Politics-What's on your mind?

[dark_crystal]

I spent the 90s clerking in bookstores, record shops, and coffeehouses-- while attending art school. I met TONS of aging hippies. The women were cool. The men were universally pervs.

"Hippies and Yuppies are two different groups" coming from Boomers is awfully similar to the "we never lived in the South" language that lets white people claim they can't be complicit in white supremacy.

Boomers cannot freeze their legacy at the 60s. Gen X met the baby boom in the 70s and 80s.

Generation X As children and adolescents

Demographers William Strauss and Neil Howe, who authored several books on generations, including the 1993 book specifically on Generation X 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?, reported that Gen Xers were children at a time when society was less focused on children and more focused on adults. Gen Xers were children during a time of increasing divorce rates, with divorce rates doubling in the mid-1960s, before peaking in 1980.

Strauss and Howe described a cultural shift where the long-held societal value of staying together for the sake of the children was replaced with a societal value of parental and individual self-actualization. Strauss wrote that society "moved from what Leslie Fiedler called a 1950s-era 'cult of the child' to what Landon Jones called a 1970s-era 'cult of the adult'."

The "Me" generation

The "Me" generation in the United States is a term referring to the baby boomers generation and the self-involved qualities that some people associate with it. The 1970s were dubbed the "Me" decade by writer Tom Wolfe; Christopher Lasch was another writer who commented on the rise of a culture of narcissism among the younger generation of that era. The phrase caught on with the general public, at a time when "self-realization" and "self-fulfillment" were becoming cultural aspirations to which young people supposedly ascribed higher importance than social responsibility.

The cultural change in the United States during the 1970s that was experienced by the baby boomers is complex. The 1960s are remembered as a time of political protests, radical experimentation with new cultural experiences (the Sexual Revolution, happenings, mainstream awareness of Eastern religions). The Civil Rights Movement gave rebellious young people serious goals to work towards. Cultural experimentation was justified as being directed toward spiritual or intellectual enlightenment. The mid to late 1970s, in contrast, were a time of increased economic crisis and disillusionment with idealistic politics among the young, particularly after the resignation of Richard Nixon and the end of the Vietnam War. Unapologetic hedonism became acceptable among the young, expressed in the Disco music popular at the time.

The new introspectiveness announced the demise of an established set of traditional faiths centred on work and the postponement of gratification, and the emergence of a consumption-oriented lifestyle ethic centred on lived experience and the immediacy of daily lifestyle choices.

By the mid-1970s, Tom Wolfe and Christopher Lasch were speaking out critically against the culture of narcissism. These criticisms were widely repeated throughout American popular media.

The 1970s have been described as a transitional era when the self-help of the 1960s became self-gratification, and eventually devolved into the selfishness of the 1980s

The Me Decade was toxic as hell, and the hippies are implicated, i'm sorry.

Xers are never going to remember the Boom the way the Boom remember themselves. We were there for the 70s. The 60s are a story.

We watch Millennials squaring off against the Boom, and-- while we are crossing our fingers for them-- we suspect they've underestimated just how ugly the response is going to be.

Like, the Millennials didn't watch an entire generation of their brothers die. Someone who came of age under Obama is going to have a different idea of what's possible than people growing up under Reagan-- who, I know, was not a Boomer, he would be 109 y/o by now.

But Rush Limbaugh was a Boomer, and that's what pushed me into activism. I was behind the counter when a flood of Boomers bought his first book, and wanted to tell me about it while they wrote their checks.

I was in ACT-UP, I was in the Lesbian Avengers, I was on Q-Patrol, I protested the Iraq War,
I spent the night before election day 1990(?) driving around Shreveport Louisiana, stealing David Duke signs out of people's yards.

Millennials know that the government killed a bunch of queers, but they did not watch it. The idea that the US could descend into theocracy is mostly hypothetical to them. Xers agree with Millennials' goals, but we have less confidence in the methods-- extremes make us nervous.

Like the girl who confronted Chelsea Clinton at the memorial last week. She was wearing a Bernie shirt. That makes this Xer nervous.