Generations

[poliphilo]

 I can't keep track of the generations- and where they begin and end.  I think they're coming and going faster than they ever did- and we're more conscious of them than ever before. Or the media is, because, as I've said, I can't keep up. X, Y, Z have flashed past and now it seems we're back to A again- or should it be Alpha?

But they're real things; I don't doubt it. And we need, or at least crave, the company of members of our own particular generation because only those born within a narrow time frame are going to have passed the same cultural and historical markers on their journey into adulthood- undergone the same initiations into the same lodge and know what the handshakes are.  I was born in 1951- which makes me a boomer (I think.) Tail-end, perhaps. And, as Al Stewart, a fellow boomer but from the front end of our generation, wrote, "Sergeant Pepper was real to me."

More real than he could be to anyone a few years older or a few years younger.

I had a an experience over Christmas that brought all this home to me. My friend is 81- so less than a decade older than I am- but lives in another mental universe. I was demonstrating how easy it is to find things on the internet (about which he is clueless) and suggested he name a song- any song- and I'd dig it out for him in double-quick time. I was prepared for Elvis. Maybe Sinatra. Maybe even Kathleen Ferrier. But what did he come up with? He came up with Al Jolson singing Swannee...

Jolson, I ask you- in full, unironic blackface...

Comments

[conuly]

The boomers were born from 1946 to 1963 - and they're also the only generational cohort which actually is defined by a demographic event, in their case (your case) the postwar baby boom. The others, not really. So the rest are all extremely made up.

[poliphilo]

Thank you. So I'm actually a relatively early boomer and not a late one...