By Michael F. Duggan
One hears a lot these days about generations—shorthand categories for cohorts of people supposed to embody distinctive personality traits, virtues, and flaws based on the multi-decade cycle in which they were born. People who would never reduce others by categories of race or sex have no problem with lumping them together in broad chronological swaths. As with decades, generations are a handy, if imprecise, basis for periodization with added moral implications for the placing of kudos or blame. There is a saying that a bigot is a sociologist without a degree.
Generations used to have names. We speak of the Founding and Framing Generation(s), the writers of the Lost Generation, the rapidly fading Greatest Generation of WWII, their children the Baby Boomers (aka the “Pepsi Generation,” or more simply “Boomers”), and the Silent Generation that came of age in the 1950s. Nowadays we designate generations with letters, like variables to be plugged into equations (X, Y, Z). Although each of us has a formative aesthetic, historical, and social backdrop that we share with others of similar age—and as animals, we reproduce in 20-30 year cycles—the fact is that people are born in every minute of every day and to speak in such general terms is only slightly better than the categories of Chinese astrology. As with the categories of race and sex, there are far more differences among individuals within a generation than between generations. But if “generations” are the terms of discussion of mass behavior these days, so be it. After all, everybody generalizes.
Oedipal chafing is inevitable between members of successive generations. I have certainly experienced this two-way street in classes I have taught (I am a member of a supposed sub-generation sometimes called “Generation Jones”—those who are too young to match all of the stereotypes about bona fide Boomers, but too old to be Gen Xers). But by and large, my experiences with people of the rising generations have been most mostly positive. For a number of years, I have seen them as the only glimmers of hope for the future of the nation and the planet. The Millennials and Gen Zers I knew have been of a high order in terms of education and thoughtfulness. I found many of them to be angry, idealistic, smart, and well-informed on issues of the economy, the environment, and other emerging crises that threaten us all. I was banking on their intensity and high-minded discontent to be a catalyst for change. It is therefore all the more demoralizing to realize how the resurgence of COVID-19 in the United States is disproportionately the result of the behavior of people under 40.
Generations X, Y, and Z, along with conservative populists, appear to be engaging in some of the worst pandemic-related behavior: COVID-19 parties, crowding into bars and clubs without masks, and what seems like a kind of self-conscious generational smugness. This exceptionalism is apparently the result of the much-reported age-based resistance to the virus. While hiking I have come across smirking young people—presumably amused by the simple precautions of the over-forty crowd—as if some degree of age-based immunity were a basis for categorical superiority. Apparently it does not matter to some of these people that they may become vectors to more vulnerable people. Their defiance of sensible precautions reminds me of the psychopathic logic for committing a crime: “I did it because I could.”
The young people I know are not of this sort. They are impatient with their elders, but they want to save the world, and they realize that the clock is running. Some see the pandemic as the opening volley of the looming global environmental crises and are as concerned about the present visitation as their parents, perhaps more so. And yet others of their cohort are acting in ways that seems like the large scale bad behavior of any other generation. The popular meme that made its rounds back in March referring to the COVID-19 virus as the “Boomer Remover” goes beyond smugness. It makes light of a global tragedy with crassness that shocks the conscience.
There is of course an irony to the bad blood between today’s young people and the Baby Boomers. The stereotypes and wholesale loathing of Boomers by many young people is well-known to be a cliché of the culture wars. And yet if there is another generation that the rising generations resemble, it is the first wave of the Baby Boom who embraced idealism—civil rights, the Peace Corps, the antiwar movement, the environmental, women’s rights, and gay rights movements. Now they appear to embody the charges leveled against Boomers as the 1970s sellouts—the hippies-turned-yuppies—of the “Me Generation.”
The danger of stereotypes—and generational categories are certainly based on stereotypes—is not found in their patent falsity, but rather in the fact that they contain enough generalized truth to appear to be plausible in specific cases where they do not apply. Some of the stories we read about irresponsible youthful behavior back in May, June, and early July may be exaggerations and distractions—the efforts of desperate governors and mayors trying to deflect blame for the consequences of opening their state and local economies too soon. It’s a convenient take on the “kids these days” argument that goes back to Gildas, Tacitus, and even the Old Testament. Indeed a major cause of the climb in infections was the rush to reopen and a lack of a coherent national strategy.
As infection rates continue to increase, the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. is taking on the character of a national-historical tragedy of epic proportions, but also of a blunder that might someday be called the Great Abdication. It is not just that the virus was bad enough, but our response to it has been a colossal failure of policy, and a failure of our spirit, our will. It is a national shirking.
We know that the World War II generation was “disciplined by a hard and bitter peace” before fighting and dying in the largest conflict in history. But what will history say about people of our time who have resisted even the mildest measures to flatten the curve and how they responded to this crisis in general? It is as if it is the spring of 1942 and a considerable number of our people do not want to enlist or join the industrial war effort—which called for much more severe impositions on individual rights and the private life than wearing a mask in public—because the general crisis is getting in the way of their enjoyment of life. It is as if we are losing the Second World War by default.
Just as crises provide opportunities for the emergence of great leadership (those who aspire to greatness consciously or unconsciously welcome crises), they are also opportunities for “generations” to distinguish themselves. Insofar as the idea of generations has any legitimacy, we can make comparisons (as long as we generalize with precision). Given their first test in facing a world historical crises, the rising generations hardly seem to be among our greatest. As others have observed, the COVID-19 pandemic is, among other things, a test of character. With the initial results of this test becoming apparent, one wonders if there may be something to the stereotype that Americans are increasingly becoming a bunch of yahoos incapable of sacrifice and who are primarily concerned with their own entertainment.
As for the behavior itself, we must ask: if there is no punishment for stupidity and recklessness, then what is the benefit of not being stupid and reckless? If infections were limited to those who shun modest precautions, then we could shrug off the newly infected as victims of self-inflicted natural selection. But the consequences of this kind of brazen stupidity (or delusions, in the case of political deniers) obviously run deeper, and many of those who will become sick and die are blameless victims along the vectors of the unthinking, the unfeeling.