Busted: Generation Jones

I read an article this morning with the headline “Medicare, Social Security Funds Expiring Sooner, U.S. Says.” Wonderful.  Just wonderful.

I’m 51, soon to be 52.  That’s a mere 13 years out from my turn to collect social security.  Experts have been telling us for years that the social security fund would go broke.  It’s a Ponzi scheme that will go bust just before folks my age start to collect.

Although it has been common to labely folks my age “baby boomers,” the term doesn’t really fit.  If you look at the various generations that demographers look at you’ll see a disparity:

Baby Boom generation – 1940-1964 (24 years)
Generation X – Mid-1960s through the mid-1970s (approximately 10 years)
Generation Y – Early 1980s-late 1990s (again, approximately 10 years)

Why is it that the boomers have a generation of 24 years and the others only comprise a narrow band of about a decade?  Did somebody get left out?  They sure did.  That would be my generation.

You see, I’m not a baby boomer.  That is my parents’ generation.  My mother was born in 1940 and my father was born in 1941.  So how is it that I’m in the same generation as them?  My parents grew up in the “Happy Days.” Remember Ritchie and the Fonz?  My dad had a green zoot suit and a pair of shoes with glow-in-the dark soles.  .  My mom recalls sock hops and dancing the jitterbug.  They loved Roy Orbison, the Platters, John Wayne, Doris Day, and My Mother the Car.  On Sunday Nights, we watched Ed Sullivan and Hee Haw.  Like the money in social security, none of that belonged to me.

I never felt like a baby boomer.  My parents were more like their parents.  They looked at the generation that came after theirs–the hippies–as a bunch of freaks.  My dad wore his hair military short and he had an “America love it or leave it” bumper sticker on the car.  He despised the draft-card-burning longhairs with the bell bottom pants and love beads.

Demographers stuck my generation in with that generation of hippies, but we really didn’t belong there.  During the Summer of Love in 1967, the Tet Offensive in 1968, and Woodstock in 1969, I was respectively 8, 9, and 10 years old.  I was too young to understand the social upheavals that were convulsing in America.  The closest I got to them was a field trip to Washington, D.C. in 1968 where we saw firsthand a riot where the National Guard arrived in helicopters and busted the heads of the hippies with their billy clubs.  Otherwise, I had a placid childhood in the lower middle-class watching Saturday morning cartoons and eating sandwiches made on Wonder Bread.

Sergeant Pepper, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix were before my time.  I learned about them later, after they had become history.  I always wondered why people said “Clapton is God.” I figured that out later.  My generation never had a cause that we got behind, that defined us.  We didn’t have to stop a war in Vietnam.  We didn’t have a civil rights movement.  Nixon was gone.  The environment was not our issue.  If anything, we grew up in idyllic ignorance.  If anything defined our generation, it was Gerald Ford–a guy who was kind of a place-holder.  That’s what we were.  Place-holders.

My brother-in-law is this great guy who was in on every hip trend.  By virtue of fate, his birth in 1951 placed him at the perfect age for every major trend that defined his generation.  He would have entered adulthood around 1967-1968 and had to have experienced angst over the draft.  He was probably deeply affected by the deaths of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King.  My wife said he had love beads in college.  He got married in a Bhuddhist ceremony (cool, huh?).  Later, he was fully into the jaded abandon of the disco era. He was into “We are the World,” Live-Aid, and Farm-Aid.  He was enmeshed in the heart of everything that defined his generation.

I have learned that demographers have only recently begun to identify a “Generation Jones.” That; apparently, is my generation, born between 1954 and 1965.  The name comes from the phrase “Keep up with the Joneses.” There’s also the aspect of yearning or craving–”jonesing” so to speak.  It implies that the folks in Generation Jones were raised to have huge expectations in our youth, only to face a different reality when we grew up.

I remember getting the Weekly Reader in elementary school.  It was a little newspaper for kids.  It always had pictures of amazing inventions that would exist in the 21st century.  There was a show on television, hosted by Walter Cronkite, called the 21st century.  Those two things planted the expectation of a future with cities on the moon, flying cars, personal jet packs, or televisions that would cover an entire wall.  Of course, they didn’t mention that a person with a lower middle-class income could never afford any of those things without going up to his eyeballs in debt.  They didn’t tell us that our parents’ generation–the Baby Boomers–would devour up all the resources like a swarm of locusts and not re-plant for the future.

Generation Jonesers were the responsible ones.  We were the demographic bump that put Reagan into office and Newt’s Contract with America over the top.  That’s because, when we turned 18, instead of the Tet Offensive, we were feeling Jimmy Carter’s “malaise.” Instead of hot rods like the Happy Days’ generation enjoyed, we had Ford Pintos and even-odd day gas rationing.  Whereas our parents could buy a new car for $2,000 and a nice home for $10,000, our cars and homes would cost $20,000 and $100,000.  Unfortunately, wages didn’t increase by a factor of ten and the taxes simply took a bigger chunk of our income through the bracket creep of inflation.

