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ASPartOfMe
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14 Sep 2016, 11:21 am

The baby boom generation is thought as people born between 1945 and 1964. Author Jonathan Pontall thinks the people born between 1954 and 1964 are a different generation because those born in those years were literally children of the 1960's and too young to be a screaming girl a Beatles concert, and anti Vietnam war protester, a Woodstock attendee and other sociological generational markers associated with the baby boomers. Generational markers for this cohort were Watergate, disco, punk, energy crises quite a different feel. Pontall coined "Generation Jones" referencing the expression "Keeping up with the Jones". "Generation Jones" became a thing when Obama a member of this cohort was elected President.

I agree with Pontall that our (I was born in 1957) group had a very different experience then those born a few years earlier. We got the benefits and a lot of s**t from failed experiments of the earlier group. Our college proffessors always called us apathetic and there was a lot of truth to that. One day our class was discussing the protests on campus 10 years earlier and the proffessor mentioned students had occupied the campus dining hall. We universally broke out in laughter, the dining hall meant bad food to us, the class of '79.

That said I do not agree with Pontall that we are a seperate generation. First or all the term baby boomer was coined due to a spike in births caused by marriages and the starting of families bieng delayed by soilders going off to WWII. The peak year of the spike was 1957 so how can we not be baby boomers?. Second of all while we experienced things differently we lived through the same key events and these events while over were still dominating the culture of the 1970's. So I think we are a sub category of baby boomers. I would call those born between '45 and '54 Vietnam era boomers and those born between the mid 50's and mid 60's post counterculture boomers.


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adifferentname
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14 Sep 2016, 11:39 am

As a jaded member of Generation X, I care only enough to tell you how little I care.

:P



dossa
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14 Sep 2016, 12:12 pm

adifferentname wrote:
As a jaded member of Generation X, I care only enough to tell you how little I care.

:P


Lol. I soooo approve of that statement.

You made me laugh so hard my face hurts now.

Oy. As to topic at hand...

I'm not a baby boomer (another gen x er here) but I think that kinda thing is common regardless of what generation you fall into. For myself, I am at the cut off date for my generation and for me that includes things like not being alive when Nixon was president. That was old news by the time I was born. Different people define gen x different, but the general consensus is about 1965-1979/80... so we only have 15 years there.

You baby boomers span about 20 years and it makes my head spin thinking about how much things changed in that time. My mom lived in a house in 1945 that had no electricity and indoor plumbing. She was born in 1941, but she did have a sibling who was born that year who lived in that house as well. My dad was born in 1948 and never knew a life without power or water. My dad had to go to war, but his youngest brother was too little to understand what was going on then. There is over ten years age difference between the two. I remember being a young child and my uncle still lived at home with my grandparents and he had a table top galaga type video game thing. It's weird to me how much changed in those few years.

I can understand why there would be such difference within baby boomers.


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naturalplastic
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14 Sep 2016, 2:16 pm

A boomer here, but in that very later sub group. Always kinda thought my cohort (54 to 64 sounds about right) is really a subgroup within boomers that should have different label. If you were a male too young to seriously worry about being drafted that is the cutoff. The boundry runs through familes (my cousins were older and the guys were in danger of being drafted, and by the time I registered for the draft Nixon was relying on bombs and not on American soldiers to keep Saigon propped up so much and though the war was still violent as ever the real threat of the draft was over. The boundary line ran through some groups of siblings born to the same parents even ( a buddy my age had an older brother who worried that his number would come up in the lottery).

Not clear where he gets the name "Jones" for it though.



The_Walrus
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14 Sep 2016, 3:46 pm

adifferentname wrote:
As a jaded member of Generation X, I care only enough to tell you how little I care.

:P

As a Millennial,



adifferentname
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14 Sep 2016, 6:10 pm

The_Walrus wrote:
adifferentname wrote:
As a jaded member of Generation X, I care only enough to tell you how little I care.

:P

As a Millennial,


Fie on thee, Millennial hellspawn!



Meistersinger
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14 Sep 2016, 7:45 pm

As a late Boomer (1957), I am of the opinion that the early boomers and my generation, gen x and gen y are the reasons why this world is FUBAR'ed. We are all a bunch of greedy, self-important bastards that don't know our asses from a hole in the ground and had everything handed to us on a golden platter. Just look at the current election cycle: we have a narcissistic psychopathic prick and a Gordon Gekko-like sociopath running for President. Don't even get me started about the faux-religious twerps running for the down-ticket office.

And education? GIVE ME A F!CKING BREAK! Our generation's education has been dumbed-down so badly that most of us think that 2+2=5! Most of us can't even point out a specific geographic location on a map. As for history, Disraeli was right: Those who fail to study history are DOOMED to repeat it! We are also probably the most illiterate generation that ever existed.

