the 46th President (Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders) are at the late end of the Silent generation.
Something else: mass media seek teenagers as a market for their culture, and such may thrust youth into adult identity and consciousness earlier than was once so. The voting age has gone from 21 to 18, and it is imaginable that that could make a huge difference in the 2020 Presidential and other elections. Kids in their late teens are at least as sophisticated and learned as any such generation ever. With their computers and the Internet they can get answers to questions to which others had no easy answers.
The 57-year gap between the last GI's and the first Millennial adults was between 18-year-old adults and 75-year-old adults in 2000 and is now between 37-year-old adults and 95-year-old adults in 2019. In the meantime, the civic component of American life has gone from being moderately-to-extremely old to dominating the young-adult phase of life. Unlike the Lost, the GI's were going to resist being carted off in the Big Yellow Taxi (Joni Mitchell)* to the nursing home to be largely forgotten; such is so with the Silent and will soon be so with Boomers. The Civic component of public life did not go into hiatus in the 1990s even if it weakened as GI's started aging into oblivion; Millennial youth became adults as such happened.
Yes, yes, yes: Donald Trump exemplifies what is worst in an Idealist generation: fanaticism, arrogance, selfishness, and ruthless. He is almost as objectionable as those Transcendental planters who countered the Abolitionist movement with the insistence that people not slave-owners recognize slavery as the best thing that ever happened to Africans. Yes -- the exploiters expected others to see them as benefactors of those that they exploited, repressed, and brutalized. I expect Americans to repudiate Donald Trump -- or (the worst way the Crisis of 2020 can go for America) that the rest of the world can repudiate the America that gives in to a horrible leader.
The best Boomers may be the ones who got sidelined in the Age of Greed. There is nothing Lincolnesque or Churchillian about Donald Trump.
*Don't it always seem to go/That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?Pave paradise... put up a parking lot!
The ages to which people not only live but have relevance because they have cohorts of constituency have gone from sixty-something to eighty-something. An additional twenty years of relevance to a generation means that it can have influence longer than it once did. Such ensures that there will be four active adult generations in place instead of three. So contrast 1939 to 2019:
Progressive 80-96 Silent 77-93
Missionary 57-79 Boom 59-78
Lost 40-56 Thirteenth 38-56
GI 15-39 Millennial ? - 37
These generations are relatively well aligned 80 years later, but you will clearly notice that the Progressive Generation was almost completely gone as an influence by the late 1930s. The second-most-powerful person in American politics, the Speaker of the House, is part of the Silent generation, and two people who have some significant chance of becoming the 46th President (Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders) are at the late end of the Silent generation.
Something else: mass media seek teenagers as a market for their culture, and such may thrust youth into adult identity and consciousness earlier than was once so. The voting age has gone from 21 to 18, and it is imaginable that that could make a huge difference in the 2020 Presidential and other elections. Kids in their late teens are at least as sophisticated and learned as any such generation ever. With their computers and the Internet they can get answers to questions to which others had no easy answers.
The 57-year gap between the last GI's and the first Millennial adults was between 18-year-old adults and 75-year-old adults in 2000 and is now between 37-year-old adults and 95-year-old adults in 2019. In the meantime, the civic component of American life has gone from being moderately-to-extremely old to dominating the young-adult phase of life. Unlike the Lost, the GI's were going to resist being carted off in the Big Yellow Taxi (Joni Mitchell)* to the nursing home to be largely forgotten; such is so with the Silent and will soon be so with Boomers. The Civic component of public life did not go into hiatus in the 1990s even if it weakened as GI's started aging into oblivion; Millennial youth became adults as such happened.
Yes, yes, yes: Donald Trump exemplifies what is worst in an Idealist generation: fanaticism, arrogance, selfishness, and ruthless. He is almost as objectionable as those Transcendental planters who countered the Abolitionist movement with the insistence that people not slave-owners recognize slavery as the best thing that ever happened to Africans. Yes -- the exploiters expected others to see them as benefactors of those that they exploited, repressed, and brutalized. I expect Americans to repudiate Donald Trump -- or (the worst way the Crisis of 2020 can go for America) that the rest of the world can repudiate the America that gives in to a horrible leader.
The best Boomers may be the ones who got sidelined in the Age of Greed. There is nothing Lincolnesque or Churchillian about Donald Trump.
*Don't it always seem to go/That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?Pave paradise... put up a parking lot!
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
