Generating Generation Gaps

Some thoughts on our collective divisions and how they've been implemented.

If you appear to be over the age of 40 or so, and you're active on certain popular anti-social media platforms, you have probably been insultingly referred to as a "boomer" by now at least a few times, or your perspective has been summarily dismissed by people using similar terms.  Insulting people based on their age (whether it is accurately assessed or not) is extremely common these days, by many left-identified youth on the internet, particularly on platforms dominated by young American men and boys, such as Reddit.

For people reading this who are actually boomers (I'm not), you may remember the "original" generation gap, in the 1960's, when the phrase was coined, in reference to the folks who embraced sex, drugs, rock & roll and antiwar protests and rejected the consumerism and patriotism that supposedly characterized the generation of their parents.

Naturally, if you were born around 1920, grew up during the Great Depression, got drafted into World War 2, came home alive, got a free college education, then bought a house and paid off your mortgage within a few years of working a good union job, all of this would have profoundly impacted your perspective on life.  The Depression turned many people into "good consumers," you could say.  Being on the anti-fascist side of World War 2 and being part of the liberation of the death camps, etc., instilled a certain kind of patriotism in a lot of people at the time. 

If, on the other hand, you were born in 1946, grew up during the age of prosperity that was the 1950's for most Americans (a decade during which half of all industrial production on Earth was in the US), and then, with the rise of the Civil Rights movement and the movement against the war in Vietnam, you saw the inherent contrast between the kind of World War 2-era propaganda about democracy and freedom, and what your country's military was doing subverting popular movements against dictatorships in other countries, and allowing so much of the country to be essentially run by the Klan at home, this whole reality would also have a huge impact, and helped create a generation that produced a hell of a lot of radicals.

Our circumstances undoubtedly have a tremendous impact on our worldviews.  But when we start generalizing about people based on the generation they're from, it's just as ridiculous as making generalizations about people based on their skin color, gender, sexual orientation, etc.  We may be able to say that people who were young adults in the 1940's are more likely to call themselves patriots than people who were young adults in 1968.  We can certainly say that more people who were young adults in 1968 became home-owners than people who were young adults in 2008.  But these kinds of generalizations are totally inadequate in assessing the perspectives of entire generations.  People from a given generation, as with people from a given region or who share certain physical characteristics, are different from each other, and thinking they're all the same is profoundly backward and bigoted, obviously.

Those who insult or dismiss with terms like "boomer" would probably say they're trying to be funny, if they were asked whether they really believed in insulting people based on them being from a particular social group in a given society.  But it's a form of humor that they and most of their associates would find unacceptable if applied to someone's skin color or gender.  Unless, perhaps, they were being insulted for being white (almost invariably by other white people).  Which is also a ridiculous thing to insult people for.  But it does tell us something about how certain people view those they consider to be boomers, which is that they represent a sort of elite that has power, by virtue of their age.

Of course, ours is certainly a country run largely by old white men.  But most old white men in the US are poor, and many of them are living in tents.  So there would seem to be a bit of a problem with understanding reality among those who are liable to freely throw around divisive and insulting terms at anyone who has an opinion they don't like.  And there would certainly seem to be a problem with the platforms that tend to amplify these kinds of posts online, by design.

But beyond the built-in problems with the online platforms that dominate our communications, and the problem of black-and-white thinking that leads us to make ridiculous generalizations about large groups of people (whether we're "joking" or not), I want to explore a little the theme of what kinds of generalized understandings many young people today have of "boomers," and what kinds of corporate media tropes sneakily created their way of thinking for them.

This is important stuff, because while there are generalizations to be made about different time periods and generations of people that live through them, the idea of the generation gap is not just some kind of relatively innocent way for brands to market their products to the youth, or for a news story to get more clicks from teenage viewers.  

Indeed, from my lived experience, the idea of the generation gap is one of the most powerful tools for keeping the population in the US as divided as it is, along with other ways society is kept actively divided, such as along the lines of class, race, and gender.

For what it's worth -- very little -- I'm a member of what the media dubbed "generation X."  I don't know when or why they coined the term, and I don't care, but it's the generation that followed the baby boom, which was an actual boom of babies phenomenon that ended in 1964.  (Which is the year my eldest daughter's mother was born, so I did have a baby with a baby boomer, anyway, even if I'm not one myself.)

I was a teenager and young adult in the 1980's, during the time Ronald Reagan was president, and there was a national resurgence of rightwing media and blind patriotism.  As a radical youth growing up in the well-off suburbs of New York City in Wilton, Connecticut, from my vantage point, suburban society was full of people who tended not to question much of anything, who flew their US flags proudly on their front porches, and whose biggest complaint in life was they had to drive to the next town to find a liquor store.  If they ever paid attention to world events, they thought the Soviet Union was an evil empire that the good guys who ran the US were going to keep in check, the Russians were probably to blame for all the rebellions in Central America, the Contras in Nicaragua and the Mujahideen in Afghanistan were freedom fighters, and the problem with those people in Africa is they just don't know how to feed themselves.

