(06-20-2018, 12:44 AM)TheNomad Wrote:(06-13-2018, 03:04 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: In most times there have typically been three well-defined generations of active adults, and one of the generational types is missing in active adulthood. Between the demise of the Gilded generation (born Reactive, but it took on a Civic character after the Civil War) and the rise of GI influence, the Civic component was extremely weak in public life. Institutions simply did not work well. Although it is hard to imagine either the Progressive or the Silent generation not slamming the Nazis and their Japanese partners in crime, it is easy to imagine either deciding not to incarcerate Japanese-Americans while the Missionary, Lost, and GI generations accepted such as a good idea. As the Missionary generation faded out of public life, so did their culture of controversy -- and American life quit asking questions that it needed to akl. Finally, the Lost, having been burned badly in the Missionary Awakening that badly neglected children was very good at protecting the children that they knew from GIs to Boomers from anti-rational religion, economic exploitation, and general neglect. As they died off or got hauled off in Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" to the nursing home because their kids couldn't move them about the country in corporate relocations, nobody could tell others that children need to set down roots and learn the basics instead of rediscovering the temptations of an Awakening Era. During the recent Degeneracy the fade-out of the GI generation from the levers of economic power has ensured that corporations and government agencies cannot be both effective and equitable, at least for now.
So here we are now.
quote nobody could tell others that children need to set down roots and learn the basics instead of rediscovering the temptations of an Awakening Era
Are you taking into consideration, tho, the children of that era HAD TO move and shake and do anything they had to do to survive? It wasn't a choice in most cases. Children of Awakening are throttled. They are abandoned, used up, institutions are broken, human connections don't exist, etc. I'm one of them. And also, we get blamed for everything yet we work the hardest - direct quote from the text.
Yes! Generation X had to find out the hard way some basic realities that the GIs, Silent, and Boom never had to learn. It's not that X had a particularly hard material life (until they became adults). As children, the GI generation often knew real hardship of having to contribute to family income while still children. That changed during the Depression, when government policies discouraged children from dropping out of school (in part to constrict the workforce. Children are lousy workers, desirable only because as cheap as their labor is they can put downward pressure on adult pay). Material life for a farm kid from the GI Generation looks hardscrabble by current standards.
Generation X came of age when college education became really expensive, found themselves with student loans instead of mortgage loans, more frequently than older generations found themselves having to do jobs that they thought they would give up in adulthood for better opportunities (as in retail, domestic work, and fast-food), and got burned badly from the housing bubble of the Double-Zero decade. Meanwhile American ideology went from a bland liberalism to a harsh new social Darwinism that Reagan started and that Trump has turned into a nightmare. Today America has a political ideology that holds that no human suffering can ever be in excess so long as elites profiteer from it and have the means of repressing all else.
Generation X has always had survival as an objective because they could never expect otherwise. They may make America a better place and undo much of the Boomer damage -- but too late for the 60-something members of Generation X tin the 2020s to get to enjoy fully as did the GIs (whose plush trailers often had the bumper sticker "We're spending our grandchildren's inheritance"); Silent who failed to start enough small businesses that could grow to be mass employers (among the biggest Silent who got super-rich were T. Boone Pickens [oil wildcatting], Ross Perot [government contracting], Carl Icahn [insider trading], Warren Buffett [buy-and-hold investing in the stock market], and Mike Illich and Dave Thomas [both fast food]); and Boomers who often indulged in the Boom Awakening instead of setting up a strong economic basis (unless in high technology). Generation X is solving many of the problems that other generations sloughed off onto them, including the underinvestment in small business that led to underemployment of Generation X. We have a housing shortage that X investors are likely to solve just in time to build good, inexpensive housing for the Homeland Generation to buy in generous mortgages. X is likely to offer entrepreneurial alternatives to crony capitalism and blank-check socialism.
For all that, the Big Yellow Taxi awaits you, and you won't be missed until it is too late if you are sent off to a nursing home for the convenience of the family -- because that will then be cheap.
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.