Curtain Closing on Boomer Era?
We’ve just had a shocker: there’s not just one generation of boomers; there are two. And in The Denver Post, Karen Auge wrote about it … the day after the new president was sworn in!
The inauguration of Barack Obama was awash in symbolism, much of it momentous.
But there was something else afoot on those Capitol steps. It was a transition of power from old to new. From baby boomer to latter-day post-boomer.
Get used to it.
As political analysts and social observers see it, Jan. 20, 2009, might go down as the day the curtain closed on the baby boomers’ era. As George W. Bush rode off into the sunset, some say, the sun set on his cohorts.
“There is a changing of the guard that is going on that is a very good thing,” said Denver political consultant Sean Duffy. At 45, Duffy is, technically, a boomer. But like Obama, he came of age a decade after the turbulence of the 1960s.
A “solutions-oriented” tack
“Part of it is just the tolling of the clock. But also, I think there really is a sense of the country moving toward a more solutions-oriented approach that’s less interested in banging around ideology on both sides,” Duffy said.
Obama is bringing a passel of youngsters with him to the White House: Timothy Geithner, his treasury secretary pick, is 47. His education secretary, Arne Duncan, is 44. For surgeon general, Obama reportedly has his eye on 39-year-old CNN heartthrob Dr. Sanjay Gupta.
Category: Boomer Lifestyle
I’m not sure what you mean when you say someone is “technically” a Boomer. I guess you mean that person is part of the post-WWII demographic boom in births. But that is a wholly different thing then cultural generations, which of course have no technical definitions. The census bureau, nor any other ‘official’ or ‘technical’ person or organization, decide the birth year parameters of generations. These are the subjective opinions of experts like sociologists.
There were certainly two seperate genetaions born during the approximately 20 year post-was demographic baby boom.
As many nationally influential voices have repeatedly noted, Obama is part of Generation Jones, born 1954-1965, between the Boomers and Generation X. Google Generation Jones, and you’ll see it’s gotten a lot of media attention, and many top commentators from many top publications and networks (New York Times, Time magazine, NBC, Newsweek, ABC, etc.) are specifically referring to Obama, born in 1961, as part of Generation Jones.
Great op-ed on exactly this topic in today’s USA TODAY:
http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2009/01/stuck-in-the-mi.html