Growing up in Wilton, it would have been hard to imagine that in other parts of the country (to say nothing of the rest of the world) I could have found millions and millions of people of every generation from every kind of background who had a worldview more like mine.  And growing up in Wilton, with all the influences creating reality there, it would have been easy to develop certain attitudes towards those who were of a certain generation and were white, except that my parents and their friends from New York City of the same race and generation didn't share the values of most of the adults I had contact with in Wilton.

Nonetheless, as a young adult living on the west coast, after dropping out of college, the group of friends I fell in with had a worldview at least somewhat reminiscent of the sort that I regularly encounter among many of the users on platforms like Reddit today.

As a young person I grew up being very impressed with the size and militancy of the antiwar movement that had basically passed me by because I wasn't born until 1967, and my parents didn't take me to protests.  But I heard a lot about it, and thought highly of the movement.

Later, though, living in Seattle and hanging out with other young Generation X radicals like myself, my perspective got more nihilistic.  My black-clad, patch-covered political punk friends and I could see the obvious, that things were messed up in this society and US imperialism was still going full-tilt, though at the time less directly than in cases like Vietnam.  We started hearing arguments around here and there like the real reason the antiwar movement fizzled out, which began to happen years before the final US withdrawal of troops in 1975, was because Nixon had ended the draft, and the young antiwar protesters no longer had their asses directly on the line.

First of all, as to the validity of this argument:  while it may have described reality for some folks who dropped out of the antiwar movement at the time the draft ended, anyone who lived through the period and was active on the streets could tell you that the movement began to wane well before 1973, which is when the draft ended.  Those inclined to give a more accurate assessment of what happened will talk about the optimism necessary to maintain large-scale social movements, and they'll talk about what happened to that sense of optimism by the spring of 1970, almost three years before the draft ended.

Regardless of what eventually happened to the massive, historically well-organized antiwar movement that ran an antiwar coffeehouse outside of every military base in the US, repeatedly got millions of people into the streets, and repeatedly shut down every college campus in the country, it is true that it ultimately waned and ended, as all social movements do.  It also never succeeded in overthrowing imperialism or capitalism, despite the degree to which large elements of it wanted to do those things.

Although I had friends who were boomers, and many friends who were of the generation that gave birth to the boomers, who were the folks who were young adults in the 1930's and 40's that were still the backbone of the American left when I was a young adult, I also had a massive chip on my shoulder about my own fairly useless generation, as I viewed most of my peers.

At least as much of my ire was directed generally towards those preceding generations, who I admitted had done all kinds of cool things, but then had ultimately failed to overthrow capitalism or imperialism.  Why had they stopped fighting when they did, we wondered.  Why hadn't they kept going?  Where were they all now?  These were the sorts of questions me and my friends often asked each other, and we had ready answers as well, that unwittingly tended to agree with the mythology propagated incessantly by the corporate media about how the protesters stopped protesting after the draft ended.

It was only decades later that I had a chance myself to participate in social movements in the US and other countries that you could mark with a beginning, middle, and oftentimes an end.  I've been part of movements that lasted for weeks and movements that lasted for many years, but they all have eventually come to an end.  

There are a lot of reasons why movements end, I've learned, that have nothing to do with the participants "selling out" in any way.  Sometimes their end comes as a result of massive state repression and police brutality.  Sometimes because the optimism inherent for maintaining any social movement died, as it can so easily do.  Sometimes because of massive in-fighting (also often related to other, somewhat more subtle forms of state repression).  And sometimes because the movement was completely victorious.

It was only later in life, with these experiences, that I came to see the major flaws in the whole notion of "selling out."  I began to understand that the way the Sixties generation had been handed this line about how their parents' generation "sold out" because so many of them became patriotic consumers was largely just an effort on the part of the propagandists of the ruling class to massively exacerbate the generation gap, in the same way the cops lined up to separate the Black and Brown neighborhoods in Manhattan during the Rodney King rebellion, so they wouldn't get the idea that they had the same interests here.  

If we're all going to basically be trained to vilify the 1930's generation as a bunch of sold-out consumers, then we're a lot less likely to be interested in hearing from them about how they participated in the labor movement at the time, or any number of vitally important campaigns associated with the Communist Party or other groups.  Why listen to them?  Now they've "sold out," moved to the suburbs, bought houses and water their lawns.

It's very easy to see the value of creating these divisions between people based on generations, just as it's easy to see how valuable maintaining divisions based on race and gender is useful, for the ruling class.  A population so divided is unable to effectively organize anything more productive than a brawl, as we can easily see if we look around this country today for signs of what most of the world might identify as real left activity.

It may hopefully be obvious that a polarized, divided, and even atomized society is easier to govern by nefarious actors who have no interest in maintaining a decent life for most of society.  Any society governed like this needs division and atomization, or else people will naturally identify their oppressor correctly and organize against the ruling class that runs the country, through their various proxies and stooges (proxies and stooges which do not include all or even most boomers, white people, CIS males, or even CIS male white boomers).

