Can you take away somebody’s generational label?   Yesterday in my local paper, The Commercial Appeal, there was an AP article by Jocelyn Noveck about Obama marking the end of the baby boomer era.

It seems social analysts and others are arguing that those of us on the young end of the boomer era (Obama, included) are really not boomers at all.  They are calling us Generation Jones (as in jonesing after things or craving things) and saying we are lost in the shuffle.  Or they are calling us Cuspers, on the cusp of a new generation.  Might as well call us the Almost Generation.

I was born the same year as Obama, 1961, and I can see how they might come to such a conclusion.  After all, how can someone born in 1961 (or the last year of the boom, 1964) have anything in common with those born in 1946? Yet, I am a boomer and will always be one.  Sure, I was just a kid when the Vietnam War raged.  But I remember my Grandma tucking me in and praying for “the boys in Vietnam,” her youngest son among them.  I remember the little girls at the lunch table in my elementary school telling us boys that they sure were glad to be girls because “boys had to go to war.” I remember feeling proud and manly at that moment and scared at the same time, as I turned my half-pint milk carton into a tank by sticking in a straw and then flattening down the apex.  I remember,  a bit later in the war, sitting at the dinner table listening to my parents seriously discuss how, if it went on until I came of age, maybe I could preempt the draft by volunteering for the Coast Guard.

I was too young to be a proper hippy.  But I thought flower power was really cool, man.  I wanted to grow my hair long but was never allowed to.  My friend Bob down the street had older brothers, so he got to grow his hair down to his shoulders.  My mom said he looked like a girl, but I thought he was outta sight.  He even had Mick Jagger lips.

I’m old enough to remember Joe Namath and the Jets upsetting the Colts in Super Bowl III.  I remember that awesome woman wearing nothing but whipped cream on the cover of  the Herb Alpert album my parents kept in their console stereo.   In the end, I think there is enough shared experience among all the boomers to keep us together.

Perhaps the biggest divide between older and younger boomers is in our experiences with drugs. Although a  rite of passage for a lot of older boomers, drugs were clearly out by the time I got old enough to think about such things. We were constantly indoctrinated against cigarette smoking and drug abuse. We made posters in school.  I still remember a public service commercial on TV that showed a little boy following his dad around and doing what his dad did.  When the dad lit up a cigarette, the boy looked down at the pack inquisitively, and the voiceover asked, “Like father, like son?”  It’s almost as vivid as my memories of Iron Eyes Cody crying beside the litter-strewn highway.

Regardless, I have been a baby boomer for 47 years. Don’t try to change my identity. You shouldn’t just make up a new generation  because the incoming President represents change. But if we must, why not the Obama Generation? Wouldn’t that sum it up best of all?

I would be interested in what Obama, himself, would say about historians undermining his baby boomer roots.  In the meantime, I’ll just stay a boomer.  Maybe I’m just an old soul, preferring Van Morrison to Van Halen. Or maybe, in spite the new President’s rallying cry, I really don’t like change after all.

NOTE:  This entry was moved from an older blog where it elicited this comment (from gint2000):

Well written piece, but you and I and Obama are not part of the Boomer generation. We were born during the demographic boom in births from 1946 to 1964, but we are certainly not part of the same cultural generation as the Boomers (Clinton, Gore, George W, etc.).

I was born in 1960. It’s long been obvious to me (and my same-aged friends) that we aren’t Boomers. As far as your question about Obama’s views on this topic: Obama has repeatedly and emphatically argued that he is not a Boomer, and in fact based much of his original rationale for his candidacy was that he was uniquely positioned to lead america past its polarization–which Obama said was primarily fueled by Boomer vs. Boomer ideological warfare.

