Portrait of a Generational Self-Deception

This graphic has been posted multiple times at Facebook, most often I’m guessing by 40-ish codgers who are tut-tutting like mad about how much worse things have gotten since their day. Anyone fancy an apt Bible quote? Try Matthew 7.5.

What am I talking about? You 40-ish (and sad to say, even you 50-ish) codgers, that’s what. I recently posted about the X and XY generations born after the Baby Boom ended in 1964. It was just a shot across the bow, really, because the subject is so huge and attention spans are vanishingly small these days.

As one who pays attention to coincidence, I was struck by the odd circumstance of spotting the above poster graphic just a day or two after an ongoing InstaPunk compilation project uncovered this long forgotten post from the Year 2004, when true Millennials would have been no older than, well, four. Here’s the introduction to ”The Box: Can You Recognize the Box?”

The Kids. The National Endowment for the Arts has issued a report that documents a continuing and accelerating decline in literary reading in all parts of the American population. Literary reading is defined as novels, plays, and poetry, although in the report's statistics a juvenile romance novel counts the same as Moby Dick. And to qualify as a literary reader, all you have to do is read one book in the course of a year. Here's the worst news:

The steepest decline -- and the one that the report notes with most alarm -- has occurred among young adults. In 1982, respondents ages 18 to 34 were the group most likely to report the recreational reading of literature. Over the intervening decades, they have become the group least likely to do so (except for some segments of the population over 65). 

The change has been particularly striking among those ages 18 to 24. The report says that, over the past two decades, the share of the adult population engaged in literary reading declined by 18 points, from 56.9 percent in 1982 to 43 percent in 2002. But for the 18-to-24 cohort, the drop has been faster, sinking from 59.8 percent to 42.8 percent, a decline of 28 percent. 

"Reading at Risk" states that the trends among young readers (or, perhaps, nonreaders) suggest that "unless some effective solution is found, literary culture, and literacy in general, will continue to worsen." 

"Indeed, at the current rate of loss," it says, "literary reading as a leisure activity will virtually disappear in half a century."

The statistics aren't surprising, but they are stark. Close to 60 percent of the 18 to 24 crowd don't read even one book -- not a mystery, not a thriller, nada -- in a year. 

What follows the intro is approximately 3,000 words summarizing survey, poll, and harder data about 2004’s 18 to 24 year olds. Let’s do the math, just to be safe. 18-year-olds in 2004 would have been born in 1986. 24-year-olds would have been born in 1980. Today, they would range in age from 33 to 39. They’re the ones we call Generation XY. They have kids of their own now, the Millennials they’re suddenly so culturally alarmed about. It behooves everyone to read every word of the post called The Box, even though you won’t. The beam in your eyes makes you impatient as well as incurious.

Let’s try to put this in a larger perspective. Those of you who congratulate yourselves for not being being XY but Brand X instead (born 1964 to 1980) probably think you are off the hook. You aren’t. Your record of accomplishment represents a significant decline from the Baby Boomers, critically in every creative discipline, education, and historical/cultural memory. It was for you they began dumbing down the SATs, Balkanizing your college populations with victim-centric admissions, and larding curricula of even elite universities with nonsubjects such as gender studies, Pop Culture Studies, the rise of trade school majors like business and computer science, and radically reduced distribution requirements for bachelors degrees. More of you got your minds ruined by law school, your values skewed by segregating siloes of association inspired by political correctness. What do I mean by siloes? You got good at one thing, like programming or massage therapy or modern political campaigning, but you learned almost nothing about anything else. You therefore got very good at faking being more educated than you were or are. One reason books don’t appeal to you very much except in narrow categories. Overall, you weren’t AS damaged as the kids described in the linked InstaPunk post, but you were significantly worse off than the Baby Boomers.

Who were the Gold Standard, right? WRONG.

I am a Baby Boomer, born somewhere in the middle of that famous generation. I knew we were off, way off, the mark even then. In big ways and small. Despite heroic efforts by my parents, for example, my small private elementary school did not give me educational essentials they had received. Coerced by the textbook publishers of the day, my teachers did not teach us history or geography, at all, only a fact-free stew of feelgood travelogues called Social Studies. Given the name of a state, my dad could tell you every state that bordered it. My sister and I learned state capitals at the dinner table because the school had no interest, but to this day I cannot duplicate the feat my father routinely performed off the top of his head. We never had a course or a textbook or instruction of any kind in Civics. What I learned about the Constitution and American political history before secondary school I learned on my own. I learned all the Presidents Of the United States from a picture supplement of the Philadelphia Inquirer when I was ten. All of them on one page. I can still see the page, their pictures. Where I still go when I’m trying to remember Millard Fillmore. The Beau Brummell Black suit and crazy hair help me place him in sequence.

The most important indicator of Baby Boomer decline from prior generations was that we were the generation that toppled everything which had held things together before the time known as The Sixties. Most of the Boomers were simply spoiled brats over-indulged by parents who had survived a massive 12-year Depression and a World War that cost close to half a million American lives. They (we) got to see the generation that sired them do extraordinary things on a routine basis. Things that involved work, discipline, duty, loyalty, perseverance, and faith. We couldn’t equal them, let alone best them. So we burned the whole thing down. (Anyone under the age of 50 is too young to remember this catastrophic, world-changing decade.) The link in the piece above from “THE KIDS” is to a book in The Boomer Bible. The Box referenced was the box even the most imaginative Baby Boomers could not escape from.

They have never escaped it. They never will. And all of you X, XY, and Millennial inheritors are living in little overlapping boxes of your own inside their box. The Millennials are bad photocopies of you, much the same but worse. There’s nothing in them that wasn’t already in you. They just have even fewer skills to defend themselves against the rot. Do you start to comprehend the beam in your own eye that gives you a self-satisfied sense of superiority when you peruse the graphic up top?

Me, I doubt it. I very much doubt it. But what do I know and who am I to say?