The War of Generations
A decade ago, the rage was all about the war between the generations. It dominated headlines, created advantages for numerous politicians, and threatened to rewrite history. And it generated myths, a lot of them.
In an age where blame is the game, focusing on the faults of older or younger generations is an easy place to begin. After all, it’s been going on since the beginning. Youth are impatient for change and older ones frequently seem slow to adapt.
Several years ago, a millennial business leader once told me that it was me and my generation of “Boomers” the ruined the chances of the next generations getting ahead. There was some truth to that, I acknowledged but maintained that he had taken the easy way on his assessment. He was someone I deeply respected, so it was easy to discuss our differences.
I’m indeed a Boomer – a generation born between the years 1946-1964 (I was born in 1950). But to assert that my generation created the ills of today is to give us too much credit. We were in little control of anything back then. We hardly had any clout, as politics, money, influence and change itself were simply out of reach.
Boomers are labelled as the permissive generation that set about to change everything. But seriously, I was only 14 years old when the Boomer generation ended. I wasn’t even 10 when the Civil Rights movement was beginning to make an impact. The ones making the change came from the generation previous to ours. The myth is so pronounced that it’s hard to break its hold in the modern era. Let’s give it a try.
John Lewis, the Civil Rights icon and politician was born in 1940. The great feminist icons credited for making great advances in the 1960s, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, were from another era (the former born in 1921, the latter in 1934). Malcolm X was born in 1925 and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1929.
This list could go on and on and would include Muhammad Ali, Abbie Hoffman, Moan Chomsky, Bob Dylan, Billie Jean King, Jesse Jackson, Jimmi Hendrix and Andy Warhol – none of whom were Boomers. They were around during the Depression and World War Two. Each nation, like Canada, carries its misconceptions of the Boomer age.
Those that followed such luminaries, the Boomers, had many flaws but also created the Internet, the personal computer, wage-equity laws, environmental movements and much else. It’s a mixed bag; every generation had its advances and blind spots. And it goes both ways. The tendency of older generations to regards Millennials or Gen X-ers as collectively narcissistic, institution deniers or technology-dependent isn’t only misinformed but prejudicial in the extreme. These younger generations are heavily involved in business innovation, environmental activism, political reform and community citizenship.
The longer the list gets, the more disjointed everything becomes, bending or denying history, or even misreading one’s own time. Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y (Millennials), Generation Z, Centennials – all within a century. What was meant to be a progression of ideas towards the refinement of humanity has instead turned into a circular firing squad that obliterates the past and eclipses the future with every pull of the trigger.
For millennia, knowledge was transferred down through the generations- grandparents to parents to children. It was the circle of knowledgeable life, building on what was good and eventually filtering out the harmful. That transfer is now breaking down as everyone reaches to Google for answers instead of their elders, or to sentimentality instead of learning from their juniors.
The war of the generations is now the stuff of numerous books, movies, podcasts and YouTube, but it’s not the stuff of reality. It is a concoction, created by us all to create excuses for life not being as we wished. We could repair that life, move towards a more holistic future, but that would involve each generation to accept its responsibility, to be accountable for its failures. That’s not happening, since so many merely look for things to criticize rather than ideas to build. The only thing that can change our current direction is self-accounting – something remarkably difficult to accomplish when there are just so many responsible for troubles.