As far as a name for our generation: I’ve been thrilled to see the Generation Jones moniker catch on as strongly as it has…I think it’s a great name for us. No other name has caught on at all for us. The cusper lable you mention has been around for awhile and never caught on, thankfully. After all these years of being denied a collective name, the last thing we should get is name that defines us by our neighbors, ie. we should be defined by who we are, not who we aren’t. And we are not an “in-between” generation, but rather a full fledged bona fide generation. Not to mention the fact the cusper term is used to describe those between any generation…those between the Silent Generation and Boomers are called cuspers, those between genX and GenY are called cuspers, etc. And the Obama generation label would never work because its named after a person, even worse a politician who may or may not remain popular. No generation has ever been named after a person for good reason.

I’m proud of our generation and of the name that emerged for us: Generation Jones. Google the term “Generation Jones”, and you’ll see that it’s gained a big national following…it’s gotten a ton of media attention, and many top commentators from numerous top publications and networks (New York Times, Time magazine, NBC, Newsweek, ABC, etc.) are specifically referring to Obama, born in 1961, as part of Generation Jones.

So that got me to thinking. I did a little more research and made this conclusion:

Does Generation Jones leave you jonesing for a better name?

It has occurred to me that while some people blog to impart what they know, I blog, it seems, to uncover what I don’t know. Like discovering a new hole in my favorite sweater, I keep finding areas where my knowledge and understanding don’t quite cover my expanding ignorance.  The latest is Generation Jones.

If you were born 1954 -1965 and are as oblivious to this term as I was just a week ago, go here and here.  Last week I wrote in my blog about Obama and Generation Jones, not what I knew about it (which was precious little) but how I felt about it. (That’s a trick of writers. People can refute your facts, but they can’t argue with how you feel about something.) The problem with feelings, unlike facts, though, is that they are prone to change.

Thanks to a comment on that entry, I have done a little more research on my new generation.  I find it fascinating.  The dates make a whole lot of sense to me.  The name, however, leaves me cold. I wish it was a bit more flattering or had a more historic overtone. Unlike other generations who get labeled fairly quickly, we have been in the enviable position of having the chance to look back and perhaps choose our own label.  So I’m just a bit disappointed. It’s like being in a new rock band and your drunken band mates decided on a lousy name while you were sleeping. Or like living in Utah and having a team called the Jazz.  Or living in a great place like Toronto but having a team called the Maple Leafs. Leafs?

What was the idea behind the name Jones? My understanding is this:

1. It is a fairly generic name and sums up our nondescript place between the boomers and the Xers.

2. The slang verb to jones means to crave or yearn for something.  We were given huge expectations in the sixties only to have the seventies come crashing down on us so that we were left jonesing for something more.  Seems kind of whiny to me.  And wasn’t it the boomers (Cheech and Chong) who sang Basketball Jones?

3. Keeping up with the Joneses. There’s a certain irony in the name, for me, because  you can’t use a name like Jones without referencing this much older phrase (which is probably the origin of “jonesing”).  Funny, then that our generation should be named Jones.  We are jonesing on the one hand and we ARE the Joneses on the other. Does this make sense?

I’d like to see a name that better reflects the history or something quintessential about our time.  The Cold War Generation or Generation School House Rock .

Many argue that those of us born in 1961 (like Obama and myself) are the first Generation Xers.  For them there are still just two generations spanning the years 1946-1981, but the dates have shifted. For more on that go here and  here. I’ve never felt like an Xer.  And, good or bad, Generation Jones seems to have enough momentum that it will stick.

In the end, putting people in convenient buckets of time is always a bit arbitrary.  There are strong threads that run from one generation to the next that can’t be severed by mere dates. Generations overlap, after all; people are born every year, not in convenient twenty year intervals. In many ways I feel like a bridge between boomers and Xers. Not separate from them but part of a continuum. I’m equally at home with members of both.  Perhaps, then, we’re BoomXers.

Regardless, I like the idea of a generational identity that’s more squarely focused on “my time.” It makes me feel younger than I feel as a boomer.  It’s fun to have a new team to root for. And, frankly, as much as I identify with boomers, it’s a bit of a burden lifted, at least politically, not to have to wear the boomer label anymore.