And people wonder why I'm such a misanthrope, so bitter, and prefer to be alone, like a hermit...



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14 Sep 2016, 7:59 pm

Even though I was a young kid, I still felt very much part of the Sixties thing. I was born in 1961 It influenced the rest of my life. I

I see Watergate as the dividing line between the Idealism of the 1960s and the Cynicism of the 1970s. I sensed a real change after Watergate. I wanted it to remain what it was before Watergate.

Of course, I know the "truth" of the Sixties--but, still, I want to maintain that Idealism.



ASPartOfMe
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15 Sep 2016, 12:33 am

Many people cite the ugly break up of the Beatles, Altmont, Kent State, and the deaths of Joplin, Hendrix, Morrison as the end of the '60's

In 1968 they were listining to this


By the time I was a teen this seemed much more relatable


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16 Sep 2016, 5:15 pm

I was born in 1947. My parents' generation were so traumatised by the Depression and service or losses of relatives/husbands in World War 2 that it impacted greatly on their parenting. We were taught by teachers who were returned serviceman with (now) obvious PTSD. Many of the returned servicemen became alcohol dependent to cope and there was a lot of domestic violence and child bashing which was not unrelated to the combination of PTSD and alcoholism.

There was an extreme emphasis on conformity after the war, because it made that generation feel safer in an unsafe world, and that extreme constriction in the 1950s was one of many factors which led to the baby boomers' subsequent rebellion against the norms they had grown up with. There was much shaming of any kind of "non-conformity" however minor. The unhealed and unrecognised traumas of the parental generation very significantly affected the upbringing and education of the baby boom children in New Zealand, though of course neither generation was aware of PTSD at the time, nor its long term impacts. The physical abuse of children was widespread, extreme and ignored by the culture of the time. No generation since has been subject to that constellation of influences, and IMO that does make the Boomers significantly different from the cohorts that followed, and there are enduring influences.

It was a baby boomer politician who campaigned later to abolish corporal punishment of children (which has been law here for about 20 years now) and initiatives like that were linked to what we saw and experienced as powerless children.



ASPartOfMe
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17 Sep 2016, 1:21 am

The vets of that generation definitely had an attitude of you do not talk about the bad things that happened in the war. That attitude was pervasive about all problems. When I was growing up if people heard screaming at a nieghboors police would not be called because what went in ones home was considered a wholly private matter.

By the time of the 1970's the political element of the youth rebellion was over. For the conversatives the Vietnam war they supported was lost and thier law and order president they supported was forced to resign because he broke the law. The college rebels went to work but a lot of counterculture was mainstream particilarly sex, drugs and rock and roll. In a space of 10 years America had went from its puritan roots to anything goes. Veneral Diseases, crime and divorce rates skyrocketed as the now acceptable vices were overdone. The schools a main target of the rebellion had given either given up trying or were trying too hard to be relevent. Campuses were open, drugs were consumed starting before homeroom and all day long. School work was still the same for everybody but it was a mish mash, bullying was still viewed as a normal part of growing up and you still were expected to "deal with your s**t". Confusing era for everybody but especially for undiagosed autistic teenagers like myself. The music was great but otherwise I do not have very fond memories of the '70's.


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Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 17 Sep 2016, 1:49 am, edited 1 time in total.

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17 Sep 2016, 1:29 am

Ah the music of the 1970s! The Eagles! The Doobie Brothers! Boz Scaggs! The Stones! Dr Hook! There were some wonderful films too that are stark in my memory - (One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest; The Godfather trilogy spring immediately to mind). However overall it is not a decade that I miss (and the fashions were terrible!)

The behaviourist dominance in the social sciences was doctrinaire and simply awful, narrow minded bigotry masquerading as science for the most part. That was the era of Lovaas, his cronies and mentors like BF Skinner. Remnants of their toxic attempt to take over academia are still around though only a few diehards thank goodness.



ASPartOfMe
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17 Sep 2016, 2:07 am

Back then I was into Alice Cooper, Jethro Tull, Queen and hard rock in general but really got into music with New wave because they were trying to move away from the '70's and those guys were "weird" in looks and how the music sounded and a lot of them were around my age.

As an older adult I now appreciate more a lot of the 70's bands then I did then because the bad associations have faded.


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18 Sep 2016, 4:04 pm

images.google ->
Old Economy Steve
Scumbag Baby Boomer

aka crony capitalists and champagne communists. They were either derivative of a black market or a subsidy, were the product of corporate welfare while complaining of breadline welfare. The bourgeoisie have a mental disconnect, in respect to the govt creating a market.