The Generation X and Boomers Metaphors.

Abstract

X: blank, unformed, unknown, whatever. The media use it to refer to people born in the later 1960s and the 1970s, who are young adults by the 1990s. is a metaphor, referring to an age-cohort of North Americans, giving them perhaps a spurious unity. Many of my college-age students object to the term - it makes them feel labeled, stereotyped, unappreciated in their diversity. As far as I can discover, the first use of the phrase Generation X was in the 1970s as the name of Billy Idol's band in London. (1) Then it became the title of a book by virtuoso Canadian writer Douglas Coupland. It was picked up by the mainstream media and seeped into the consciousness of the culture. The metaphor is explicitly vague. It allows us to project our own experiences with young people into it, and then classify them as confirming the existence of a X. But some themes recur in descriptions of X. X'ers feel they were born too late. They missed out on all the fun of the '60s: protests, sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll. All the good jobs are gone - taken by Boomers. Jeers are facing rising costs, a declining standard of living, a polluted planet. Oh yes, they whine and complain a lot. And they're supposedly less smart and talented than the older Boomers - declining SAT scores prove that. I have encountered many of these attitudes among X'ers. One young man was bemoaning his missing out on the fun of the anti-war demonstrations. I informed him that those demonstrations were not fun. They were serious and some were extremely dangerous - you couldn't tell what the police forces would do nor could you count on demonstrators to act reasonably. At the anti-war demonstrations I attended, I always made sure I knew the way to the nearest exit. The young man was surprised. No, it didn't sound like much fun, after all. The metaphor exists in inevitable polarity to the Boomer metaphor, which has its own story. The Baby Boomers were born after World War II and through the 1950s. There were a lot of them, and they rode into the world swept along by an economic boom and chastened by the atomic bomb. They had all the advantages consumer culture could give them. They took rock music to new heights, refined the art of protest, and had a lot of fun. So the story goes. But then what happened after the Sixties (which actually spread well into the 1970s)? Now the story takes on a darker cast. The Boomers sold out. They quieted down, became and forgot about social change. And they left the next generations, the Baby Bust generation, and then X, facing a word of diminished expectations with fewer opportunities. Such, in broad outlines, is the narrative of the North American Generations. It contains enough truth to be interesting, enough distortion and stereotyping to be infuriating. My reading of the fate of the Boomers is somewhat different. They didn't sell out, they won. They kicked up such a fuss about Vietnam that the foreign policy of the country had to be changed. This action was almost without parallel in modern history. When the war disappeared, the draft disappeared also; and one of the main external forces uniting the age cohort dissolved. People then went on living their lives, and seemed to melt into the faceless crowds of suburbia. However, very few of them became yuppies, and most of them encountered the age of diminishing expectations before discovered it. The X'ers can thank the Boomers that they did not have to face the draft or endure long foreign wars. I also read the story differently. These young people live in the richest nation in the world, are well-educated, and still have tremendous opportunities. They are being told that their lives will be constricted and cramped. I wonder how much of this is true, despite the avalanche of readily-cited statistics which show it is harder to get a single-family home, for example. …