06-25-2019, 12:23 AM
If you accept the Howe and Strauss theory relating to the divide between a Civic and an Adaptive generation, then the definition will not be established until the end of the Crisis, when Civic young adults find themselves in heroic roles and Adaptive youth find themselves on the sidelines of momentous events that define history for perhaps sixty years. The oldest Homeland kids will have been well prepared for heroic opportunities that never came to them.
There was no great divide between the GI and Silent generation until WWII was over. GIs got to storm the beaches at Normandy and Okinawa. The Silent were the well-disciplined, spit-and-polish occupation troops. The slightly-older troops had the dubious pleasure of facing enemy troops fighting desperately to save their Fuhrer or Emperor; the slightly younger ones got to see Germans who no longer heard the incendiary rhetoric of Goebbels and Japanese who had to return to the rice paddies to stave off famine.
OK, this Crisis Era will not resemble the last one (it can't!), the American Civil War, or the American Revolution. Even if this Crisis is as much a calamity for America as it was for Germany and Japan in the last one, there will still be a huge divide between those who find out as they are fully grown-up that what preceded was unconscionable and those who still are a bit wet behind the ears finding out that everything that the discredited leaders told them was a sham. A divide similar to the GI/Silent divide in America also applied in Germany and Japan, if for very different reasons.
So what if we have a relatively bloodless Crisis? Maybe an electoral landslide that knocks out the power-base of the social elite solves seemingly everything (or, on the other hand, establishes that monopolistic gougers and domineering overlords are the best friends that we could possibly have -- if you believe the Hard Right). Maybe we have a 2008-style economic meltdown that makes America's super-rich more concerned with economic survival than with political power -- or cause the disintegration of some private empires with the concomitant appearance of small business serving niches that those behemoths either never served well or served people at too high a price. Maybe we get a consensus on needful reforms of our political and economic order.
The best that any of us can hope for is what the bleakest of all Christmas carols carols (ironic, as I write this halfway between Christmas 2018 and Christmas 2019)... the wrong shall fail, the right prevail!
There was no great divide between the GI and Silent generation until WWII was over. GIs got to storm the beaches at Normandy and Okinawa. The Silent were the well-disciplined, spit-and-polish occupation troops. The slightly-older troops had the dubious pleasure of facing enemy troops fighting desperately to save their Fuhrer or Emperor; the slightly younger ones got to see Germans who no longer heard the incendiary rhetoric of Goebbels and Japanese who had to return to the rice paddies to stave off famine.
OK, this Crisis Era will not resemble the last one (it can't!), the American Civil War, or the American Revolution. Even if this Crisis is as much a calamity for America as it was for Germany and Japan in the last one, there will still be a huge divide between those who find out as they are fully grown-up that what preceded was unconscionable and those who still are a bit wet behind the ears finding out that everything that the discredited leaders told them was a sham. A divide similar to the GI/Silent divide in America also applied in Germany and Japan, if for very different reasons.
So what if we have a relatively bloodless Crisis? Maybe an electoral landslide that knocks out the power-base of the social elite solves seemingly everything (or, on the other hand, establishes that monopolistic gougers and domineering overlords are the best friends that we could possibly have -- if you believe the Hard Right). Maybe we have a 2008-style economic meltdown that makes America's super-rich more concerned with economic survival than with political power -- or cause the disintegration of some private empires with the concomitant appearance of small business serving niches that those behemoths either never served well or served people at too high a price. Maybe we get a consensus on needful reforms of our political and economic order.
The best that any of us can hope for is what the bleakest of all Christmas carols carols (ironic, as I write this halfway between Christmas 2018 and Christmas 2019)... the wrong shall fail, the right prevail!
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.