Today is my sister's birthday. I would share her age with you, but I don't know what it is. In fact I often have to ask my l.p. (life partner) what MY age is. This is not a sign of senility, I actually celebrated being 30 for a year when I was only 29. LP says I'm 57, which would mean *takes off shoes to count* my sister is 61. Or maybe it's 62... I guess it doesn't matter except that this has been leading me to think about "Generation ____".
I am a Gen X'er. (Little did Douglas Coupland know what he would start with that book. Good book, but not his best imho.) It is easy to dismiss the categorization of people by age as a variety of pop psychology a thoughtless pigeonholing of complex humans into easily digestible categories. But I think it is more than this, I think it is a sociological study of sorts. I'm fairly sure that it is a study which is applicable to a majority of white Americans, far removed from immigration but of European descent and mostly of non-urban environments. Taking that as the "test group" you can see how they are played on by changes in their social environment. A generation of people mostly raised by stay at home mothers will have a higher sense of self importance (boomers) and those generations raised by working parents ,X'ers, will need to learn a degree of self reliance that there predecessors did not. So for me: I did drink out of the garden hose, I am liable to be a filter less arsehole, and I do have legendary resourcefulness.
My sister is a "boomer" although now late model Boomers are referred to as Generation Joneses. I find the addition of this new definition, based on "keeping up with the Jones" very satisfying. A Gen Jones means basically many qualities of a boomer but a stupid amount of conspicuous consumption. But I think there is a good deal of truth to this. Joneses are a generation that was born in Boomer wealth, optimism and the American dream, but for Jones somewhere in the 60's and 70's everything changed. Mom Brady got a job outside of the home, Mike came out of the closet and ran off to San Francisco with their neighbor Steve, leaving her as a divorced single mother with 4 kids still under 18. Alice moved out to pursue macrame art freelance photography and college classes. She decided Sam the butcher was too square left him to spend the rest of his life drunk at the VFW. To say that social upheaval was the center of a Joneses up bringing is quite apt.
These kids were pushed out of their comfortable suburban berths with a key on fat orange yarn tied around their necks, and alone at home at 3:30 pm with the After School Special and a pitcher of Tang and ho ho's for company. Or if they were lucky enough to live in a neighborhood with other kids outside to play never ending games of "who's the best". Entirely unsupervised. Parents exhausted come home to take care of their children's physical needs, feed them, bathe etc. and as a family fall into a coma in front of the t.v. This is isn't the same as the level of attention or care they received earlier, and I think they missed it. And I think that in many ways parents tried to make up with physical things. Those physical things became a talisman of how much you were loved, a precious commodity.
The collection of stuff by this generation and the valuing of conspicuous consumption by Jones Adults, in this context makes sense. Kids or any generation are avaricious, they want things, they collect things, they like things, and they are jealous of what things others have. And if those things are outward signals of how much you are valued and loved than it becomes clear how they got there; I propose that the burning desire of Generation Jones to have the best shiny brightest and most things is just a continuation of this "who's the best" game. Legos replaced with mansions, Hot Wheels replaced with Escalades.
Sometime soon I'll talk about why they became Karens....
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