by Charles Fischman.
Wherever brewed coffee is sold to the American public is the “to-go” cup with its plastic lid. If the likeness has not already made an impression, let it be noted that the coffee “to-go“ cup and lid, with its upturned spout and narrow hole designed to fit grown human lips, looks very much like a toddler “sippy cup.”
One might be tempted to dismiss the similarity of the “to-go” coffee cup to the toddler sippy-cup as mere spill-prevention-design coincidence. To do so, however, would be to neglect the serious, underlying implications. The preference of apparently grown humans for consuming commercially-brewed coffee on the move from a “to-go” sippy-cup rather than seated in a café or diner and drinking from, respectively, a china cup or a stoneware mug, is one of a long list of signs of a fundamental immaturity in the current United States. In fact, despite their outward, adult appearance, four generations of Americans, starting with the Baby Boomers, have all failed to move beyond child, or, at best, adolescent stages of human development.
Is it a coincidence that the once largest demographic cohort in the United States ever is still referred to as “Baby Boomers” even though the youngest of them is now in their late fifties? This generation is renowned for its childish ways: selfishness, self-indulgence, petulance, rebelliousness, and frivolous materialism. Even if the “Me Generation” reputation is mere casual observation, sociologist Robert Putnam’s famous study of American society, Bowling Alone, chronicles in exhaustive statistical detail Americans’ plummeting participation rates in communal activities of any nature once the “Baby Boomers” began to reach physical maturity in the mid-late 1960s. Although the imagery and legends of their assorted communal living experiments of the 1960s and ‘70s survive, the communes themselves failed. When one can party all night and then sleep until dinner, why pitch in on difficult farm or household chores? No one ran away from Mom and Dad in square suburbia just to impose Mom and Dad’s rules on themselves, right?
Setting aside selfish motives for the sake of group accomplishment or welfare, a defining practice of adulthood, is mostly lacking from the Baby-Boomers’ comportment. The generations younger than the “Baby Boomers,” those born after 1971 (Generation X, Generation Y, Millenials, etc…), are similarly self-absorbed, self-indulgent, irresponsible, and annoyingly bratty–all conduct learned from the Baby-Boomer model. These characteristics best fit infants, children, and adolescents, human individuals who have yet to progress to mature adulthood.
One might well ask, why did the Baby-Boomers not mature? Why did they largely fail to reach an adult stage of development typified by forbearing individualism for the sake of others? What cause or phenomenon endured for 36 years (from roughly their first infancies starting in 1946 and lasting into their last adolescent years in 1982, when those Americans born in 1964 turned 18), affected all socio-economic categories and geographic regions coast-to-coast equally, and prevented an entire generation of Americans from growing into adulthood? The never before experienced phenomenon of nearly instant, total human annihilation: nuclear war.
Either in utero or conceived in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or born and raised during the 1950s and early 1960s in an environment of constant nuclear testing and tension with the Soviet Union, the spectre of nuclear warfare traumatized Baby-Boomers. Even though they were not its literal victims like the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians obliterated in August, 1945, they suffered from the fallout. This American generation literally was born and raised under the constant shadow of atomic mushroom clouds.
We can easily speculate as to the impact of this shadow on their lives in utero, as infants, as children, and as teenagers. First, Baby-Boomers were spoiled by their parents. Despite the positive aspects of a massive economic boom and consequent proliferation of material comforts after 1946, those parents knew it could all be vaporized in an instant. Combined with memories of their own deprivations during the Depression and World War II, parents amply delivered toys, home comforts, electronic gadgets, indulgent foods (e.g. sodas, milkshakes, candy), and family vacations to their Baby-Boomer children. One cannot doubt that those parents desired to provide their offspring with an idyllic childhood given that the future’s arrival appeared dubious. In other words, if little Johnny and Suzy might not live to see adulthood, at least they could have a memorable childhood.
That doubtful future, especially as the nuclear arms race accelerated into the early 1960s and culminated in the Cuban Missile Crisis, created a crisis of a different nature: existential. If tomorrow might never come, then one’s natural reaction is to live in the moment. Rather than postpone gratification, one indulges immediately. The Baby-Boomers were and are notorious for their excessive self-indulgence. Such behavior reflects both their parents’ doubts and their own, given that they were the participants in regular “Duck and Cover” drills and observers of their parents’ bomb shelter building and constant worry.
The oldest Baby-Boomers would have been sixteen during the harrowing thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis. That age is an impressionable one, midway through high-school, when powers of reasoning are moving rapidly toward adult levels, when futures start to take shape, when a grasp of cause-effect in local, national, or world events blooms. Yet, at sixteen, let alone younger ages, control over one’s daily circumstances remains largely determined by the elders in charge of family, school, religious, civic, or business entities.
Slightly over a year later, President Kennedy’s shocking assassination would have shattered the halcyon fall of the oldest Baby Boomers’ high school senior years. President Kennedy had hardly been mourned before President Johnson fabricated the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August, 1964 and the Vietnam War commenced in earnest. As they left high school, Baby Boomers not only faced a life cut short by ICBMs but, just like the President, by bullets, too.
Who can fault the subsequent flight to escapism, both mental and physical, of the Baby Boomers? High school graduates evaded both Eisenhower-era conformism and the draft on college campuses. The infamous trinity of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n‘ roll provided an easy, if temporary and risky, escape. Running off to California, to a commune, or to India combined physical separation with an apparent psychological break, too. Yet, as the turbulent mid-to-late 1960s slid into the Nixon administration, what had started, perhaps, as a statement of identity, disintegrated into consumer subculture and dissipation.
