From The Denver Post Magazine, May 8, 1994

Baby Boomers vs. Baby Busters

Article by John Kessler

By now we're all familiar with Generation X, the current crop of Americans just entering their 30s and not at all ready to fill the Birkenstocks of their baby-boomer elders.

We've witnessed the emergence of their post-MTV pop culture, from grunge bands in Seattle nightclubs to grunge fashions on New York runways. And we've documented the plight of this baby-bust generation -- the "McJobs" they scramble for after college, the government largesse they never will receive and the fact that they will surely emerge as the only generation this century to fare more poorly than their parents.

That's all old news. What's begun to surface recently in the boomer vs. buster debate is the presence of far-reaching cultural distinctiveness -- and a rift. The only two generations raised on television, rock'n'roll and recreational drugs don't tolerate each other particularly well.

Gen Xers scowl at the moral posturing and the Woodstock/Wall Street hypocrisy of their elders. Boomers dismiss the upcoming group as a bunch of whiners and chronic underachievers. Welcome to America's newest generation gap.

Neil Howe and Bill Strauss, a team of writer-historians, have studied this burgeoning brawl, identifying its origins and projecting the course it will run. In their first collaborative effort released in 1991, "Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069" ($12, Quill), they identify this new generation gap as an inevitable outcome of the rhythms of American political and cultural life. Last year they followed it up with "13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?" ($10, Vintage) -- a pop sociology look at the 13th (i.e., buster) generation and its deepening sense of alienation.

To understand their discussion, you've got to know the rules of their game. Howe and Strauss identify four basic generational types recurring regularly throughout American history, each one engendering the next in a fixed pattern. These generations shape and get shaped by a repeating cycle of "secular crises" and "spiritual awakenings." Like a double-helix DNA strand, the generational personalities and currents in history make sense only in unison. (The 13th generation gets its name because the authors have identified 12 previous American generations dating back to 16th century colonists.)

The developing boomer-buster generation gap completes a cycle of American life, one that begins with the "civic"-type GI generation. These were the protected children that followed the much-criticized "Lost" generation before them. They came of age during depression and war -- a time of secular crisis when they were called upon to exert their innately heroic nature. As John Kennedy said, they were the ones who could "bear any burden, pay any price" to fight totalitarianism abroad and poverty at home. And so they did, emerging as powerful leaders in midlife.

The following "adaptive"-type Silent generation grew up during the Depression in a suffocating home environment. "As threats against the national community deepened, children were bluntly told that older generations were making enormous sacrifices so they could grow up enjoying peace and prosperity . . . (any) day could bring devastating news -- a layoff, a foreclosed home, the combat death of a father."

Little wonder the Silent generation entered adulthood as early conformists, eager to join the security of a large corporate employer, get married and have children -- milestones they passed incredibly early in life. Howe and Strauss write their coming of age marks the beginning of an "outer-driven era" -- a time when society turns toward conformity and stability, and spiritual discontent is deferred. Currently pushing 70, this generation has not yet managed to elect a president from its ranks.

The boomers, an "idealist"-type generation, were the indulged youth of postwar America who were guaranteed a pivotal role in history. "From VJ-Day forward, whatever age bracket boomers have occupied has been the cultural and spiritual focal point for American society as a whole. Through their childhood, America was child-obsessed; in their youth, youth-obsessed; in their 'yuppie' phase, yuppie-obsessed."

The spoiled-rotten Dr. Spock babies grew into narcissistic young adults who put into action a self-proclaimed "Consciousness Revolution." Like every idealist generation before them, boomers followed a cult of personal growth, challenging -- and fundamentally changing -- American institutions.

How quickly personal growth turned to personal gain. How quickly they became yuppies. Their desire to restructure society is taking a moralistic turn in midlife. Noting the "New Puritanism" in '90s America, Howe and Strauss write "Fortyish Americans are beginning to police 'politically correct' behavior . . . attach 'Green Seals' to products, ban obscene music, promote 'chastity,' and even support novel forms of corporal punishment."

Perhaps this attitude explains why today's boomers look for the "Heart Smart" label at Alfalfa's, react with virulence and loathing to Madonna's obscenity-laced appearance on David Letterman's show and surprisingly support the caning of a spray-painting street vandal in Singapore.

Meanwhile, the real children of the '60 and '70s were the 13ers. Survivalists since early childhood, they were, according to Howe, implored as youngsters to "stay out of the way . . . while older people are doing important things, like finding themselves."

As a generation they've also been roundly criticized. The news reports about these children growing up centered mostly on their high rates of suicide, drug abuse and crime, as well as their record "dumbness" as measured by standardized tests.

In addition, Howe maintains 13ers long have been perceived as "a generation of predators" in popular culture. The spate of late-'60s and '70 child-demon movies -- "Rosemary's Baby," "The Exorcist," "Damien" and "Omen" -- presented the era's most consistent image of childhood.

Demonized and discounted in youth, 13ers have matured into an alienated group of young adults. They are the Kurt Cobain fans who, at Courtney Love's suggestion, hurl en masse obscenities at his memory.

Howe and Strauss suggest they are now coming of age in an "inner-driven era." They're getting the short end of a stick wielded by idealistic boomers, and they know it.

