Re: Movies 51 - Rise of the Frozen Joker: Chapter II: Dark Fate
I had the same opinion. I was apologizing to Millennials for not fixing things, and another Gen X'er corrected me. It isn't that we never had the opportunity; we never had the numbers. The Boomers were always MUCH larger as a population and were able to win elections and set policy accordingly. We never had a chance to fix things because we never had the power. Look at the presidential candidates: Most are from either the Boomers (all GOP candidates, the Dem front runners) or Millennials. The only Gen X candidates are Booker, Beto, Castro and Yang. Who are the Gen X leaders in Congress? Quick: Name five House members who were born between 1965-1980. No googling. Can't do it, can you?
The good news is that we won't have a chance to screw things up in the future because the Millennials will seize power away from us (they already are). There is a good chance we'll be the first generation to not have a president.
Not at all. X just hasn't entered into their period of primary influence yet. Let's say they are '63-'83 (they can't cheat by artificially shortening the generation interval and then crying paucity of numbers). That means right now they are 36-56 years old. That isn't even sniffing power.
IIRC this is the first year in which Gen Xers outnumber Boomers. Go X's time is
just arriving.
Everything until now is strictly the Boomers' fault. It will be for a while yet because of momentum, like the few months of a new administration really belong to the old one. But X coming into their own now. They are about to be at fault.
Also: Gen Xers aren't
that much smaller in terms of a generation of native births. Even though the Boomers were larger they weren't ridiculously larger. And even tough family planning has helped women step off the baby machine treadmill the Silent Generation also had family planning. They even had -- gasp -- abortion. It wasn't legal but they did it all the time.
But if you insist on this BS granfaloon... if you are
really going to insist on "generation" as something demographically meaningful then a generational interval should be equal in length to the median age at which a woman has her middle child. That used to be 20 in the 19th century. It moved up to around 25 by the mid 20th century. I suspect right now that means a generation is about 30 years.
The "real" generations are probably, roughly:
98-17 (21) Lost
17-40 (23) Silent
40-65 (25) Boomer
65-92 (27) X
92-21 (29) Millenial
21-52 (31) Z
And if that's the case X is now 27-54 years old. Still just kids with no power at all.
But of course generations
aren't real. They are labels used for people to sell you sh-t by appealing to your vanity and oppositional identity formation. They're almost as dumb as races. "There's no youth culture, only masks they let you rent."