Generating Hope for the Future

At first glance, Thirteenth Generation: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail? looks like two baby-boomers' sloppy way of making a buck.

A study of us much-hyped twenty-somethings, this book's pages and margins are stuffed with so many graphs, quotes, stats, comments, and cartoons that in places the actual text is almost eliminated. It's a splashy, fun-book layout for kids with the attention span of a squirrel.

Flipping through its pages, you get the impression that forty-something authors Neil Howe and Bill Strauss hope to tap into the youth market by slapping together some MTV-inspired cliches on (white) youth culture, adding a few statistics about cynical post-boom attitudes and flashy graphics, and passing it all off as a hip, grunge-generation guidepost.

But as the more gullible members of my generation who voted for Reagan/Bush are learning, first looks can be deceiving. Howe and Strauss, authors of the acclaimed history Generations, are serious sociologists, engaging writers, and fair, painfully thorough historians. They not only look with favor at the children of Vietnam, Watergate, and Reagan, they profess an adoration for us that is almost obsessional.

To them, "13ers" - the 13th generation to come of age since Ben Franklin - are postmodern heroes who have survived personal and economic catastrophes that are worse than for any generation since the Great Depression. Born between 1961 and 1981, we are a post-boom study in contradiction: selfish and media-blunted, yet walking the walk of sacrifice that boomers talked in the '60s.

NOT THAT WE have much choice. We bore the full brunt of the cultural shifts of the '60s and early '70s, from declining scholastics - which, contrary to popular opinion, began their plunge during the boomers' student tenure in the early '60s - to skyrocketing abortions and divorces. (The divorce rate eerily mirrors 13ers' childhoods, taking off in the early '60s and leveling off in 1975.) "Of all child generations in U.S. history," Howe and Strauss write, "13er kids are the 'onliest,' their families the smallest, their houses the emptiest after school, and their parents the most divorced."

Those parents are members of the Silent Generation, born between 1925 and 1942. They're the younger brothers and sisters of the G.I. Generation (1901-1925). And though largely unacknowledged, they shaped the boomers, 13ers, and the country in remarkable and devastating ways. Many were boomer heroes - the Beatles, Neil Armstrong, and Joni Mitchell, to name a few - and they were the first to experiment with what the authors call "the Consciousness Revolution that marked the 13ers' growing years." But while their consciousness was being elevated, 13ers' lives were deflated by feel-good moral ambiguity and "an amazing (even stupefying) tolerance for the rising torrent of pathology and negativism that engulfed a child's world."

Worse, the Silent Generation took the money and ran. Accustomed to affluence since their own adolescence in the post-war years, the Silents have rigged the economy to unfairly benefit the elderly while leaving the young out in the cold. Today 13ers pay quadruple the taxes of wealthy retirees, and have suffered the greatest drop in income of any generation since the 1930s. Howe and Strauss call our economic woes a "trauma today's older people would regard as a history-shattering catastrophe if it fell mostly on their heads."

The twenty-somethings do have bright spots, mostly in personal matters. We're a generation that shows healthy doses of feminism (57 percent of first-year college students in 1967 believed that married women's activities "are best confined to the home and family"; today, the figure is only 26 percent) and racial tolerance: Our ranks will ultimately include the highest percentage of immigrants in the 20th century. (Refreshingly, Howe and Strauss give African Americans and other people of color the attention that most generational studies do not.) We accept alternative lifestyles, but crave the kind of family structure our own parents didn't provide.

Contradictory? Sure. This is a generation at once cunning and idealistic, pious and free-spirited, anti-authoritarian and insecure, cynical about relationships and hopelessly romantic. But not without precedent. In the last chapters Howe and Strauss prove that ours is not the first generation of its type - the Founding Fathers were an early example - and claim that our reputation as "bad kids" will follow us through life as the Millennial Generation, born in 1981, grows up with love and advantages of enlightened boomer parents.

Hope for the next generation may sound like wild speculation and wishful thinking, but in a book this bold and brilliant, it seems like gospel truth.

Mark Gauvreau Judge was an editorial assistant at Common Boundary in Bethesda, Maryland, and was himself a 13er when this article appeared.

Thirteenth Generation: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail? By Neil Howe and Bill Strauss, Vintage, April 1993, $10, paper.