September 22nd, 2004
You know, one of the strangest things in my life these days is the fact that I have dozens of people reading this Rant-o-Rama. I get email when one doesn't appear for a while, I get email when I make factual errors (or say something stupid ... it's rare but it happens :-) ), and I get email when I say something -er- controversial. And the latter point is the case with what I said yesterday.
To refresh our memories: I started by telling baby boomers that if they want to age gracefully, they were going to have to give up the attempts at trying to stay young as long as possible. I didn't mention this in my rant, but my thoughts were leaning towards Sartrian Angst, which, very roughly, means that all fears and subsequent motivations can eventually be distilled out to a fear of Death.
Then I went into some discussion of the bitterness I used to have in my younger years towards boomers, concluding with the notion that my worry was not necessary, that members of my generation have--by and large--found our niches in workaday life.
I concluded by telling baby boomers that they should not keep trying to hang on to a past that probably wasn't very satisfying anyway. The inference was that my generation, by virtue of not getting hired directly out of college, and not being able to buy a house before we were thirty, does not exhibit the same sense of entitlement and expectation from life that the boomers seemed to have.
Well, I got my eyebrows singed off by an email reply to that one. I don't think the email writer read it very carefully, and it seems pretty clear that he had some ideas simmering in his head already, and my rant just got the juices flowing. I didn't read his email very carefully last night (when I received it) because I wasn't in the mood, but I finally got around to it today.
Here it is:
From: [Name and address removed--though I was tempted]
To: Brian Porter
Subject: Stop sniveling
Nobody is denying that the you Xers face problems. But you are not the first to have trouble, and it does no good to play victim. You are having trouble finding jobs and you think that you are the first postwar generation to face a declining standard of living? Are you serious? Apparently you have no idea that real wages in the U.S. 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 we were starting jobs or heading to college, it has been a slow fight for us to maintain on two salaries what the war generation in the 1950s and early 1960s had earned with one.
You love to wrap yourselves in martyrdom, [but] it was the boomer generation that first experienced the decline. You do not know the countless PhDs of the 1970s and 1980s who never made it into the universities because of the declining economy at the time, PhDs 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.
Read Katherine Newman's Declining Fortunes and learn to introduce social scientific study into the debate.
(I'm going to call you "Don", is that all right?)
Okay, Don. First off, thanks for an intelligent response to my rant (except for the subject line). I appreciated it, though it is obviously at odds with how I used to feel. I think that my younger days were plagued (or blessed, depending on one's point of view) with that common trait of the young: Trying to forge our own destiny by rejecting, rewriting, or just plain refuting previous generations. It's as common as beer in a frat house.
I couched my rant in terms of how I felt in the past, but your reply comes to me as though all that we are "debating" is current news. Even ten years ago it was going out of fashion.
As it is now, my generation seems to be doing just fine, speaking generally and relatively. I think that your charge that we "played victim", though harsh, is probably accurate. But speaking personally, I grew tired of that stance early in December of 1994, which marks the first time I ever went grocery shopping and left my calculator at home. The tearful joy of that experience (I'm not exaggerating) was enough to break my own sense of victimization. I don't think I am unique among members of my generation.
Your explanation of American economics is suspect, in my mind. First, you make no mention of the startling boom times of the 1980s after the recession early in the decade and before the crash at the end of it, and the fact that there even were PhDs looking for professorships at the time tells me volumes about what rights and privileges your generation had: A typical member of my generation would work part time and go into a $20,000 debt in order to get a BSc or BA ... and then work at McDonalds, incapable of affording more while regularly fielding calls from the bank asking where the next student loan payment was. Not much different, perhaps, but certainly more dire.
By the way, Katherine Newman kinda got it wrong: She predicted serious downturns in the middle class, especially as the younger boomers lose ground in an ever-shrinking society of affluence. But it turned out much better than that, didn't it? The other thing is that she isn't a "social scientific" author; she anecdotally introduces peoples' stories in an anthropological context. She is an anthropologist, after all ...
But, Don, I liked that you took me and my rant seriously enough to get upset about it, and I also appreciate that you took some time to write a response.
In the end, what really interests me most about your email is the fact that your generation saw downturns in the standard of living, and so did mine. Rather than sit and debate with each other about who had it worse, let's commiserate. I can see that we have a lot more in common than previously thought, and maybe it's the shared experiences we should think about these days, not the generational differences.
* * *
PS: Incidentally, Don, did you take my survey?