Thanks so much for your response, and I think you are correct. Yes, we Jonesers definitely *were* more skeptical than earlier Boomers at a very young age (though perhaps not as young as Xers), but still retained a hope that maybe our incipient Nomadic "life sucks and you can't change it" attitude was wrong after all, and that maybe, just maybe, the world *could* be made better (though we'd leave the actual dirty work to you old Boomers, as we'd rather just watch, thank you very much!). Several months back, I came up with a mini-theory in which I call Jonesers "pessimistic idealists" (early wave Boomers are Optimistic Idealists; first wave Xers are Pessimistic Realists; and last wave Xers are Optimistic Realists). Guess you might also call us "Xoomers." :grin:

It's also so true about a tradional education morphing into a nontraditional one sometime during the late elementary or junior high years. I remember back in Grades 1-2, we were reading "Sally Dick and Jane" books; by 3rd grade (when the first Xers were in kindergarten) they were trashed and replaced with more contemporary, multicultural books. Starting in around 4th or 5th grade, girls no longer had to wear dresses to school (unless they attended private or Catholic schools) but could wear "slacks," and by eighth or ninth grade, began to be seen in jeans. By the time I got to high school, there were actually courses called "Astrology and Adolescence," "Love Stories" (girls signed up for that one in droves--they could read romance magazine stories or Harlequin romances for credit, if they wished!), "Ghost and Horror Stories," and "Human Sexuality," (the course actually included a graphic "educational" film of how a boy and girl masturbate, and "get to know one another")--a popular class that distributed information on birth control, abortion, and VD (remember, they weren't called STDs yet). Many of the elective classes were pass/fail courses where students sat or laid down on the floor or on comfy beanbag chairs and were taught by liberal long-haired hippie types.

Happy Labor Day!

--Xoomin Susan


I also think, Barbara, you must have seen cultural trends (music, fashion, etc.) begin to change as well, though maybe you might only have noticed this among high school students.


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Susan Brombacher on 2001-09-02 18:51 ]</font>

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Susan Brombacher on 2001-09-02 19:04 ]</font>

It's just that the way I see it, what I consider to be my generation - the Baby Busters - has no personal connection to GIs because they were too old to be our parents and too young to have been our grandparents (and keep in mind here that I restrict the term "GIs" to mean those born after 1910 only). Therefore we can look at them from a neutral, unbiased perspective. Those somewhat older - the real Boomers - are obviously not in a position to do this. Indeed, a lack of anti-GI sentiment would be one of the key factors in distinguising a Buster from a Boomer.

i dont really remember any specific year that was really bad, like jon remembers 1980 as being a bad year.
I remember 1987 sucked. And just about every year between 1987 and when Nevermind came out in 1991 was really terrible music,film,fashionwise.
I remember thinking in the late 80s that everything had become so overproduced, to the point that it made me sick.
I remember Batman, and Dick Tracy and all these hyper blockbuster movies and just feeling like a kid that had too much cola, so jaded, sick from it all.
So when alternative came out it was very important and valuable to me because to me it was very anti-production, and anti-fashion...
Being cool wasnt as expensive, in fact being cool was not being cool.
A very exciting moment.
I remember that by that time news stopped having that heart stopping shock effect.
The last thing i remember being extremely saddened by was when John Candy died of a heart attack. No actually it was watching OJ in the back of that bronco and thinking that the guy from Naked Gun had sliced two peoples throats.
When Oklahoma City happened I just didnt care. I dont know why.
I think when the news puts the same ppolish in every story you just digest it all the same.
So a carjacking and a terrorist threat are the same because they are treated the same.
My mom kept saying they blew up a day care center but it just didnt effect me.
When princess di died i was a little sad...but i in no way jumped on this candle in the wind thing. Then john john died and that was his fault...didnt bother me like it bothered his baby boomer peers.
I think he meant alot more to that generation than to mine.
To us he was some heartthrob guy in the enquirer.
Honestly I have to say that about December 1998-December 1999 was a really weird time for me.
From the Impeachment to Seattle, not to mention a shooting every week.
I kept wondering what was wrong with the kids...the millies..
that was my response. when i went to school there were no bomb threats...shootings happeed in the inner cities.
there were alot of suicides and things like that...but there were no columbines.
so i saw that as a problem effecting the younger generation.
I also should add most of my friends regard tghose a few years younger as being part of a younger up and coming generation.
My friend said the 15 yearolds she works with dont know who River Phoenix was.
Youve got to admit thats a pretty big gap.

