What do you think are the major pros/cons of each current generation?

[Eric the Green]

Quote:- As a millennial, I always got the sense they were trying to groom me for some moral crusade and distrusted most of them. "great, so all you have to do is come up with the values and I'm the one who actually has to do the fighting? ...nah, that's not gonna happen" -- JasonBlack

That was the fervent hope and the lofty portrait given by the authors of The Fourth Turning. I doubt most Boomers have even read the book, and I doubt this idea has much currency outside of T4T readers. But, it's a neat fantasy. It's not really even historically correct, at least not all of the time. It was the civics who spearheaded the labor movement in the 1937 period, for example, and I don't think they were merely following what Daddy said to do. But they certainly did their part in such projects as the CCC.

The problem is that today's Millennials don't see as much worthy of following in the Boomers. They see them as hogging the wealth and status, and as righteously fostering divisions (as you do), among other things. The herd instinct has declined too since previous 4Ts, partly due to the Boomers' influence.

It's not clear exactly what Millennials are being asked to do these days in order to follow Boomer values. The division in the country makes it seem more like an anomaly going on, since this is a civil war 4T like the 1850s-mid 1860s instead of an external-focused one like 1929-1945. So which side are Millennials being asked to follow? It's not like they are all being herded into the CCC or the army. If Millennials appear to be interested in the same causes as Boomers are, that is less due to their desire to follow Boomers than to the mere fact that the same problems affecting us have gone unattended to for 40 years of neoliberalism, and are just the same ones still left over from this 40 years of neglect, reaction and regression.

One bright spot is that the older Millennials had the highest rates of covid vaccination of any generational group. That shows their ability to obey the "liberal" common-sense requirement to care about others and not spread disease, in contrast to the libertarian delusion that vaccines are an individual decision and should not be "policed." They understand that liberal is not equal to libertarian, and in fact is almost opposite. Kudoes to them in that respect, and in contrast to some of the Xers/13ers. The great Millennial Gen ability is to be collegial and to network and respect science and technology. They fill the void left by some Xers and some Boomers in that respect.

I hope they can apply that ability to indeed to concern themselves with the world's problems, which intrude on all of us personally now, and act together to solve them, which is the only way they will be solved, as well as carry out the work that needs to be done day to day and nearer to personal experience. We can't depend on trickle-down economics schemes and the invisible hand of each person just freely pursuing their own needs to solve these real concerns impinging on us all now in our fourth turning.