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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsSeems like we really are living in two different realities --
1990s: A Book
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(I just started the book, but a lot of premise's that the author writes about seem spot on. Just have to remember it all...)
I think the above quote explains why millennials & gen z'ers can't understand that there is no magic wand that gets a law on the books immediately or hey! just stop being racist or not every white person has white guilt and refuses to get up on the stage and rip out their heart and spill blood all over the stage.
I know instantaneous acts like that work in the virtual world, but this is the 'real world' where time is needed to come to a consensus from all parties, whether we like the outcome or not.
Explains a lot as to why and how we became "divided," which the "media" is exploiting to the nth degree and ageism has become okay because we appear to be old fogey's who "know" how the world works in real time.
As always, YMMV...
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NNadir
(33,515 posts)We basically tore the planet to shit.
I think the rising generation will be a great generation because they will have to be, as they will live in extreme conditions not of their own making. I see many among them who are already facing the challenge.
As for us, history will not forgive us, nor should it.
DownriverDem
(6,228 posts)reagan. So many Boomers honestly thought their peers were Hippie values believers until they voted in reagan.
NNadir
(33,515 posts)Genki Hikari
(1,766 posts)Were greater in number than they ever were.
Most of their age peers weren't protesting or "tuning in/dropping out," but getting jobs, going to college for reasons other than protesting, getting married and having families, listening to lounge music not rock, buying homes in the burbs, and all the rest of the "square" life.
They were the ones who whined about how there was a "black" student union, but not one for whites (ahem) at their college. The ones who skated around protests to get to class and hated having classes canceled because a protest was now out of control. The ones who never went to college and resented the ones who could get out of the draft, or who had the luxury of protesting when the squares were holding down a job and supporting a young family. The square women weren't wearing mini-skirts and the square guys didn't have long hair.
The squares were people like my mother, in the same age contingent as John Lennon or Bob Dylan, who not only had little idea who they were--but didn't care to or have time to, because they were busy working and raising a family. Just like all of her age peer friends. She was the NORM, and the hippies WERE NOT. That's what everyone forgets.
The squares were out there, in massive numbers, and nobody paid them any mind at all. They didn't get the press that the hippies/activists got, so too many people failed to realize they existed--or how many of them were out there.
That's why the hippie contingent have been flummoxed since Nixon and r-gun about how non-liberals could win office. They missed how so many of their square peers were right under their noses and living a life not much different from the one most Americans had lived before the sixties.
Failing to grasp how many late silents and boomers DID NOT buy into the 60s mythos is precisely why we're where we are right now.
Pluvious
(4,310 posts)Thanks for sharing
bucolic_frolic
(43,141 posts)Pluvious
(4,310 posts)
NutmegYankee
(16,199 posts)When these articles try to pigeon hole me into Gen X, I just ignore them.
Reasons I feel that way - I came after the MTV craze. I had a Tandy 1000 computer to play games on in my home while I was in Kindergarten. By middle school I was gaming on a 486 with Windows 3.0 (later upgraded to 3.1). By high school, I was using a Pentium PC with AOL for internet access.
I work with Gen Xers, My computer comfort and skills are light years beyond them.
PatrickforB
(14,570 posts)of what we saw, what shaped our lives - the younger half of the baby boom generation.
JFK, RFK, Martin and Malcolm, and all the others killed at the hands of RWNJs and Kluxers
Vietnam
Watergate
Civil rights movement and race riots
Antiwar protests
Suburbia and white flight (my dad said he'd die before he saw me be bussed)
Chicago 1968
Kent State
The Beatles and the British Invasion
Color TV
Atari
The Lone Ranger
Batman
Superman
The Green Hornet (with Bruce Lee as Cato)
Matchbox cars (we called them dinkies)
GI Joes - the 'boys doll'
Love American Style
Rowan and Martin's Laugh In
the Not Ready for Prime Time Players and SNL
Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley, and the old Fairness Doctrine
The Great Society and the War on Poverty
The Cold War and MAD
50 cent a gallon gas
50 cent packs of cigarettes
Actual newspapers delivered daily to your home
White and yellow pages
Rotary telephones, and living operators
Stagflation
The Chicago School and Supply Side economics (voodoo economics, trickle-down, the Laffer curve)
Devolution (devolving federal programs like job training and medicaid to states knowing states wouldn't have the money)
Privatize, deregulate and gut social programs
Greed is good and Gordon Gecko
The list goes on. Many white people still don't 'get' white privilege and won't even acknowledge this nation is built on genocide, conquest and slavery. Very few people know about the doctrine of shareholder primacy, the Powell Manifesto, Reagan allowing the Fairness Doctrine to die, what real news is actually like.
Yeah, I get it. By the way, your third paragraph reminds me of the old Stones song, Its Only Rock n Roll -
If I could stick my hand in my heart
And spill it all over the stage
Would it satisfy ya, would it slide on by ya
Would you think the boy is strange? Ain't he strange?
If I could win ya, if I could sing ya
A love song so divine
Would it be enough for your cheating heart
If I broke down and cried? If I cried?
If I could stick a knife in my heart
Suicide right on stage
Would it be enough for your teenage lust
Would it help to ease the pain? Ease your brain?
If I could dig down deep in my heart
Feelings would flood on the page
Would it satisfy ya, would it slide on by ya
Would ya think the boy's insane? He's insane
Well, best wishes from this aging Boomer!