JC wrote: "Times may seem bad now, but they are nothing compared to the 1979-1982 period of which '80 was the ugliest year I have ever seen."

Wow, dude, that's a bummer. 1980 was a great year for me out in sunny Southern California! 1980 was the year I changed my college major from Physics to Engineering, thus saving my fledgling social life :smile: In 1980 I also bought my first car (a '77 Pontiac Sunbird), met my college sweetheart (whom I dumped for good in '83 :smile, partied hard at the Magic Mountain disco, turned 21 (in late October), and did my first big road trip as a young adult. (Ah, the good old days......) Yeah, I know I badmouth the Awakening alot.....but in 1980, the damage inflicted on society hadn't yet become obvious yet to my 20 year old mind. Ignorance really was bliss (sigh).

Now, 1985-- THAT was as fu**ed up a year as any I've ever seen. College was done and I'd finished my first year as a Civil Engineer, so for the first time in my life there were no immediate goals at hand. I'd moved out of my parents house, expecting to have a steady girlfriend and buddies over to my bachelor pad all the time. BZZZZZT!!! Wrong answer. None of my college friends ever even dropped by that year (and the steady girlfriend didn't appear until '91, after I'd moved north to Seattle). In 1985, I first experienced what it felt like to be truly, completely alone. Add to that Mr. Reagan's incessant "Evil Empire" speeches, and the resultant nuclear bad dreams I had nearly every night......'85 really sucked big time. In retrospect, I suppose that cold, forlorn wind that blew through my life in '85 was the Unravelling hitting full force, like a giant saecular hurricane.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Kevin Parker '59 on 2001-09-03 07:51 ]</font>

You people make me feel like a little boy. :razz:

I really enjoyed reading the messages about Jonesers in their schooldays, especially from Barbara and Susan--thanks for the memories and insightful comments. As a Joneser, I found myself nodding in agreement with much of what you said. Maybe most relevantly, the idea of us as skeptical hits the nail on the head. I think that word fits us better than the word cynical which the media so often uses to describe Jonesers. I think of Xers as cynical, Jonesers as skeptical.

On 2001-08-31 04:46, Justin'79 wrote:
jessie...you can always count on me.
yeah.
i was under the impression that this was just world events...because baby boomers get all weird when they have to listen to Xers hum the knight rider theme song.
But add lots of early sci/fi stuff to this skull
Flah Gordon Dark Crystal Clash of the Titans Beastmaster Conaan Dungeons and Dragons
STAR WARS
my first memories are really of watching television in my basement with my brother
I can remember summer 84 really well
I remember that the Pointer Sisters and van halen both had a song called 'jump'
elton john had one called 'im still standing'
they played alot of juicy fruit commercials on tv
and this 7up commercial with this jamaican man in a white suit
I also remember V.
chalk that up to another scifi film that majorly screwed with me

You got that right Justin. Boomers, heck maybe even the Jonesers, love that news stuff.

I think Xers often would rather talk about how cool Kitt was, or the Smurf ass biting episode than break down into something like Liberal/Conservative baiting.

Barbara wrote:

>>>the Xrs only got to hear second- or x-hand. Members of Jonesers and Xrs also got to experience the AFTERmath, as far as society and parenting (which I have previously posted, goes very much hand in hand).


