Ponder: youth outreach (3)

Hi again, circa 40 year olds and younger, "youth outreach." Age is an odd thing or, at least, our perceptions of age. I tend to think less of age in term of years, and more in term of generations. So in one respect I'm like the marketeers, but I'm different from them in every other respect. Marketeers differentiate by age and generation to market both their products, but also to manipulate taste and consumer demand. That's social engineering and that's a really bad thing when it is context free social engineering. In other words, people do not care about the overall well being of the individual or age cohort, but only the ability to make a sale. I'm not naive or totally idealistic. The trick is that marketeers have taken over what I call "each generation's priorities."

Generations tend to have a set of priorities that large numbers of individuals have in common. They are both good things and hopes that they have, and also issues and situations that they must face. Examples of priorities that previous generations have had include owning one's own home, and fighting a war as a nation. The World War II generation (the ones who were adult and fought the war) are the classic example. The entire generation, whether in active service or not, was totally committed to fighting the war and getting it done. This same generation then became committed to bringing the soldiers home and ensuring that every young family could find and afford a first home.

So the priorities of a generation "glue and bind them together" to have a mostly common world view. The priorities bind rather than the individual ages. For example, many who served in World War II were the usual ages of late teens and twenties... but very many of them were also in their thirties and forties! Think about it. They were a social cohort, a single generation, even though individual members of that "generation" ranged in age from 17 to almost 50. My dad, for example, was forty years old when he enlisted during World War II. The younger members of his company called him "Pop," because of his gray hair and age. But still, they were social contemporaries. They had different ages with spans of twenty years between them or even more, yet they returned to America after the war as a single generation. Teens and grown men returned to go to college, return to their original home places, or to buy their first home for a new family. Millions of men and women at this wide span of individual ages were forged into what Tom Brokaw calls "the greatest generation." Young men in their late teens had the same set of values as older men in their twenties, thirties and forties. It was a remarkable time in history, one that I don't think people understand in the way that I've explained it here.

The bonds that this widely aged generation felt also overcame educational, class or regional differences. World War II, both in combat and at home, truly united the country in its priorities across age and background. I'm not talking here about some idealistic perfect country, where racism and so forth didn't exist. I'm talking about aspirations. Everyone had the same aspirations. They wanted to win the war, have peace, raise their families, and have their first home. The black American may have suffered dire discrimination and hardship, but their aspirations and hopes, their priorities and values were the same as even the most privileged white. Their aspirations were the same and that bound them together, but it was the unequal or blocked access to achieving those aspirations that brought about the much needed changes. But my point is that from all parts of the country, that generation was united as no other generation was, or has been since, because they shared the same aspirations.

I hope this helps you to actually look at some verbiage and assumptions with different eyes. For example, everyone talks about "baby boomer generation." But that was not a generation. That was a fractured collection of three generations. So even though the term "generation" referred to a tighter age grouping, the aspirations were not shared by any means across that generation. And it was not even a two way split. I would argue that the so called "baby boomer generation" is actually an artificial term based on the grouping of age cohorts, and that there really was not the widely vaunted generational traits and self identity at all. If I were writing an essay or a thesis I could easily demonstrate that the baby boomer "generation" was, instead, three or more parallel generations that occupied the same space at the same time, yet did not share priorities or issues at all.

So you, dear young people, are the children of parents who themselves "thought" they were part of a single generation, but were instead foot soldiers in one of many parallel and often competing "generations." The whole thing about "values" of the "baby boomer generation," "Generation X, Y, Z?" and the "Millennium babies" is really a myth, and a political and marketing artificial social construct.

Furthermore, and of even greater concern, the term "generation" has become less about priorities, hopes and aspirations, and more about the troubles and tribulations of that age cadre, plus their marketing potential as consumers. You really are not part of a "generation," and have not been since World War II. A true generation has a shared set of aspirations and priorities. But the rise of consumerism, and the hostility between "generations" from the social revolution of the 1960's, plus the influence of socialism, has fractured the definitional term of generation. Now a generation really is a simple date of birth grouping. It is not the shared aspirations that previous generations had, even before the incredibly unified World War II generation. You, dear friends, are defined as a generation according to your age, what you are willing to buy and be sold, and the woes that you face.

Being aware of it and not just accepting labels is an important first step. Too many people have accepted speaking and thinking in "marketing short hand." It's like acronyms or text abbreviations. You have been raised referring to yourself and thinking of yourself as a generational grouping, when all that you really are is an age pool of people with charge cards and a pack of problems. I don't think of you that way, but I'm sitting here in my (virtual) rocking chair explaining to you another way that I think you have been cheated. You don't know the incredible comfort and strength that comes from being part of a generation that has un-manipulated aspirations.