People wonder why there is such division between generations of Americans in recent years.
Consider this: it was the Silent Generation which began entering academia and then actively took to advancing the message of nonconformity to the next generation – who themselves had just begun their pursuit of higher education.
That next generation would come to be known as the Baby Boom Generation.
The dangers of social conformity, a sentiment handed-down from one generation to the next was clearly centered around distrust of the older generations.
Fast-forward just over five-and-a-half decades. And, now it is the Silent Generation which predominantly constitutes those “old folks” who hold much of the top positions in our society’s institutions of power.
What is their prevailing message today?
It is one rooted in the demand of total conformity with their social edicts.
Such hypocrisy is not lost on today’s young-but-emerging population, even if they don’t necessarily understand it in the terms presented above.
A discernable pattern is developing in response to it.
The present situation is producing fertile soil for the budding of a new Punk Rock generation, which will arise just as its predecessor did during the second and third decades of the Cold War.
Parallels to social conditions on the other side of the Atlantic during a recently bygone era serve as a prelude to what we can expect here in the next several years.
In the late 1950s in Great Britain, the youth of the day found themselves caught between a society which had known individual freedom quite well and a nation that had become ensnared in a post-war phase during which the power brokers who had inherited an expanded central government – as a result of its growth during the war effort of 1939 through 1945 – were steadily developing new ways to over-regiment the lives of the country’s young people unlike anything their society had seen before.
Throughout the 1960s to the end of the Vietnam War era in the early 1970s, social conditions had become tense enough for the punk rock movement to splash across that country and cause further social shake-ups.
Here we are in 2020, the same frustrations – born from the confusion of understanding the value of freedom (which had been enjoyed to varying greater levels by older generations) while simultaneously being bombarded with concepts chiseling-away at individuality and individualism – are steadily mounting.
Similar forces are concomitantly at play just as were seen and felt decades ago: the stress of constant war-involvement on the other side of the world; shifts in media technology that enabled wider expression of outside-the-mainstream viewpoints; expansion of power wielded by public authorities; a growing sense of not fitting-in with each round of young people just entering adulthood; and discontent with how the country’s affairs are being handled.
The only X-factor is how that new punk rock generation will view the efficacy of the State in their lives and society at-large.
Distrust of the State still was high in Great Britain of 50 years ago. Today’s American young people have had a wider separation of time from when the strangling of liberty rapidly began accelerating to their coming-of-age.
Unfortunately, Generation X did not do enough to nurture the flames of individual liberty. We see the evidence of that all across social media.
Hope remains for us to redeem ourselves in this regard through our mentorship of that generation when its time comes. Our success there hinges on our credibility. Otherwise, we will become just another generation in the shuffle and find ourselves lost in it.