in the wind | tweets from the space ending 02.06.16

Study: Abuse by family members + other adults far more common than in youth-serving organizations http://buff.ly/1nZxyyE

Boomers + drugs | US drug overdose deaths in people aged 45–54 are more than 3x greater than in those aged 15–25 http://buff.ly/1X27a2Y

take 4 of these... | advice on making gun violence harder from the Journal of the American Medical Association 

thinking about all my friends who visit mosquito-rich environments... | MMWR http://buff.ly/1SAk1e2

forever young? | that's a baby boomer problem

One of my go-to curmudgeons, Bob Lefsetz puts his finger right on the bruise for leaders of my generation...

That’s a baby boomer problem. The belief that what was once important will continue to be. 

But look at it this way… When we were listening to the Beatles back in 1964, were we also listening to the music from 1914? Of course not! So why do baby boomers expect that kids today care about what happened fifty years ago? 

They don’t. 

As for boomers saying they loved Frank Sinatra growing up… I don’t believe this is true, Sinatra nostalgia came much later, but in any event, his moment of fame came only twenty years before the Beatles, it’s like patting today’s kids on the back for liking George Michael.

Class Diagnosis | a small idea from Raising Adults

One of the biggest social challenges for adolescents stems from something called Class Diagnosis. Class Diagnosis is what happens when we group people by some  shared characteristic—age, gender, ethnicity, religious identity, national origin—and then assume they all share other characteristics as well because they’re in the group. It’s not that Class Diagnosis is completely without basis...we’re not giving anything away by acknowledging that old people tend to have more life experience than young people. It becomes a problem when it becomes a stereotype, a short cut, an easy answer to a complicated question: He’s young, what does he know?

I think Class Diagnosis seems most dangerous in the hands of politicians and social scientists because some of them have the power to lock kids up, or drug them, or establish law enforcement standards that are out of line. It was Class Diagnosis when people my age were young and they called us The Me Generation. We hardly had a chance to prove them wrong or right. Apparently it sounded right, and they just went with it.

Class Diagnosis happened again when marketeers jumped on Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X. They weren’t trying to understand; they were looking for market share, trying to get their hands on the 125 billion dollars young Americans were spending each year. Coupland wrote a eulogy for the term Generation X:

The problems started when trendmeisters everywhere began isolating small elements of my characters’ lives—their offhand way of handling problems or their questioning of the status quo—and blew them up to represent an entire generation…Around this time my phone started ringing with corporations offering from $10,000 and up to talk on the subject of How to Sell to Generation X. I said no. (The Gap asked me to do an ad. It was tempting, but I politely refused.) In late 1991, after both political parties had called to purchase advice on X, I basically withdrew from the whole tinny discourse. And now I’m here to say that X is over.

—Details Magazine,June, 1995, page 72

For Douglas Coupland Generation X was never about demographics or even generations. He borrowed the term from the last chapter of Paul Fussel’s funny book about America’s classless society, aptly titled Class. Thus, Generation X is a distributed category of people who don’t fit in any generation because they won’t fit in; a fifth column of people whose values run counter to the current culture. If anyone ever called you a hippy (and meant it) that probably sounds familiar.

Of course the question remains: How do we sell them stuff?

And now it’s happening yet again to the people known as Millennials (or, more lazily in my estimation, GenY—you know, the one that comes after X).

What’s shocking is that parents, grandparents, teachers, coaches, youth workers and everyone else who cares doesn’t raise a ruckus; doesn’t say, “Hey, you don’t speak for me,” to the hacks who make their living trashing a generation of people they barely know if they know them at all. Where’s the love? Where’s the loyalty?

— from Raising Adults

Memorial Day | a small idea from Raising Adults

You’da thought we were a nation of rabbits! Soldiers and sailors came home from Europe and North Africa and Asia and bam! Their wives delivered babies nine months and twenty minutes later!

They were a fertile lot. The population increase from 1940 to 1950 was more than double the increase from 1930 to 1940.

There are stories of young men comparing military campaign notes in maternity waiting rooms. “Lessee: it’s June, ‘46; the bomb dropped last August ... So, you were in the Pacific when the Emperor surrendered. Am I right?”

 “Mmm ... Good guess. Actually I came back from Berlin, walking the frontier with the Soviets.”

 “What? I thought you said you were a Marine!”

 “Who said anything about Marines! Airborne, my friend. All the way.”

These people were, quite simply, a different breed. Raised in the biggest economic bust in America’s history, they fueled one of the biggest booms. They came of age winning America’s last good war; but the horror of the victory was emotionally debilitating.

Women watched helplessly as men shut down. Permanently. Many Boomers grew up with male role models more like the Marlboro Man than, say, Santa Claus. They were silent, stoic, distant, disconnected—from their spouses and children ... everything but work, really. Sure it’s a stereotype; but nobody made it up. Those men had other, secret lives. Some because they went overseas, others because they didn’t.