Their generation gap is not like the boomer's rebellion against authority; rather it's a cynical feeling of disdain and a profound distrust.

Where's it all going? Enter the perspective of history. The spiritual comrades of Gen Xers are not the boomers they see sitting across from them at Greatful Dead concerts, but the once-maligned "Lost" Generation of Fitzgerald and Hemingway that came of age in the 1920s.

This previous "reactive"-type generation "had their own boomerlike nemesis to contend with. They knew what it felt like to be upstaged by an indulged 'postwar' (in their case, post-Civil War) generation just older than themselves." In countless records, the Lost were perceived as dumb, self-destructive, politically retrograde, shallow and violent.

If history is a lesson, the 13ers will follow the pattern set by the Lost and previous reactive-type generations. They will mature into pragmatic doers in midlife, avuncular straight-shooters who will be more admired by youth than by their baby boomer elders.

But this generation will never outgrow its bad image. By 2020, "Americans in their 50s will be generally regarded as worse-behaved (and worse-educated) than Americans in their 20s."

Among Howe's and Strauss' many predictions, they suggest Gen Xers will refocus class politics on the rootless poor, restrengthen the American family with a commitment to traditional values and emerge as no-nonsense (likely conservative) political leaders. They will make up for what they didn't have as children and "favor investment over consumption, endowments over entitlements, the needs of the young over the needs of the very old."

Eventually they will settle in as reclusive elders.

But not before they complete an important task that history has determined. As elder boomers lead the country to a secular crisis, sometime around 2020, 13ers will have to be the cooler heads that prevail.

"The typical old boomer will be . . . an ascetic elder glowering down from Sinai, looking upon himself as a critical link in human civilization, without whose guidance the young might sink into Philistinism."

And "faced with crisis, this generation of onetime draft resisters will not hesitate, as elder, warrior-priests, to conscript young soldiers to fight and die."

They'll finally have their hammer and will know exactly which way the wind is blowing as they march forth to finish building their place in history.

And the 13ers will be brining up the rear, mouthing the only battle cry they've know since youth: Just do it.

*Projected (based on behavior of past generations) | Source: "Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069" by Strauss & Howe

Attitudes help shape generations

Any demographer armed with a stack of bar charts will tell you exactly when babies stopped booming -- in 1964. One glance at the data shows that the national annual birth rate first starts to decline following that year.

But Neil Howe and Bill Strauss, who define generations in terms of shared attitudes and peer personality rather than numbers, peg the end of the baby boom four years earlier -- in 1960.

When I first heard Howe make this argument at a lecture, the news hit me like a Rock'em Sock'em Robot. He was telling me something about myself that I've long suspected. It was a message I embraced with equal measures of relief and recognition.

You see, I was born in 1961, and I'm no baby boomer.

Howe and Strauss write: "The 1961 birth year is a milestone identified by every sub-30 biographer of this generation . . . Babies born between 1961 and 1964 are tired of hearing themselves called 'baby boomers' when they know they don't carry the usual hippie-cum-yuppie baggage." Amen.

As Washington Post reporter Nancy Smith writes, we're "the generation after. Born after 1960, after you, after it all happened." My cohorts and I were just learning cursive the fall after Woodstock and hitting puberty when Nixon resigned.

We watched history run its course on TV, along with every moronic rerun we could fit into our glassy-eyed schedules. (In elementary school one year my classmates were asked to count the number of hours per week we watched TV. I clocked in at 28 hours.) Unlike our older siblings, we didn't care for the gee-willikers morality lessons of "Father Knows Best" and "Leave it to Beaver." We much preferred the endlessly repeating idiocy of "The Partridge Family" and "The Brady Bunch." Of course, we knew it was stupid. Danny Partridge knew it was stupid.

By the time we reached high school, the students in my particular class were the first to get busted as a group for smoking pot on the infamous "Hill" behind the athletic field. It was a small instance of the year's record high rates of teen crime and drug abuse.

And though I admit it with the greatest reluctance, I belonged to the group of teenagers that spawned the "Valley Girl" craze. Howe and Strauss put a hopeful spin on this silly phenom by calling it a "flagrantly non-Boom youth trend." Thanks guys.

When my cohorts entered college in the fall of 1979, we were the least argumentative class of students the professors had ever seen. I remember thirtysomething teachers routinely berating us: "You people are so passive. You don't ask questions. Don't you care?"

Neil Howe was a teaching assistant at Yale at the time, and he recalls the change vividly: "Boomers . . . had trouble getting along with authority. They talked back at teachers. They belligerently disbelieved in institutions."

Along came the class of '83 who "got along much better with older people" but stopped talking back. They raised their hands in class only to ask "Is that going to be on the exam?"

Then again, who knew what was going to be on the exam? An idealistic faculty had liberalized the curriculum and had begun to filter their discussions through modern critical theories, such as deconstructionism. It was, to say the least, confusing.

Throughout the years, I've suspected that I had little in common with the baby boomer generation I was supposedly apart of. Little use for the hand-me-down youth culture, little tolerance for the short end of idealism. I wasn't born into a world that offered such clear moral choices.

As Howe and Strauss point out, 1961 was the first year people took pills not to have babies.