Although the Baby-Boomers were surrounded by serious-minded adults in the Civil Rights and Women’s Rights’ Movements, those adults leading the way were born prior to 1946. Whether a Bus Boycott, Lunch-Counter Sit-In, or a Consciousness Raising, such social movements were serious, coherent, and direct efforts to bring about political change within the existing system of the Constitution and the democratic republic it establishes. Those movements did not feature coitus, cannabis, or concerts, at least not prominently.
The first Baby-Boomers would have graduated from college in 1968, the year of the dysfunctional Democratic National Convention in Chicago and Richard Nixon’s election. With the exception of the Anti-War Movement, most other movements for social change in that era splintered into fractious, identity-oriented sects all convinced, just like any indignant, self-righteous teen-ager, that they were more right than others. By the time Baby-Boomers reached leadership age in the late-1970s, Ronald Reagan was on the near horizon and the Yuppies, corporate schemers bent on gentrification, conspicuous consumption, and nostalgic re-creation of their sunny childhoods did nothing to stop his version of revolution. Their focus as individuals turned to material accumulation and “self-help” through one New Age-inspired fad or pop-psychology theory after another.
By the time the last Baby-Boomers graduated from high school early in the Reagan Administration, 1982-1983, Baby-Boomer self-mythologizing, or rationalization, had begun in earnest. Starting with George Lucas’s American Graffiti, the epitome of the trend was the 1983 Lawrence Kasdan film, The Big Chill. At the time of the film’s release, its popularity stemmed from its presumably accurate depiction of the Baby-Boomer experience: the frustration of having to reconcile an idealized past of radicalism, revolution, and recreation with the present demands of careers, marriage, parenthood, finances, and aging. Glenn Close’s character, Sarah, is a physician, mother, and wife to Kevin Kline‘s character, Harold, himself a loving husband and father, and athletic shoe store mogul. Close’s Sarah captures the film’s zeitgeist when she exclaims, in the midst of another evening of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll with her college friends assembled for another friend‘s funeral, “I feel I was at my best when I was with you people.”
At The Big Chill’s end, when no existential or practical questions have been answered but music has been listened to, drugs consumed, and sex had, Jeff Goldblum’s character, Michael, sums up the wish not only of the film’s immature characters but all Baby-Boomers whom they represent when he states that the college buddies are all moving in with Sarah (Close) and Harold (Kline). Symbolically, it is a wish to return to their childhood cocoon. Although they might have protested otherwise, Sarah and Harold are the only adults on hand in The Big Chill. Despite Sarah’s having had an affair, she and Harold have a stable marriage, stable careers about which they have no misgivings of having “sold out,” children, and a home.
Though becoming parents often forces a final transition to adulthood, Baby-Boomers ironically perpetuated American infantilization through their own child-raising techniques. They became the infamous “Helicopter Parents,“ swooping in at any sign of trouble to rescue their children. Generations Y and Z have inherited their parents’ self-absorption. Generation X, though not the offspring of the Boomers, grew up in their long, cultural shadow. Given that rock music, recreational drugs, and rebellion had already been claimed, Generation X accepted the mantle of “slackers.” Generations X, Y, and Z have taken the Baby-Boomers’ model of quasi-adult life, as they did with the Baby-Boomers’ absorption in screens, and perfected it.
What are the consequences of the sippy-cup grasping, self-adoring, screen-obsessed American generations‘ immaturity? One might have one’s own favorite sign of American infantilization, perhaps the wearing of Halloween costumes or animal hats by adults (Peter-Pan syndrome), or the acceptability of ear buds or headphones in public (a symbolic retreat to the “privacy” of the teenage bedroom), or maybe the all-ages playing of video/computer games. These signs all reflect the ultimate result: the inability to place others’ needs above one’s own.
To make this assertion is not to make a neo-Burkean appeal to “the good old days.” After all, it was the parents and grand-parents of Baby-Boomers who brought humankind the Great Depression, World War II, and atomic weapons in the first place. Who would like to claim those events as their adult achievements? However, longing for “order,” itself perhaps a wish for the structure and security of childhood, has its own drawbacks.
Rather, many of the major issues facing society in the United States–wealth inequality, corporate malfeasance, ineffective Federal governance, and environmental destruction–can be traced to the arrested development of the Baby-Boomers and subsequent generations. Inequality? A result of accepting and promoting an economic view which emphasizes self-interest and wealth accumulation (the child with his or her toys) over all other facets of human life. Corporate malfeasance? Similarly, a reckless pursuit of profits (partying teenagers) without concern for the collateral damage. Ineffective governance? More recklessness, in this case self-promotion and ideological extremism (petulant teen rebellion) at the expense of finding effective, compromise solutions to social concerns. Environmental destruction? A spectacular failure to imagine (like any child still learning morals) the impact of one’s actions on others, from SUVs and McMansions sprawling over the land, to despoiling the natural world for corporate profits, to deliberately corrupting legislatures and weakening regulations.
Infancy, childhood, and adolescence under an atomic mushroom cloud? Dreadful and traumatic times, perhaps, but now over. Sitting down for a cup of coffee, from a china cup or stoneware mug, with a friend or two, is much more civilized… and adult.