However, my observations about the power of such divisions being maintained in the minds of so many Americans and others these days is not based on assumptions that seem obvious, but more on comparing different realities that I have extensive lived experience with.  Which is to say, in other countries it's not like this.

Of course, in other countries a lot of other things are different, too, so making direct comparisons between apples and oranges is of limited use.  I will readily admit that I may have a rosier view of places like Denmark or Cuba because I don't speak Danish or Spanish and thus have limited direct exposure to whatever kinds of sectarian insults are being thrown around by Danish or Spanish users of Reddit.

Nonetheless, in most other countries that I spend a lot of time in, there is much more intergenerational community both in general and on the left.  The level of general respect for older people varies a lot from one society to the other as a cultural phenomenon, and sometimes all kinds of history plays into how that works, but one thing that is generally more common in other countries than it is in this one are institutions that naturally maintain intergenerational community.  

This happens through so many different means that are more common in so many other societies than they are in this one, such as cities and neighborhoods designed for pedestrians rather than cars, such as most adults being members of labor unions and many also members of cooperatives, and those unions, coops, municipalities, and other such institutions actively organizing educational and cultural events intended to bring people together in so many ways.

Without going into all the different actual or potential reasons why there is so much more intergenerational cohesion and also continuity in terms of thinking and organizing on the left in many other countries, this intergenerational cohesion in many societies exists, it's real, I've seen it in action for most of my adult life, as a traveling performer spending much of every year over the past 25 years on tour in other countries, mainly in Europe.

Once again, there may be too many factors involved with the differences between societies to definitively talk about what kind of impact intergenerational cohesion might have on one.  But to me it seems very evident that when you don't actively sever the connections between the generations by spreading lies about people and entire generations "selling out" in so many different ways, then it's much easier for people to communicate with each other, and appreciate each other, across the generations.

It also means people are generally much more apt to work together, organize together, and ask each other for advice, across generations.  Older people who have valuable experience can readily share it without worrying about first proving somehow that they're not one of the "boomer sell-outs" about which so many of us have heard so much.

Communicating across the generations seems possibly more useful now than ever, since the playbook of division that was so effective in exacerbating the divide between so many Boomers and their parents' generation is being once again employed, with very little variation from the last time, with an equally devastating impact.

To make another observation that I think very pertinent:  why is there such a focus on Boomers in particular, as opposed to the even larger numbers of people active online who are members of Generation X?  Is it that "Boomer" has just become a term for anyone over 40, regardless of which generation they're actually from?  Did the folks using the term just never learn what it actually referred to?

I think actually what's happening here is more sinister than any of that.  

The youth-oriented movement of 2020 was profoundly media-driven, like Occupy Wall Street and other movements in the past 19 years or so have regularly been.  This has also been true of other previous social movements, but it was not true of social movements in the 1980's, 1990's, and the first four years of the Naughties, during which time the official media policy regarding the left was to completely ignore our existence domestically, while actively vilifying foreign leftists in Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, etc.  

This is why there is so much attention in the media-driven 2020 left upsurge to the movements of the 1960's.  Not because that was the last time there were movements for racial equality or against US imperialism, but because the 1960's is the last time most of the people online seem to have ever heard of such movements existing, because the media told them about them, just like the media taught them to like most of the "independent" music they may now identify with.

Being a traveling performer is helpful in providing some insights into how intergenerational communication can work, or not work.  In the US, when I meet a young person who is a fan of my music, when I ask how they first discovered my music, the answer is usually Spotify, which very often means Spotify's algorithms suggested my music to them because they were already interested in a similar artist.  

In Denmark, when I meet young fans, they usually first heard my music because they were a member of a socialist youth group, in a country that has had active socialist youth groups continually for over a century.  These days a group like the Socialist Youth Federation there is funded by left political parties or other organizations with budgets, it has offices across the country, puts out a songbook, runs summer camps, and puts on lots of concerts and other events in venues that are readily available for them to use for free.

For these sorts of reasons, among many others, in Denmark everyone knows about various important social movements that happened there well after the 1960's.  

Some of them are movements I was actively involved with as a performer and propagandist, such as in 2007 around the totally successful effort to force the government to replace the squatted social center which they had destroyed with a comparable new building.  The way the movement for a new Ungdomshuset managed to sustain weekly marches for well over a year, some of which involved many thousands of people, was largely due to the active participation in the movement of people from previous generations of squatters, who came out of the woodwork to support the folks mainly under the age of thirty who were the mainstay of the movement in the beginning.

When these older folks who had been involved with the movement maybe thirty years earlier got involved, I don't recall anyone in Denmark talking about them being sell-outs, or hearing about any of their other supposed transgressions along the way in the past or present.  All I ever heard regarding their involvement was unmitigated excitement.  With all of us together like this, I heard people say so often, maybe we'll win.  And we did.