Boomer

"Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it."

-George Orwell

A milestone of sorts yesterday--for the first time, the morning post was read by no one. Zero. Zip. I am truly talking to myself at this point. At least I have an appreciative audience.

This morning's paper left me scratching my head about my generational camp. I ran across an article that touched on the generational difference between Kamala Harris and DJT, noting that her birth in October of 1964 places her at the very beginning of Generation X.

Wait . . . what? I was born in July of the same year, and have always considered myself the end of the Baby Boom generation, along with everyone else born that year. When did that space of a few weeks between July and October mark a point of demarcation between these two rather arbitrary generational camps?

So I went digging online, and found that almost everyone who weighed in on the subject (how does one make a living doing that, anyway?) placed the transition between Baby Boomers and Gen X at 1964-65.

Within the Baby Boom cohort, there's another dividing line between Baby Boom I, born between 1946 and 1954, and "Generation Jones" born between 1955 and 1964. Our group didn't have World War II vets as fathers, and were too young to have been drafted into the military. Plus we always had TV, which was nice.

So, why would a journalist try to pull Harris out of the Baby Boomer tent and into the camp of Gen X? That one's pretty simple: the press hates her opponent, for the most part, and needs to draw a generational contrast between the two of them. The Cheeto Messiah was born in 1946, meaning that if one follows the generally accepted lines of demarcation between the generations they both are Boomers. Thus, our enterprising, objective journalist simply moved the line a little, like kicking a golf ball out of the rough into the fairway, and hailed the new Democratic nominee as a harbinger of the next generation's ascendancy into political leadership.

Not that any of it matters, or that these generational divides aren't arbitrary as hell. I have a lot more in common with folks born in the mid1960s than the late 1940s, in terms of life experience and shared memory and wealth accumulation, or the lack thereof. Labeling someone a Boomer or Gen X or a Millennial tells you pretty much nothing except that people like to create groupings of like objects, and treating things or people as "like" requires blurring a lot of detail to the point that the grouping becomes meaningless.

Time for a quick trip to the gym before my first call in a couple hours. A year ago Peg and I were flying to Texas to see my mother alive for the last time. I dreamed yesterday that she walked right through the front door of Tara, carrying her own bags, and asked where she could find the guest room. I was about to tell her we didn't have one for her because she couldn't climb stairs, but then I noticed that this was Mom from thirty years ago, getting around just fine and already starting up the stairs to one of the guest rooms, bags in hand. I miss that person today.