And what do you suppose was the effect on the 110,000 Americans of Japanese descent who lost everything when they were relocated to camps from the California mountains to the Mississippi River? Hard to say. They mostly didn’t talk about it.

James Jones wrote about his war with horrible realism in The Thin Red Line. Joseph Heller wrote about his with equally horrible comedy in Catch 22. Everyone else stuck to the numbers. How many went ashore, how many fell from the sky, how much ground was covered, how many lives lost.

Or they remained silent.

in the wind | tweets from the week ending 05.18.13

Seth Godin | Killer Profits 
http://bit.ly/10BOtYK 

Rise in plastic surgery appears to be tied to social media image concerns http://bit.ly/12hMpU0 

Millennials Vs. 50+: The Brands They Love - Forbes http://t.co/dnXeUGnwrm 

unfinished business | a small idea from Raising Adults http://jimhancock.blogspot.com

Crossing Cultures | Have American Parents Got It All Backwards? 
http://huff.to/17mOBj9

They're going to listen to someone, why not us? | 3970 Gun Deaths Since Newtown http://jimhancock.blogspot.com

Monitoring kids on Facebook is so 2009 http://usat.ly/10PV9hv 

unfinished business | a small idea from Raising Adults

Somehow, with or without us, our babies grew to be children.

Then, while Boomers elected presidents we would sooner have thrown eggs at when we first got the vote, our children turned into teenagers who seemed to feel as great a distance from us as we felt from our parents. And just like our parents we made wisecracks, then nagged, then yelled, then shook our heads disapprovingly, then gave up on them—everything we said we would never do. 

And it felt bad.

Actually, it feels bad; we’re not done yet. A lot of us have a good bit of child-rearing before us. In 2012, the number of American kids under the age of 18 reached 73.8 million. As a point of reference, there were 69.9 million under-18ers in 1966. That was a lot, but it was the top of the Baby Boom. This time the numbers continued to rise and many of the babies were born to Boomers in their 30s and 40s.

And then there are the adult children.

A lot of Boomers left home without going very far. A lot of our kids never left home at all, or left briefly, then returned, some bearing the gift of grandchildren we now raise in part or in whole. That wasn’t supposed to happen.

In 2012, about 4.7 million American children lived in households headed by grandparents about 2.2 million of them with no parent present.[1] 

Even those without drinking-age heirs in a bedroom down the hall seem to have plenty of unfinished business with their adult children. Again, I may be wrong but I can’t think of many peers who have a completely clean slate with their offspring, grown up or not. 

— from Raising Adults

[1] U.S. Census Bureau, America’s Families and Living Arrangements: 2012, Table C4, http://www.census.gov/hhes/families/data/cps2012.html

like there was no tomorrow | a small idea from Raising Adults

1976. Tom Wolfe is right about Boomers; at least in broad strokes. But what the popular media do with his insights seems all wrong.

The ‘Me’ Decade has a street date of August 23. In a matter of weeks the media turn The Me Decade into The Me Generation—by which time no one means what Wolfe meant. They aren’t describing the spirit of the age—that zeitgeist we inherited and embellished from our parents. They mean people born when we were born, growing up as we grew up.  They mean Boomers and no one else. The Me Generation is defined by demographics, and the question on everybody’s mind is: “How do we sell them stuff?”

How do you sell to people reputedly driven by unbridled self-interest? Are you kidding me?

Nothing, apparently, could be easier.

And so the sixties became the eighties—Boomer youth culture, darkly celebrated by Buck Henry and Mike Nichols in The Graduate (1967), lasting only a moment, it’s death conceded by Lawrence Kasdan in The Big Chill (1983).

Boomers may have been slow starters but they took to business in a big way. Which is where the money came from to build those bigger better suburbs beyond the suburbs; upgrading the shopping centers with mega-malls; importing European and Japanese cars from former manufacturers of tanks and bombers; electing Ronald Reagan and George Bush 41 hoping they would be good for business ... Some were nervy enough to display Grateful Dead stickers in the rear windows of four-door imports (not the skeletons; those cute dancing bears ... You know who you are).

So, what happened to the revolution? For some the answer was, “Nothing! Just shut up! We ended The War. We made Nixon resign. We invented Earth Day. We went to Woodstock: Three days of PeaceLove&Understanding! How can you say we’re self-absorbed!”

But that’s exactly what they said. Tom Wolfe updated his vision of the Me Decade in his 1987 novel, Bonfire of the Vanities (the book, not the awful Brian DePalma film), and a decade later in A Man in Full (1998).

Wolfe’s characters wander, self-consumed and thoroughly disoriented through these comic horrors. But his vision goes beyond caricature. God help us, these characters are just like us; our youth spent, our idealism gone to seed. How could this happen! 

No one knows; it just did. We laid aside the macramé, got real jobs and spent money like there was no tomorrow.

— from Raising Adults