SocraticGadfly: I'm a 70s kid, as #Apollo11 reminds me

July 23, 2014

I'm a 70s kid, as #Apollo11 reminds me

This beautiful montage of 45 Apollo 11 photographs for the 45th anniversary of landing on the moon leads me to that.

I've talked a bit, indirectly, on this blog, and more with a few similarly-aged, and politically like-minded, friends on Facebook about this.

It's about demographic cohorts. And, such an issue prompts bushel baskets worth of discussion.

I'm old enough to, barely, remember Apollo 11. But, I definitely don't consider myself a Baby Boomer. So, did the Boom end in 1960, instead of 1964, as some demographers postulate?

Well, then I'm a Gen-Xer, right?

Absolutely not! I have less in common with the Alex Keating generation (more on that in a bit) than I do with Boomers.

Instead, whether we use the word Tweeners, or another, let us postulate a mini-generation between Boomers and Xers.

I originally said 1961-69 birthdates, but I'm going to tweak that a bit.

Let's call 1962 the front end. That way, none of use remember the Kennedy assassination, and beyond that, likely, none of us heard our parents talk about it when we were old enough to have a reliable memory.

Let's call August 1969 the tail end. That way, states who use Sept. 1 instead of Jan. 1 as the birthday cutoff for school age eligibility are my guiding line. And thus, everybody in this cohort was at least starting junior high before the end of Ronald Reagan's first year in office, and halfway through high school, at least, when he was starting his second term.

Hence, a lot fewer Alex Keatings of Family Ties in our cohort than in the Xers.

We're not only too young to know anything about Jack Kennedy. We know relatively little about the Space Race, about Vietnam, and about the pre-detente Cold War that fueled them. But, we do remember Watergate, two oil embargos, stagflation, and the "malaise" that Jimmy Carter did not mention.

See? We're 70s kids.

2 comments:

mrhambre said...

'we do remember two oil embargos, stagflation, and the "malaise" that Jimmy Carter did not mention.'

Hello, Watergate?

I'm of the age that I recall being annoyed that my much-anticipated afternoon cartoons had been pre-empted by the Watergate hearings. In high school, I read a lot of the Watergate literature and got an appreciation for the cynicism, disloyalty, and pettiness that fills the air in Washington.

If nothing else, it inoculated me against vast Washington conspiracy theories. That Bush could have pulled off a labor-intensive stunt like the 9/11 Inside Job in a money-sodden snake pit like DC is even less plausible than one of the Bourne movies.

Gadfly said...

Oops! I added that.

And, right, on the anti-conspiracy angle.

That's why the Jesus Mythicism and other stuff from Gnu Atheists, or even lower, village idiot atheists, makes me laugh, too.