The Big Boom
The generations that comprise our country
IN 1976, a small Swiss film destined to be a cult classic was released, called Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000. The movie centred on a group of young adults in Geneva (baby boomers all) trying to deal with the lingering fallout of the French “revolution” of May 1968, a time when general strikes, student protests and the brief disappearance of President Charles de Gaulle brought much of Europe to a standstill. One of the characters, Mathilde, is pregnant, and the group collectively reflect on what the world will be like for the unborn Jonah (so-named because his expecting mother is “like a whale”) in 2000. The friends have 25 years, they figure, to help Jonah “get out of the mess.” What they’re clearly engaged in is the personal kind of historical hubris that baby boomers would prove to love most: their status as the prime saviour among generations, the star of cohorts.
This year, 2017, marking Canada’s 150th birthday, could be our turn.
As Canadian boomers, our demographic is aging, but we’re still the dead-centre fulcrum of the generational lifeline of the country, the pivot of its history. Behind us are three generations: our parents, the Greatest Generation; our grandparents, The Lost Generation; and our great-grandparents – let’s call them the Confederation Generation, who touch year zero, 1867. Ahead of us are three (sort of) generations: our children, divided, depending on their birth years, into generation X and the millennials; and their children, labelled, alternately, generation Z, founders or alphas.
Confusing? If so, it’s our fault. Until we arrived, the naming of generations was far less common and descriptive than it is today. The Lost Generation actually comes from a quote attributed to Gertrude Stein in an epigraph to Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises. It was a reference to either people killed during the First World War or a disillusioned artistic community in Paris, both of which were more representative of Hemingway than, say, my paternal grandfather, who emigrated from Russia during the Communist revolution. The Greatest Generation, as far as anyone can determine, was coined by news anchor Tom Brokaw, a quasi-boomer (born 1940), in his 1998 book The Greatest Generation. The encomium “greatest” was meant to honour the heroism of the cohort that reached adulthood during the Second World War (and grew up during the Great Depression of the 1930s). Generation X was identified by Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland, a late boomer (born 1961), and millennials cropped up first in the 1992 Generations by historians William Strauss and Neil Howe, both classic boomers (born 1947 and 1951 respectively).
In fact, until boomers arrived, generational divisions were more about year brackets than personality. But the cultural and political hallmarks of the ’60s generation in North America were so pronounced and glamorized that the epithet boomer quickly lost its connection to the war and became synonymous with a grab bag of icons and movements: the Sexual Revolution, Flower Power, bra-burning, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, “plastics” ( The Graduate), “far out” and farther out, ad infinitum. Overnight, a generation became as much about how you lived as when you lived. The trend was retroactive to past generations and automatically applied to those coming around the bend. Gen X was immediately stereotyped as the cohort of the kind of slackers/stoners/good-girls/ mean-girls who populated iconic movies like The Breakfast Club, Dazed and Confused and Reality Bites, a kind of high school of a generation on steroids. Gen-Y, or the millennials (our later, younger progeny), quickly became typed as gen-X with smartphones but without the fun: a technologically addicted group who specialized in indolence and complaint and stealing things off the Internet. The children of gen-Xers, the gen-Z/alphas/founders (our grandchildren) have already been stamped, a priori, as destined to be so technologically comfortable they’ll be as inscrutable to us as Martians.
None of these catch-all descriptors is accurate, of course, and most of them come with what Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof might call a faint stench of mendacity.Thepurveyorsof much of that stereotyping? Regrettably, baby boomers. All previous generations think the generations after them are going to hell in a handbasket, but we’ve come up with our own way of looking down our noses that at times strikes me as uniquely smug. Particularly Canadian boomers, who may just well be the luckiest generation of all time. We, after all, were heir to all the perks of the ’60s – the music, the freedom, the fun – but none of the downsides – a draft, a war in Vietnam, burning inner cities. Jobs were waiting for us when we got out of high school or university, and shortly after that homes nor-
mal people could buy. This is why I’m so heartened by Statistics Canada’s ongoing policy not to divide our children into gen-Xers and millennials but to just call them our children. What divides our older and younger kids isn’t a word with a lot of double consonants, but the improbability that the latter will ever be able to afford a home.
But, surprise of surprises, my own stereotypes are flawed, too. Included in the first “Zoomer Census,” administered by this magazine six months ago, was the question, “Do you consider the millennial generation lazy?” The results: 25 per cent of the respondents said yes, 75 per cent said no. It turns out we may know our own cohort as incompletely as we know any other.
So here we are, born at the midpoint of our country’s years, celebrating its 150th and poised at the final chapter of ours. We’ve come a long way from a group of Swiss 20-somethings marvelling that Jonah will be 25 in the year 2000. We have done some amazing things, undeniably, and it’s been fun to think, because of the comparative size of our group, that we’re at the centre of the universe. But our size is not our doing. We didn’t beget ourselves, and our record in upholding the ’60s ideals we once espoused is less than spotless. A lot of the things we decry – cellphone addiction, degradation of the planet, reality TV – we helped create. And while there’s something to be said for refusing to go gentle into that good night, there’s merit, too, I would argue, in knowing when to step aside. When to stop thinking we are history and recognize that we’re just one part of its longer arc.
By a lucky coincidence, my own family has been represented in five of the six generations in Canada’s lifespan. My mother, at age five, arrived in Halifax from Poland with her mother, her brother and $14 in 1925. She and my father had three children, who begat eight of their own, who in turn have added, to date, five of their own: three boys and two girls. For Mother’s Day this year, a large picnic was planned that would have included all four remaining generations, but it was derailed when our oldest Canadian, my mother-in-law, 96 going on 97, was hospitalized briefly. Even if it had gone on as planned, our youngest Canadian, my eight-month-old granddaughter, Lylah, would have missed it; she celebrated Mother’s Day with her maternal grandparents. My daughter-in-law texted us a photo of Lylah wearing the same dress her mother had worn when she was eight months old, confirming my purely objective opinion that my granddaughter is the most fetching human being to ever walk the face of the earth.
She has other things going for her. According to actuarial predictions, a baby born today in Canada has one chance in two of living to be 100. Which means the grinning little girl in her mother’s dress has an excellent shot at seeing the next century.
So rise with me, fellow boomers, and raise a glass. To Lylah, who will be 84 in the year 2100.