I think Jonesers may influence Xrs as to the Crisis agenda more than early Boomers. You share early-age skepticism and MAY also be the last Boomers to be heard (age longevity may prove me false, however, and then Heaven Help Us - it IS going to be a bumpy ride). >>

IA. Early Xers/Jonesers were usually seen as cool by us, even if they didn't notice.

I also think that some Jonesers suffer from "Leave it to Beaver" syndrome. They've convinced themselves it was really this way back then and they are taking Xer's with them.

>>The Xr shift was the one I noticed. Generally, they would not be taught under
the classical way, and I saw that generation in both junior and senior high. This caused quite a controversy in education and society, but I think we caused our own problem in teaching them from day one nonclassically (open classrooms, no grades, no one right answer, no criticism, big emphasis on self-esteem). The earliest educ. years up to abstract thought around puberty are the most important.

Of course my prejudice here is that I feel the classical way is the best. It is easier to self-educate as to book learning past this point if necessary. (And the plucky Xrs have shown they can self-educate no matter what, but theirs wasn't a conventional education). >>

No. Go with that. Classical is best. The way I was taught was a complete failure. It wasn't even consistent. Didn't have any kind of grammar until 6th grade. Middle school was a disaster becuase we should have learned that already. It was catch up time. The best was the look on my HS biology teachers face when half her class, including me, didn't know the measurements or conversion. Previous teachers just skipped that Math chapter because they "felt" like it. Afterall, you'll learn it next year. Yeah, right. I can imagine how inner city schools suffered. What a mess.

I just wanted to add two former role models of mine to this forum.
One is Crazy Eddie.
The other is John DeLorien.

Education by Feelings
_____________________________________________

Ms Barbara writes:

"The Xr shift was the one I noticed. Generally, they would not be taught under the classical way, and I saw that generation in both junior and senior high.

This caused quite a controversy in education and society, but I think we caused our own problem in teaching them from day one nonclassically (open classrooms, no grades, no one right answer, no criticism, big emphasis on self-esteem).

The earliest educ. years up to abstract thought around puberty are the most important.

Of course my prejudice here is that I feel the classical way is the best. It is easier to self-educate as to book learning past this point if necessary."


With an extremely sad take from Jessie74:

"No. Go with that. Classical is best. The way I was taught was a complete failure. It wasn't even consistent. Didn't have any kind of grammar until 6th grade. Middle school was a disaster becuase we should have learned that already. It was catch up time. The best was the look on my HS biology teachers face when half her class, including me, didn't know the measurements or conversion. Previous teachers just skipped that Math chapter because they "felt" like it. Afterall, you'll learn it next year. Yeah, right. I can imagine how inner city schools suffered. What a mess."
_____________________________________________

Marc Lamb responds:

In November of '63, my parents moved from just outside the inner-city area of Columbus, Ohio up tp the burbs'. I was in 2nd grade.

I was so far behind in my new school (for example I didn't even know what a vowel was let alone how to use them) that it took years for me to recover. But I did because the teachers had NO MERCY (w/my parents permission)on me. They pushed, prodded, screamed, paddled etc...

By the sixth grade, I was aok and very much in line with the rest of my peers, if not excelling beyond them.

Question: Why, Barb, was there this push into a notion that stupid was aok?

I'm a senior in college and I still don't know many basic things about grammar, mathematics etc. I have felt that It has been very easy for me to BS my way through our educational system. And you wonder how those inner city kids got to college without learning how to read.

One stoooopid thing about writing classes I had in high school (late 1980s) involved this garbage about "writing in your own speaking voice."

I thought this was insane, because I thought that the point of writing was to convey thoughts and feelings with clarity. Teachers who bought into this "speaking voice" idea always gave me B's and B-'s because my writing "never sounded like a NATURAL speaking voice." My best grade on an essay was when I wrote a phony piece spoken in phony language (language I hardly used) of how I thought teens were SUPPOSED to speak.

