Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, November 15, 1993 TAG: 9311160249
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: EDITORIAL EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: NEIL JUMonville
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
While the intellectual activity of its members is welcome, when they step into the public arena and fire shots at surrounding generations they should expect to be treated as adults and receive criticism in kind. So let's review the Xers' complaints, match them against the historical record and judge their validity.
The most frequent charge by the twentysomethings is that the ``baby boomers'' (born in the 1940s and 1950s) and the ``war generation'' (born between World W ar I and World War II) have just returned wobbly and
inebriated from decades of wild deficit spending. The bill for these carefree years, the young lament, unfairly has been slipped into the Xers' pockets.
But unfamiliar with even the most recent history, twentysomethings conveniently forget that the national debt has been built in the pursuit of many good as well as bad ideals - many of which benefit the young. The New Deal, World War II, the space program, foreign aid and the Cold War, to mention only a few programs that created the debt, were not hedonistic expenditures. The most greedy and self-serving spending was done in the 1980s under the guidance of Ronald Reagan, whose administration opened up the national lands, resources and social programs to be pilfered for profit by the private sector.
Have the thirteeners (the 13th generation since the Constitution, they claim) forgotten that until yesterday their generation was the most vocal supporter of Reaganism? Then let me remind them.
A Times-Mirror study in the summer of 1990 revealed that 70 percent of those under the age of 30 thought that Reagan would go down in history as a great president, compared to 56 percent of those over 30. Similarly, only 34 percent of those under 30 were critical of government, compared to 54 percent of the older group.
Thirteeners were the generation most solidly in support of Reagan and his policies. Blaming others for the debt all of us now face is comforting to the Xers, but it's bad history.
The laments of the twentysomethings, to a disturbing extent, focus on money rather than idealism. Raise your hand if you haven't read recently a wet-eyed charge that Xers are the only generation in recent memory to face financial difficulties. Perhaps the thirteeners have forgotten that the war generation, those grandparents who so now anger them, spent a chunk of their lives enduring the decade-long Great Depression. We heard far less moaning from their grandparents during the Depression than we do from the young now.
Another staple of the Xers' laments is that they are having trouble finding jobs and that they are the first postwar generation to face a declining standard of living. Can they be serious? Apparently they have no idea that real wages in the United States leveled off in the late 1960s, when the rest of the industrialized world had sufficiently rebuilt itself after World War II that it could compete with us.
So since about 1970, when boomers were starting jobs or heading to college, it has been a slow fight for those boomers to maintain on two salaries what the war generation in the 1950s and early 1960s had earned with one. This earlier affluence had nothing to do with the war generation's greed, but instead resulted from the unique economic vitality in the United States, following World War II, when this country had the only industrial economy left intact.
Although the young would love to wrap themselves in martyrdom, it was the boomer generation that first experienced the decline. Who in the academy, for example, has forgotten the countless Ph.D.s of the 1970s and 1980s who never made it into the universities because of the declining economy at the time, Ph.D.s who drove taxis or sold real estate instead?
It was the boomers who were first pushed into the necessity of two-income households, and yet still found themselves having to move into more modest neighborhoods. Unconvinced Xers should read Katherine Newman's ``Declining Fortunes'' and discover the wonders of introducing social-scientific study into the debate.
The self-absorption and materialism of the Xers' complaints is unsettling. While they whine about their McJobs, how many of them have paid attention to the displaced steelworkers and loggers of the past decade who also labor in McJobs (if they're lucky), but who have none of the hope of becoming computer-literate job applicants like the generation brought up on Nintendo?
At least when the boomers rose up and complained in the 1960s there was far less moaning about the comforts they were missing and far more about the problems of the world. The boomers went South to try to register black voters, tried to organize the poor through various organizations, and joined the Peace Corps. The boomers either helped fight a long and brutal war in Vietnam or else marched against it for peace.
What similar dilemmas have the Xers taken upon themselves? How many twentysomethings, in the comfort of their poolside apartments, remember that at the same age many of their grandparents (who they now so resent) were fighting a protracted war against fascism to preserve the freedoms we all now enjoy? Do the Xers really have it so much worse than the generations that preceded them?
If the thirteeners are more worried about their finances than their ideals, it is consistent with the conservative generation we have found in our college classes over the past decade. Our young students have scoffed for years at the foolish idealism of the '60s generation. Instead, many of them wanted to swan dive into the great financial bonanza that the 1980s represented.
If they now find themselves injured as a generation by that 1980s ethic of greed that they so strongly supported, are we to bear the blame? Thirteeners cannot have it two ways. They can't smirk about the boomers' irresponsibility and naive idealism, yet also accuse them of being greedy yups who led Reaganism.
Nobody is denying that the Xers face problems. But they are not the first to encounter hardships, and it does no good to adopt a pose of simple victimhood.
Yes, many of the twentysomethings grew up with divorced parents. But, as a boomer, so did I. Yes, many of the thirteeners were ``latchkey kids'' whose parents (or parent) worked. So was I. But, unlike the Xers, it has never occurred to me to make that condition central to my politics.
If this younger generation would read the relevant history of the 20th century, they would realize that many of the problems they complain about (with some justification) are longstanding ones that others have faced, too.
Further adopting the pose of victims, Xers have complained that boomers are currently in control of politics and society. Are we to find it shocking that those boomers who have trained themselves as youths to operate the levers of power are now doing so in middle age? Don't the thirteeners have the same ambitions? Are we to understand that the Xers will voluntarily relinquish their power in their early 40s to a generation that is just leaving college?
The complaints of the thirteeners (many of which, like the need to reduce the debt, boomers endorse, too) can be useful and encouraging - if they take some stock of the surrounding historical context, temper their self-interest with social idealism, and join with members of other generations who share their own concerns. They should follow this rule of the reform community: Thou shalt not snivel.
To observe the first breath of identity in any generation is inspiring, and around us at this moment we are witnessing a wave of the young beginning to lift its head and take stock of itself as an entity. That its members are now beginning to write manifestos of their beliefs and intentions is a welcome sign since that prompts healthy debate and is evidence that they are awakening intellectually.
So I'm not hoping the younger generation will vanish. I look forward to more activity on their part: more writing, more speaking, more demands on the rest of society. From that we will all profit.
Yet from them I also hope for better analysis, stronger intellectual quality, a greater sense of history, some humility about what they, in turn, might be able to accomplish in their lives, and a greater altruism, idealism and social commitment.
Neil Jumonville is an associate professor of history at Florida State University. He wrote this article for the Tallahassee Democrat.
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