Having been born on the threshold of a generation, just south of the line where Boomer (1946 to 1964) meets Gen X, (1965 - 1980) I have always been a bit reticent to generalize about people according to these artificial guidelines. A person born in 1946 would have pretty strong recollections of a world without rock n' roll, hippies, casual drugs and widespread cynicism. A person born at the end of the Boomer corridor, 1964, would know little else, not to mention the advent of color TV! Despite my technical residency in Boomerdom, I've always related more to Gen X. Boomers, in my view, were people who could pay for college with a half-hearted part-time job sweeping classroom floors, find a somewhat livable pad for 300 bucks a month, and stay in grad school until draft eligibility expired at 27. By the time I finished high school college was already outrageously overpriced, rents had gone into the stratosphere without any increase in minimum wage, and fear of an induction notice was replaced by the dreaded result of an AIDS test. That sounds Gen X-y to me.
My partner Kat stands on a similar Pew Research generational borderline, hers between Millennial (1981-1996) and Gen Z (1997-2010). She would certainly opt for Gen Z, (since Millennials, as we all know, are the WORST!). Not for her are flash mobs, planking, or (lest we vomit) Pokemon Go. Consistent with the earlier gen are the tatts, the piercings, the no-hair-below-the-eyebrows body grooming; in line the more recent gen, she has never known a world without tech, Zoom calls, or dating apps. A visitor from another world, observing her going through her day, could be forgiven for thinking her Android phone was some kind of bodily appendage. Yet somewhat more atypically she is a ferocious Libertarian, gun rights advocate and free-market Ayn Randian. "You will never find me taking an Uber to go on a date with a guy from Tinder at an independent start-up Pho restaurant and talk with him about the evils of Capitalism."
So what to make of this next to latest generation? Will they devour us alive? Well, that would involve them first getting off their devices, which might be asking a bit much. But for those who can work up the gumption, I do think there may be some cause for worry. At some point, good parenting became associated with treating your six year old like they are a wise, well-informed human being whose opinions and feelings are worthy of very serious consideration and mollification. Not surprisingly, such children grow into adults who maintain the same attitude, absent of any sort of humility or awareness that those who have been around awhile longer might actually know something they do not. Wholehearted, sweeping beliefs regarding gender, economics, international relations and racial structural oppression, inculcated by Millennial teachers, are joyously embraced with uncritical fanaticism. Any pointing out of logical inconsistencies or factual accuracies is met with "Well, given your AGE you probably can't understand...." rather than engaging with the ideas. Also (and to me this is most mystifying) at some point being young became not about rebelling against the powers that be but rather becoming the powers that be. When did brash youth become all about empowering The Man to rule over our choices, speech, even what we might possibly be THINKING? Can people who seriously put forth the notion that physical gender is a social construct, that medical care should be distributed according to a bureaucratic decision on quality of life, or that Maoist Communism might be worth another try, be people into whose hands I can bequeath my old age?
As I write, the television is covering someone expressing an unpopular opinion at a climate conference. A few feet behind the speaker is a young woman of about twenty, spitting at his back and with a facial expression that allows me to pretty easily picture her in a Khmer Rouge uniform about to machine gun a trench full of villagers. An expression attributed to Voltaire, a translation from the somewhat ambiguous French original, goes along the lines of "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
Gen Z believes a lot of absurdities.