When I was in my early 20s, Jimmy Carter’s malaise collided with Reagan’s recession.  I joined the military to get a job because there were none to be found and college was too expensive.  Somehow, though I was married, they still wanted my parents’ income figures to factor in financial aid for college.  My parents made “too much” money for me to qualify, even though I was flat broke and working for $3.65 an hour.  In the military, they had just phased out the Vietnam Era GI Bill for education benefits and the Montgomery GI bill hadn’t come into existence yet.  In the interim, they had a pay-and-match education benefit that a married E-1 couldn’t afford, so I ended up in the gap with no GI Bill at all.  That’s another one of the timing problems associated with being a Generation Joneser.  It took me 10 years, doing it one course at a time, to get an Associate’s Degree while working, getting military training, traveling, and raising a family.  It took even longer for the Bachelor’s.

Of course, I’m not totally ungrateful.  Our generation did get cell phones and the Internet.  Of course, with my over-50 eyeballs, I can’t hardly see the buttons or touch screens on the newest phones, so they made one called the JitterBug for us.  The Internet has enabled humanity to do what it does best–quarrel–with hundreds or thousands of people simultaneously.  The technology still isn’t completely mature, which keeps me employed fixing the darn computers for doctors and nurses.  One of the Generation X doctors (the generation after me) complained that he lost 12 minutes waiting for me to fix his computer for him the other day.  When a 12-minute break-fix response isn’t good enough to suit a person, that’s really unfortunate.  After working on computers all day long, I come home and write, do homework, chat with my family, and annoy people on Facebook on a computer.  Thank goodness for my church duties and judo, which keep me somewhat sane–that is, until the computer at church breaks and I have to fix it for the clerks.  But, I digress.

Generation Jones is essentially split into two sub-generations.  Some of us were raised by conservative, patriotic, mom-and-apple pie Americans and the other half was raised by liberal, hippy types who burned their bras and their draft cards, who wallowed in the mud at Woodstock and loved every minute of it.  That divide is what splits our society now.  Some of us grew up in homes where we pledged allegiance to the flag and others who wanted to burn it.  Each of us feels entitled to a particular future, but those visions of the future clash.  It’s why we are so divided now.

America finally has its first Generation Jones president: Barack Obama.  He aptly represents everything about our generation that marks it as a lost, or phantom generation.  He doesn’t have a birth certificate–at least not one that doesn’t have several moveable layers when you look at it with Adobe Aftereffects.  In his case, he is a child of hippies, not the conservative variety.  His father was an African Marxist. His mother was a loose hippy chick. His stepfather was an Indonesian Muslim, He was raised by his “typical white person” grandparents, and mentored by communists.  Like our entire generation, he voted “present” more than he took a stand for anything.  He has great expectations, but not the means to realize them without breaking the bank.

As I return to the headline that started this train of thought–the looming bankruptcy of social security–I feel acutely the sense of America being busted, bankrupt, and broke.  The American dream of endless progress and prosperity is gone.  Later today, I’ll talk on the phone to my baby boomer mother, who is now 71.  She’ll tell me about the two or three doctor visits she made this week (paid for by Medicare).  She’ll complain about the $250 she spent on getting her dog’s grooming and teeth-cleaning (paid from her fixed income from social security and a survivor benefit from the Coast Guard).  She’ll complain about gas prices, food prices, and the $5,000 price tag of some work she had done to her expensive home.

Meanwhile, I work two jobs and still wonder how I’m going to be able to afford the increase in our health insurance costs that they announced at work this week.  My wife and I live very modestly, exercising extreme thrift.  There have been years at a time where I have worked for companies that didn’t offer health insurance at all and we couldn’t afford to buy it privately–so we just did without it.  We don’t take vacations, We drive old cars (a 1991 and a 1984!) We look for deals in thrift stores,  Our house payment is fully half of what my mother’s house payment is.  When the market tanked in 2007 the paltry value of our 401k dropped like a rock. That event, combined with the jump in health insurance premiums forced us to stop putting money into a retirement account that was going down every month.  I think the last statement showed that, when we reach retirement age, we’ll be able to withdraw something like $65 a month from it.  Now, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (the one who can’t figure out how to work TurboTax, but who is THE man to run an entire economy) tells us that social security will be bankrupt just a few years before I can expect to start drawing benefits.  Wonderful. Just wonderful.

It wasn’t that we didn’t work hard.  It wasn’t that we were slackers and expected the world to be handed to us.  We went out and worked, served, and did our best.  It’s just the fact that there is a finite amount of resources available to us and the Baby Boomers are still feasting at the table while the rest of us are waiting for the leftovers.  The big question is: will there be anything left when they’re done.  Perhaps I am just disillusioned to be in the first American generation that cannot count on having it better than our parents did.  It’s just that they are still consuming the resources without regard to the damage that they have done to the future–and they’re still at the table, ordering from the menu, knowing that the bill is never going to come due for them.  It is us who are paying their tab. When they finally finish, we’ll be washing dishes in the kitchen for a very long time to come.