01-09-2022, 11:51 AM
(This post was last modified: 01-09-2022, 01:17 PM by Victorian Jim Dandy.)
I've finally realized there's no sense in comparing Millennials to the Greatest Generation. This is a Second Civil War Saeculum and no heroes are going to be found. Even if it turns out to be a cold civil war, the fact that the topic is on everyone's minds is almost enough. Yesterday, I learned that my life, beginning in 1987, is very comparable to a man born in 1822. It's not a perfect comparison, but it works better than the Greatest Generation comparison.
9/11 was our Alamo, an event of the unnecessary and stupid Mexican-American War. The War on Terror was our Indian Wars and Mexican-American Wars. Bill Clinton deregulating Wall Street was one of the major events that led to the 2008 recession and Andrew Jackson's Bank Wars caused major recessions from 1836 to 1857. This would make 2008 our 1843.The worldwide cholera pandemic, peaking in 1854, is our Covid-19 Pandemic, beginning in 2019, but peaking in 2020 and 2021. This leaves 2026 as our 1861. I don't have to tell you that racial tensions are still with us. A couple things are different, which is fine because our times are never going to line up perfectly. As a Navy combat veteran during the war on terror, I don't think my experience would be quite as difficult as a Navy veteran during the Mexican-American War (Yes the Navy was used in the war) but the experiences would definitely be comparable. If you look up the Pacific Squadron of the Antebellum U.S. Navy, some of their deployment experience matched closely to some of mine.
Another thing is the presidents don't line up at all, but that's okay because it doesn't have to match perfectly. A slight comparison that could be made is that after James Monroe (The Era of Good Feelings) we had a string of weak presidents until the civil war and since Eisenhower and to a lesser extent Kennedy (The American High,) we've had a string of weak (or downright evil) presidents until the present. Yes Millard Fillmore was president during the 1854 peak of cholera and he looks just like Donald Trump (and Alec Baldwin) but Fillmore wasn't a hugely damaging president who was divisive and impeached twice. In Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, we had presidents who did nothing in the face of a looming civil war, with Donald Trump, we have a president who's actively marching us towards civil war. The only question now is who will be president in 2026, when we face our next civil war.
A quote from Wikipedia: "Strauss and Howe define the Gilded Generation (nomad archetype) as those born from 1822 to 1842. They came of age amid rising national tempers, torrential immigration, rampant commercialism, conspicuous consumerism, declining college enrollment and economic disputes. This led to a distrust of zealotry and institutional involvement, shifting focus to a life of materialism." That definition, of my generation being "directionless" sounds more accurate than the current write-ups on Millennials. The fact that we're the "entitled" generation is pretty laughable to me at this point considering what we've been through.
9/11 was our Alamo, an event of the unnecessary and stupid Mexican-American War. The War on Terror was our Indian Wars and Mexican-American Wars. Bill Clinton deregulating Wall Street was one of the major events that led to the 2008 recession and Andrew Jackson's Bank Wars caused major recessions from 1836 to 1857. This would make 2008 our 1843.The worldwide cholera pandemic, peaking in 1854, is our Covid-19 Pandemic, beginning in 2019, but peaking in 2020 and 2021. This leaves 2026 as our 1861. I don't have to tell you that racial tensions are still with us. A couple things are different, which is fine because our times are never going to line up perfectly. As a Navy combat veteran during the war on terror, I don't think my experience would be quite as difficult as a Navy veteran during the Mexican-American War (Yes the Navy was used in the war) but the experiences would definitely be comparable. If you look up the Pacific Squadron of the Antebellum U.S. Navy, some of their deployment experience matched closely to some of mine.
Another thing is the presidents don't line up at all, but that's okay because it doesn't have to match perfectly. A slight comparison that could be made is that after James Monroe (The Era of Good Feelings) we had a string of weak presidents until the civil war and since Eisenhower and to a lesser extent Kennedy (The American High,) we've had a string of weak (or downright evil) presidents until the present. Yes Millard Fillmore was president during the 1854 peak of cholera and he looks just like Donald Trump (and Alec Baldwin) but Fillmore wasn't a hugely damaging president who was divisive and impeached twice. In Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, we had presidents who did nothing in the face of a looming civil war, with Donald Trump, we have a president who's actively marching us towards civil war. The only question now is who will be president in 2026, when we face our next civil war.
A quote from Wikipedia: "Strauss and Howe define the Gilded Generation (nomad archetype) as those born from 1822 to 1842. They came of age amid rising national tempers, torrential immigration, rampant commercialism, conspicuous consumerism, declining college enrollment and economic disputes. This led to a distrust of zealotry and institutional involvement, shifting focus to a life of materialism." That definition, of my generation being "directionless" sounds more accurate than the current write-ups on Millennials. The fact that we're the "entitled" generation is pretty laughable to me at this point considering what we've been through.