Ever since Sunday morning, April 23, 1972, when Baby Boomers like myself awoke to find one of our own, Joyce Maynard, adorning the cover of the New York Times Magazine, with her now signature piece, "An Eighteen-Year-Old Looks Back On Life," setting many, including this writer's, teeth on edge, others like myself have pondered the issue of the generations--mine, ours and theirs.
In 1975, in a rebuttal to Maynard's piece, entitled "A 20-Year Old Looks Down On Life," I maintained, "We have reached young adulthood, and have nothing to look forward to, either because whatever we were anxious to do we have done already, and because of what these experiences we have achieved succeeded in turning us into--an apathetic group of jaded cynics, a society unto ourselves, a self-centered generation." I further maintained that "because too many of us got too much of what we thought we wanted too soon, we became detached, and distanced, emotionally."
Sound familiar, darlings??????????????????????
Now, I don't know how old Joel Stein is, but in his recent TIME piece on The Me Me Me Generation," he waxes rhapsodic about the narcissism and entitlement of today's young people, many of whom are children having been raised by members of my generation--the Baby Boomers.
What the piece does not stop to consider is what that says about those of us who became parents. And if these children were coddled and praised, it is an almost natural reaction towards the generation having gone before. Each succeeding generation--from my grandparents on down-- are determined not to make the mistakes of their predecessors. Instead, they make their own. Were we, the Baby Boomers, given too much? Perhaps, but think of that as being a reaction by our Depression-era parents, who, at times, had nothing. Are children today too coddled, too praised? Perhaps, but think of it as a reaction by a generation (mine) who went to school during what I call the John Holt era, when many of us--and I am one--were terrified of failure, of doing anything wrong in school, so a certain spontaneity was lost. Not to mention being denied recognition many--and count me in, here!!!!!!--felt deserving of, but did not get, during those years!
Added to the issues the particular time periods. The Boomers' parents had the Depression; we had the Sixties--Woodstock, Vietnam, Assassinations--to fuel our underlying sense of malaise. And if I decry that today's young have no taste, in a world where a show like "Spring Awakening" can win a TONY Award for Best Musical, it is not just standards having changed, and styles eroded, it is because of what these kids had--Internet and other gizmos--that my generation did not have. In other words, if you were to take the different generations, and put them in a different time period--the Boomers in the Millennial, the Millennials in the Sixties--you would get largely the same results. Youngsters are as much effected by the social and technical mechanisms around them, in addition to their upbringing, so it is not all the parents' fault. And how do you account for the select few within the generations, who choose to operate outside their peers' mainstream??????????
The Millenials are essentially no more or less entitled or narcissistic than the generations who went before them. They just have more to distract them, than their predecessors did.
And what of the children of this young generation?????
In other words, darlings, it is the same old corn, but fermented by mechanisms relevant to each succeeding generation!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And this was in place, long before Joyce Maynard ever wrote a word! And it will be so, in the future!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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