Can't Quit Jonesin'

Sigh.

Two more exhibits of an overlooked generational cohort.

Exhibit A: The college course, "Talkin’ About My Parents Generation." USA Today reports on a college course to help kids understand their "boomer" parents. The course, according to the article, covers all those culturally-defining moments for Boomers: Father Knows Best, political demonstrations, Woodstock, the Vietnam war, hula hoops, The Graduate, and such.

These are the typical icons that were supposed to shape these college kids' parents in their coming-of-age years? Most of us parents who have a 20-year-old college student weren't old enough for any of these events to actually shape us.

One student from the class was quoted as saying that while most conversations with her parents used to be about her, now, it's often about them. "It's 'Hey, Dad, where were you in 1968?' It's not stuff I've ever talked about with my parents before."

I can just imagine if my college sophomore took this class and asked me about 1968.

"Ah yes," I'd say to him, a faraway look coming to my eye. "Second grade was a good year. I was usually chosen as captain of my kickball team."

C'mon. For most parents of today's college students, when we got old enough to buy our own music or make our own movie choices, we listened to BTO rather than the Beatles, and Star Wars shaped us more than The Graduate. Politically, it was Carter's "malaise" speech and not Nixon's Watergate-related resignation that more closely captures the mood of the times we knew in high school:

I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy.... I do not refer to the outward strength of America, a nation that is at peace tonight everywhere in the world, with unmatched economic power and military might. The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.

Cheery, huh? Those of us who came of age in the 70s can tell ya: our 1978 wasn't anything like the Boomers' 1968.

Even the title of the course--"Talkin' About My Parents Generation" misses the boat. That's a riff on the line from The Who song, "My Generation," released in 1964. I was 3.

Exhibit B: Robert Wuthnow's latest book. After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion.

Now, I like Wuthnow's books and I'll probably end up reading his latest. It's good to get some help on persuading young adults to get connected to the faith and the life of a congregation.

But Wuthnow follows the common practice of lumping those of us in our 40s into the Boomer cohort (hence the title: you have Boomers, and then you have those in their 20s and 30s "after the Boomers"). Gee, I thought I had another 20 years or so before retirement, but apparently we're supposed to be already talking about what life will be like now that "my" generation is leaving the scene--you know, the Boomers.

Whoever decided that the "Boomers" label covered everyone born between 1946 and 1964?

It leaves me jonesin', jonesin' I tell ya.