09-05-2019, 09:58 AM
(09-04-2019, 05:57 PM)Ghost Wrote: 1994 is a better year to start Homelanders than 1995 in my opinion. In fact, it actually seems like a decent starting point for Homelanders/Gen Z had it not been so early:
*They were the first to start elementary school after the Columbine Shooting, arguably a turning point for parenting and the entire school system.
*They spent most of their elementary school years after 9/11.
*They didn't start middle school until after the demise of Nickelodeon Studios, the debut of YouTube, the peak of Blockbuster, and the start of Web 2.0.
*They started high school after the start of the Recession.
*They graduated college after the legalization of gay marriage.
I have never seen consumer technology as the defining difference between generations. If the electric light (expanding the time of productive activity) and automobile (giving far more flexibility in travel), arguably the consumer technologies that most changed life in America could not separate generations, then nothing can.
A technology such as the Internet allows people to do things that they used to do by other means, whether in research or mindless entertainment. Nickelodeon Studios and Blockbuster Video collapsing? Does anyone really care now?
Same-sex marriage still affects a minority of lives, and Obergfell vs. Hodges legalizing same-sex marriage affects fewer people than did Brown vs. Board of Education or even Loving vs. Virginia. I'm not saying that same-sex marriage is suspect or trivial, but let us recognize what matters to far more people more directly. The sesqui-year economic meltdown was as serious after a year and a half as the economic meltdown beginning with the Great Stock Market Crash, but the earlier meltdown had three years in which to inflict far more damage. Maybe the timing of the Great Depression (the Lost had far more to lose than did GI's) could define the divide between the Lost and GI's -- but so did World War I, which defined the Lost against all other American generations.
Also worth noting -- Civic generations have hardscrabble childhood and teenage experiences in contrast to Adaptive youth... really -- GI childhood was materially deprived by standards of any subsequent generation... and I have yet to see kids born in the late 1990's as better off as they attain adulthood than kids born in the early 1990's.
Howe and Strauss use wartime service as the divide between the GI and Silent generations, with the deciding difference in that GI young adults could be involved in heroic battles and make rank, and parlay such into economic dominance as the Silent could not. Sure, the Silent may have served in the war, but they did not do so in time to define themselves as the Greatest Generation. They did occupation duty instead of battle in WWII.
The Crisis is not over, and a Civic-Adaptive divide has yet to establish itself.
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.