Generation Jones

 Last night I learned I was "Generation Jones". That sounds like black exploitation flick Tarantino might have made, but it's not. It was a YouTube about the 1954- 1965 segment of the post-WWII "baby boom" children and how we really aren't boomers. 

I never felt like I was a boomer. In our family of 7 kids, two older sisters are actual boomers, four of us aren't (technically now) and the youngest might be an "X". I don't really know what the demarcations are of the X, Y and Z's. Why did they start so early in the alphabet with double b's and then jump to the end? Did they know Trump was going to destroy the planet? Why start with alliteration and then go straight to the higher Scrabble letters? It doesn't make any sense.

But it doesn't make any sense that I am a boomer either. Never felt like one, but stupid kids of one of the three other generations still might say to me, "OK, boomer" if they think I'm too preachy with any advice I might have for them. WRONG! That's "Joneser" to you, ya whippersnapper! 

To me, boomers are the boys that went off to Vietnam and the women (and other boys) who took to the streets to protest the war and then went to see Hendrix at their local hangout. Janis Joplin would open for him, and it was like 5 bucks to get in but all the Beatles were alive, and in the crowd, smoking weed and everybody was cool about that. 

The video pointed out that boomers were able to go to college for cheap and came out of that with good paying jobs, and very affordable housing that they could collect nice pensions doing, kinda like their parents did as "The Greatest Generation". I missed that by several years, dammit. The video pointed out that us Jonesers left college to 20% interest rates and recessions. Things changed quickly, but depending upon who you talked to, we were still boomers then. I think they kicked us out. Maybe we were crowding them? 

I don't really know one generation from the next, especially now that I've been reassigned retroactively. And this reassignment is unofficial and not enforceable by law, just like all the others. Like the others though, it's a way that society marks time and gives- or takes- agency to or from a group of people. Your mileage may vary, as in all the generational categories. 

It was great for me to be a kid in the 60's and come of age in the 70's. Fond memories! I would imagine everyone's childhood was the right time to be born because, frankly, that is how it works. Us Jonesers may be a lost generation to the people who ponder these things, but I wouldn't trade if I could. Generation Jones is very practical that way, I think.   

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