Well DUH. I was seven-freekin-teen years old. My level of spoken verbal sophistication at that time was not veryh high. I was not a smooth talker. I am still not a smooth talker. That's why we WRITE, isn't it? ...to ameliorate the deficiencies of being goofy, dumfounded, stammering, and digressing as is done in normal speech, right??

Why I or ANYONE had to dumb down my writing rather than strive for the best possible erudition and most economical "idea density" is a complete mystery to me.

See what happens? First, gen-xers strive to succeed. Then they are told to act more dumb for better grades. Then, they emerge into society and are accused of being worthless and inadequate intellectually.

To those who deride my agemates and tell us we don't measure up, I quote Ian Williams from my alma mater's paper, The Daily Tar Heel, "F*** all y'all. Y'all MADE us this way!"

[Jon] I thought this was insane, because I thought that the point of writing was to convey thoughts and feelings with clarity.

[Mike] Some writing is intended to be clear, e.g. journalism, business writing, technical writing. Clarity is not typically a major goal for creative writing. Style is often considered more important. For example, Virgil Saari uses a style that gives his posts an unique flavor, but at the cost of clarity.

Was the class a creative writing or technical/business writing class?

It was your basic language arts class, which included both reading and writing. My rant refers to the "essay writing" part of the course, which included reading Erasums, Thomas Jefferson, and then we wrote essays on our own topics. I suppose it WAS creative writing but definitely within a structure...though I loved reading good stuff--and even managed to get some A's in college in English, Art, and History classes--the subjectivity of the humanities is what ulimately turned me off to going farther in that direction.

I don't like being told that what I write has no style. I already know this. (Now Virgil Saari, on the other hand--the man's writing is as jeweled and glittering as a cathedral window.)

Writing styles. Hmmm. What an intriguing subject.

Creative writing was very popular during the Awakening because self-expression was emphasized over boring High stuff like rules, grammar, and proper punctuation. Of course, much of this "creative" writing is just, well, very BAD writing...a quick peek in my high school journal makes me cringe in embarrassment. During my junior year in high school I went through a phase where i thought i was ee cummings and never capitalized anything. i cannot bear to read it now. I think it's possible to be creative but still follow basic rules of grammar so others can understand what you are saying.

Now, whose writing styles are most unique?

Virgil certainly has the most unique writing style I have seen here...his posts have a sort of ironic quaintness about them and a very creative use of words. Unfortunately (and no offense to you, Virgil) I often cannot understand what he is saying! I don't think this is due so much to bad writing as it is to my own obtuseness!

Madscientist writes like a mad scientist: his posts are very intellectual and verbose, but are well-written and usually pretty interesting (if you have the patience to plow through the longer ones). :wink:

Neisha, Donna, Jessie, and Justin all write in a colloqial, personal style that is entertaining and uses anecdotes galore. They are not usually overlong, but get to the point quickly. I think the fact these people are all Xers is relevant. Justin has a very unique writing style that always socks me right in the gut. You either love his posts or hate them (I love them--most of the time!). Sometimes he doesn't bother to punctuate or capitalize, but since sometimes he does, you know it's because he gets so into what he's saying that it's just not that important to him at the moment.

I think Jonesers, including yours truly, write in a style that is a hybrid of the Boomer and Xer styles, with lots of personal anecdotes and get to the point quickly, but sometimes can be judgmental and occasionally whiny--like they missed out on everything.

Barb definitely writes like a Silent--thoughful and considerate of others, always seeing both sides of every issue, and a little folksy ;D

I also really enjoy Marc Lamb's writing style--even though I don't always agree with what he says! His wit is often sharp and biting--but it makes me laugh anyway.

A simple reply to Ms. Susan:




:grin:





Enough said?

OH

MY

LORD!

Susan, you got Marc to use a smiley!