Genki Hikari
(1,766 posts)Consider what my grandparents witnessed during their lifetime. My grandfather was born before the Wright Brothers, and my grandmother only a few months before Kitty Hawk.
They were around when most people still got around via horses, not cars.
When the world didn't have radio or movies, never mind TV. When music was live because there were no recordings...because there was no equipment to record it or play it on.
When most people didn't have running water, electricity or a phone.
My grandparents got to see the advent of cars, air travel, mass entertainment, nuclear bombs and space travel. My grandmother lived long enough to see computers become ubiquitous in our culture and cell phones were becoming reachable for people she knew.
Now tell us all about the "amazing" changes you saw, compared to what they witnessed.
PatrickforB
(14,570 posts)and went from horse and cart to the atomic bomb to the moonshot (one of them was still alive when that happened).
But yeah, contemplate too, the population graph. There are just too many of us for the earth to sustain. We are destroying it. Talk about a cancerous species. And capitalism definitely doesn't help, with its philosophy of shareholder profits and unlimited growth. Unlimited growth, you know, is also the philosophy of cancer cells...
Hestia
(3,818 posts)the changes of your grandmother's time happened gradually, over time, and not to everybody all at once. Not everyone could afford a car, even at Ford's prices. In fact, TCM just had a 'short' about the prices of vehicles from when the first came out until like 1947.
Average wages were somewhere in the range of $30 per week and vehicles were around $800.
When was your grandmother born? Flickers were around in the late 1880s, radios came around 1925. (Amazing that radio is barely or almost 100 years old.) First "hit" for a movie was 1907, with The Great Train Robbery. That movie aired on TCM this past summer on Silent Sundays. It'll come around again eventually. UCLA with Coppola Family and George Lucas are paying to have silent's restored - they look mah-velous.
Back to the OP - just because a car, radio or movie came along, it wasn't a different world. After the internet, the entire world changed (not for the better IMNSHO), so much so that those born after 1985 cannot understand us when relating current history or trends or norms. They can't relate to us but we can them.
Pluvious
(4,310 posts)The Pill
Transistor radio
FM stereo
Tape recorder
Star Trek
End of polio
The Cold War
Moon landing
JFK shot
Berlin Wall falls
IBM, Intel, Apple
Rock and Roll
Xipe Totec
(43,890 posts)orangecrush
(19,545 posts)When I've got T-Rex?
speak easy
(9,241 posts)What a drag. Too many snags.
orangecrush
(19,545 posts)
speak easy
(9,241 posts)until Windows '95 
orangecrush
(19,545 posts) 
cagefreesoylentgreen
(838 posts)I did a google search by the title alone and got a bunch of trivia books instead. I’m confused if Michael Harris is also supposed to be the author of “1990s: a Book” or if that book is just referencing him.
keep_left
(1,783 posts)...The Nineties: A Book by Chuck Klosterman.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-nineties-chuck-klosterman/1139432581
A review in the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/01/books/review-nineties-chuck-klosterman.html
It appears that Michael Harris is the one being referenced in the Klosterman book.
Hestia
(3,818 posts)Gummies have a way of spacing you out 
NullTuples
(6,017 posts)Last edited Sat Oct 15, 2022, 07:44 PM - Edit history (1)
They're the ones out protesting and canvassing to change laws.
They're the ones who understand that racism is a choice.
They're the ones who know that until more white people recognize that our society is inherently structured to favor them, there will be no equality for people who are not them. Same for cishet people, and so on.
The kids are doing a better job than we ever did of pushing back and trying to fix society. WE are the ones who made the mess.
Signed,
An older Gen-X
Sympthsical
(9,073 posts)Our generation is defined by "analog childhood, digital adulthood" as a commonly understood concept.
Broadband internet as we generally regard it with its 24/7 access to everything didn't really swing into gear until 2000-2005. Iphones didn't come out until 2007, and even then they were prohibitively expensive. I think my first smart phone was in 2011.
I think people think Millennials really are much younger than we actually are. The older among us are in our early 40s. These are people with lives, careers, families, and children. They're not kids who've been online all their lives.
Gen Z I'll give you.
As for "magic wand" bs that's always used to explain to people why politicians just CAN'T DO THAT, YOU GUYS (until they can, and then those same people cheer and pretend they didn't just spend two years lecturing everyone on why it wasn't possible; see: student loans).
Instantaneous? In what universe? Remember when ACA passed, shifted a lot of the burden to younger workers, and it was "We'll fix it later!" So, uhm, anyone know when that later's going to arrive, because there certainly hasn't been anything instantaneous about it.
This is just youth-bashing horseshit. It's tiresome. And hearing about "youth" from people who don't realize that "youth" are entering middle age is just . . . yeah. Expert opinion there. Think I'll give the author a pass.
Elessar Zappa
(13,968 posts)and yet you insult Millennials and Gen Z.
Hestia
(3,818 posts)I'll just betcha that millennials or gen z's aren't even mentioned. If you feel insulted, that's all on you.
Like I said, it's a book, I just started it and the quote struck me from the introduction.
mjvpi
(1,388 posts)They pointed out that 2000 people holding hands would illustrate the number of human generations in our evolution. 6 to 8 for the US. Generational successes and failures that struggle, is part of our evolutionary process. Our best efforts determine the moral arc of history.
Pluvious
(4,310 posts)What a “successful” species we are
It’s going to be touch and go if we last 2000 more I fear