It was a helpful example, and whether the largescale associations or specific timelines were appropriate, the basic idea is valid and important: That my eldest maternal uncle was in the third group drawn in the draft lottery gave him a SLIGHTLY different perspective on life than either my mother or his kid brother had. As far as a strictly etymological meaning, yes my he and my mother were of the same generation (as were he and his brother, who was NOT of my mothers generation) but I think a ten or fifteen year delineation a more useful guideline (and that is all it is) than twenty or twenty-five. That means there is an intergenerational epoch, that a more subtle gap lies between the simple parent/child gap. Missing that misses half the story.


Well, maybe I had a little help for those two particular incidents; I grew up in Houston and precisely remember the seventh grade classroom where the announcement came over the office phone on the wall used as our intercom. When the Wall came down I was a HS sophomore half way through four years of German; just the previous year our teacher told us the amusing story about her Air Force Colonel husband getting the family lost on a drive somewhere between Checkpoint Baker and Checkpoint Charlie, and the helpful East German soldiers who found them kindly escorting them all the way to West Berlin. That kind of thing very definitely separates personal memory from historical memory: The idea of an East and West Berlin, that commies storming over the wall separating them might cause H-bomb detonations all over the globe fifteen minutes later and leave Jason Robards slowly dying of radiation poisoning in a nuclear winter is so completely foreign to todays twenty year olds that they CANNOT CONCEIVE of what was a fact of life for us. I remember discussing this with my mother once upon a time and she compared it to the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is apt in many ways, except that the whole point there was to prevent a scenario in which a full scale thermonuclear war could happen as suddenly as you and I knew it could at any moment of our childhood. Still, I am as certain as those of our "generation" can be that those who recently reached adulthood have never once had a thought like that (which is too bad, because the possibility is just as real, if less likely, now as then.) I did not even mention things like the first A-bomb, or the Holocaust, or Sputnik, but that also illustrates my point: They did not occur to me because I have lived my entire life in the Space and Atomic Ages, but for people who did not those events were like Columbus discovering America: The world and their understanding of it fundamentally and forever changed that day. For you and I it is, like Columbus, something we read in a history book, but the change precipitated has always been a fact of life requiring no education: The sky is blue, water is wet, Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon. That kind of generational divide is relevant in a way no mere number on a form could ever be; 19 is just a number, but not remembering the Queen of Soul is annoying and alienating.


Part of what made JFK a big deal (but only part, obviously) was that there were precious few alive in 1963 who remembered McKinley being shot in 1900. Among those few septegenarians there were probably more than a few people thinking, Geez, it's like they've never seen a president shot before. The reaction might have been likewise muted for McKinley because plenty of living people remembered Garfield and Lincoln. For most people in 1963 the idea of a US president being killed, not in a history book over half a century ago when Billy the Kid still ruled the West with his six gun from horseback, but "in modern times" was probably pretty unthinkable. Speaking of that comparison: Airplanes, cars, railroads; the people who saw those things arrive are products of a world that in a very real sense never existed for us. Granted, the difference between our perspective and that of someone who once thought the United States could never be otherwise because they never had been is not likely to re-fracture society now, but there are plenty of other equivalent events from our own era. 911 is easily the biggest since the Wall fell, but it will surely not be the last; such is the nature of history and social change. I had not thought about it in those terms before, but it is actually a bit worrisome to think of a generation coming of age in an era where post-911 paranoia and hysteria has lingered so long they consider it not only normal but INTEGRAL to their lives. I am SO not going to see "Crescent Dawn" (or maybe the "Ahmedika" TV mini-series. )


In that case the incorrect assumption would be mine, sorry. ' /> For some reason I had the idea you were in your late twenties, but apparently I only have about five years on you: I actually have to think for a minute to know who was president when I was born, because it was a little over a month after Ford took office. By the arbitrary metric I stated above, that means you, me and my wife are all from the same generation (though only barely in her case; she claims to remember Challenger, so good enough. )


Except that the '90s was only when the already existent birth rate increase peaked; it began with, well, YOU, and only returned to the previous baseline in '94 (ironically the 25th anniversary of Woodstock, which makes me chuckle over the final Boomer spike before birth rates nose dived for a decade.) I think it was "Boomer babies" increasing national birth rates to an extent muted by the fact birth control was a LOT less controversial (and a lot more advanced; the pill was novel in the '60s, but by the mid-nineties we were implanting it.) It would be nearly as hard to prove as disprove though, I admit. In the case of the eponymous boom, no, I do not think the Great War DIRECTLY influenced the low number of births immediately prior to it, but the Spanish Flu carried home to America probably did combine with the Depression to have that effect, particularly because the Spanish Flu was an odd duck in that, rather than affecting mainly the very old and young, it disproportionately targeted adults of prime child bearing age. In terms of technology, that accelerates the rate at which truly paradigm shifting events are publicized, but does not change the overall effect of something like 911. If anything it only deepens the effect; I am quite sure you, I and everyone else who watched the towers come down live will always think of it differently than those who will only have seen it in archive footage shown in history class, just as the footage of the Moon landing we have all seen a thousand times does not impact us the way it did our parents when they saw it live.


Note:
One big reason the effect can be skewed, and IS far from an absolute constant, is because of earlier examples of what is still the same effect. In other words, the biggest reason people of the same age from the same area may have different generational perspectives is that their parents are not of the same generation, and the childrens still quite real generational perspective is altered by the parents equally real generational perspectives. The effect of parents from different generations does not invalidate the concept of generational zeitgeist, but supports it, because no effect is possible unless it exists. The childrens persepective will still have far more in common with each other than with that of people from other generations, because they still share basically the same pivotal collective experiences, but their perception of them will probably be slightly different because it their general perspective was formed by people from different generations and therefore with different perspectives of their own. The general rule, however, holds in both cases: The closer the generational correspondence of parents OR children, the more any given generation will identify with its own member to the exclusion of others. Thus in some respects I identify more with people rts age than my own, because while we grew up ten years apart, our parents are more likely to have grown up at the same time. Take someone my wifes age, or a few years younger, and even if they were also born when their parents were in their thirties that will probably be about all we have in common, because our parents were not from the same generation and thus did not share the same collective experiences, even if though they both happened to have children at the same age. In fact that is pretty much the case with me and the younger daughter of my moms oldest brother, though her big sister is my wifes age and we are pretty much on the same wave length (despite her parents being in their twenties when she was born.)

Sorry if that got complicate, but I am basically saying that I do not think the articles contention (or at least the basis of it; I am inclined to agree with Palatine about which generation is most responsible) is either all wrong or all right, but somewhere in the middle because it takes an overly simplified view of generationalism. It ignores key elements of generationalism, but those elements are integral to and a function of that basic phenomenon, which they therefore only support.


If all you are saying is that the article is being too specific, simplistic and absolutist in its analysis of a generationalism you recognize as real and significant, then yes, I agree with you fully (or close enough; we can always debate the details, and usually do. )