T4T is here, I think...... :BIG WINK:

May I ask a question
How did child raising go from the
"free to be me" upbringing I even got as a child where I put my priorities over the group.
To the millennial group focus.
Was it the end of the awakening, a shift in power from silent to boomer...
what made people do this

On writing styles: the internet seems to sort people on the basis of their writing styles - the good, the bad and the ugly! :smile:The forum is so new; many people are having to learn how to write all over again!

Thanks for the compliment, Susan. Your posts can be longer than the average, and I always find them interesting to read, since you include some personal experience and ask some out-of-the-box questions. And you definitely jump-started some threads over the last year that had gotten, well, a little dry.

I enjoy posts from Jessie, Angeli, Barbara (who added a great Silent perspective and a sense of history) Marc (even if I disagree), Erie (even if he still is a flower child), Robert (when he divides into paragraphs :wink, Neisha, Delsyn. Sometimes Virgil is harder for me to understand.

The only thing is that I wish I had more time to post thoughts - usually I'm running to the next thing and don't have time to organize my thinking and translate it to writing that is rational and understandable. I think the more experienced a writer one is, the easier it is to quickly put your thoughts together in written form.

a.pol.o.gy noun 1 A formal acknowledgment of error, offense or incivility. 2 Originally, a justification. 3 A poor substitute.


My apologies to those who have had to struggle with my posts. One here at T4T was concerned with their excess length. When I recalled him to the efficacy of prayer in his religious tradition, he seems to have taken to his knees as my posts shrank in size considerably. When they again zoom in size the fault may be mine or a lapse on the part of he who is petitioning.


It has worked in one case; it may work in others. As I do not know if those concerned with my lack of clarity, which I freely admit, have a method of reaching the higher powers of the Infinite or even government; I do not know that a method of petition will work. I have found that history and life itself is not that clear- perhaps it is the due of philosophical Taoism- thus my writing lacks clarity.


As to wordiness, I must plead guilty. I think it a blow for freedom. As Mr. Eric Blair, aka George Orwell, has argued simplifying our vocabulary is a method of simplifying our thinking and our actions.


I was taught by GI teachers and preachers in the main. They had a love of language and stessed the KJV and the literature of dead white people. I had little instruction in a business-like efficiency save for writing business letters. I may be completely mistaken but T4T is not a commercial space even though styled as a "market-place for ideas".


I do write allusively in large part due to Bullfinch's Mythology and the KJV. These are probably not much in use in the instruction of youth as was the case during my living in a backwater of the Republic. I also use terms of my employment, which is in the large agrarian...and as such probaly unintelligible to many of my more progressive fellow earthlings who have climbed the ladder of industry, service and information.


The windows of Notre Dame speak to Truth and Light, I cannot claim any such virtue. As the moral philosopher last known as Sebastian Melmoth wrote, We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. Lady Windermere's Fan.


I hope I have met some part of the definition of apology with this post.

Yo. Ob. Sv. VKS

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Virgil K. Saari on 2001-09-07 13:45 ]</font>

Thanks Susan. I aim to be pithy. After all there is no correlation between the size of one's posts and the size of one's intellect, or anything else for that matter. (Sorry couldn't resist.)

Since we're all into the "apology" thing, allow me to offer one - to Mike Alexander, for being too dismissive of his claims that 4T might have already started.

With yesterday's unemployment report, Mike may have been right all along. About two decades ago, the NFL's Buffalo Bills used "We're Talkin' Proud" as their team slogan. An appropriate slogan for the entire country right now might be "We're Talkin' Depression" - quite possibly even Great Depression!

If any of our "regulars" here would like to sound off on this subject, I have just created a new thread for that purpose. It is in the "Politics and Economics" section and it's entitled "The Great Depression of 2001?"

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Anthony '58 on 2001-09-09 01:58 ]</font>

Possible new boundaries:

X Gen -- 1960-1980
Millenial Gen -- 1980-1998
New Adaptive Gen -- 1999-?

Unravelling -- 1982-2000

Thoughts?

I think you're about right
I cant help but feel sick thinking that I used to work several blocks from there