What will our children have to unite their generation?

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GarthRanzz@reddit

I’m sorry but I have to ask. Who did Reagan attempt to have an assignation with? Was it Jody Foster? Is that why Hinckley tried to assassinate him?

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styxfloat@reddit (OP)

Hinkles attempted to assassinate Reagan to get Jodie Foster’s attention.

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Fit_Subject_3256@reddit

I’ve never been accused of being an optimist but…

I’ve raised millennials and my youngest is Gen Alpha, she’s 9 yo. I am loving Gen Alpha! Yes, they’re still very young, but they are smart and they are political! My youngest and her friends really care about justice. They care about doing something abt gun violence, the environment, they loathe Trump, and they are incredibly enlightened and open minded about gender and LGBTQ+ issues. I’m almost 54 yo and my kids are 32, 30, and 9. Since I’ve been raising kids for over 30 years, I am no fool. I get it that younger kids naturally tend to care abt justice and I realize that can - and often does - wane. But I’m seeing a lot of deep thinking, caring, and organizing coming from really young kiddos in Gen Alpha. I didn’t see this with my millennial kids (although they’re great too!) and it gives me hope! Yes, they love Roblox and Minecraft. My 9 yo does too. But they care abt much more than that and they seem rightly baffled by certain political decision makers and voters who make no sense and care abt no one but themselves. One quick example: my youngest had field day late last school year. We thought it would be a day of foot races, water balloons, obstacle courses, etc. and yep, it contained all those things. But the part that impressed me involved flags. The kids were invited to create their own class flags to carry when the event started. The children all sat together and did an amazing job conferring with one another about what the flags would look like and stand for. The kids included the official colors of the trans flag, the bi flag, the more general, rainbow LGBTQ+ flag, and elements relating to flags representing the different nations the students families originally came from. They really wanted to represent absolutely everyone in their class and they went out of their way to make sure all their LGBTQ+ peers were repped and cared for. Yes, I do live in a progressive bubble area. I get it that this isn’t how elementary school looks across the US. But…I’m still impressed. Please tell me none of you fellow Gen Xers have forgotten how homophobic our peers were! I remember friends coming out to me in tears, terrified they’d be beaten and disowned for doing so. Hell, I was more than one friend’s “beard” back in the 80’s, trying to help them not get the crap beaten out of them by their own parents. Our era was very closed-minded. The AIDS fear mongering alone - it was hideous. I remember hearing ppl talk abt sending ppl with AIDS to deserted islands to die alone, like lepers. The 80’s sucked! It wasn’t like we were all united, listening to “We Are The World” together, kumbaya-style. So I’m interested in and excited abt what the youngest generation is into. They’re giving this bitter X’er some hope!

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Normal-Philosopher-8@reddit

I’ve raised Millennials and Z’s. My sisters have Alphas. Each generation has their core media. We might have gone from PBS to YouTube stars, but they all can identify their own. Kids are all right.

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ravenx99@reddit

Yes and no. There are too many YouTube stars. Too many artists. My kid (24) watches one set of YouTubers, but they're not the same YouTubers the basketball kids down the street watch. They listen to music from artists I've never heard of, fringe stuff, and they watch TV that is nowhere near mainstream.

It's as if our generation has been divided into groups that only watched ABC or CBS or NBC... Just one, not two or three. Except there are 500000 channels for our kids to divide themselves among.

I see this among adults today... There is no water-cooler talk about TV anymore, because outside of rarities like Game of Thrones and Mandalorian, everybody is watching different TV. (And even when we watch the same show, it may happen months apart.)

Proliferation of content and choice, increasing niche content, and on-demand streaming of everything means as a society, we are less and less connected by shared media experiences.

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Sumeriandawn@reddit

Sports, blockbuster movies, videogames

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ravenx99@reddit

You might be surprised, but a poll by Pew Research finds only 4 in 10 Americans follow sports closely. Surprising to me, Gen Z engages with sports more than Millennials, but few of them go to live games or watch whole games... they watch highlights on their phones. (Which sounds very Gen Z to me.) Though I will say this... I didn't follow sports at all, but I still knew there was rivalry between the Steelers and the Cowboys. And I still known names like Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, they were so famous. I guess that was Kobe more recently... so yeah, Gen Z may be the generation that, in their 50's, says, "Remember Kobe? Damn shame that."

I wrote about three paragraphs about video games, until I realized it boils down to this...

Over 80% of Gen Z plays video games, a larger number than any previous generation. So "video games" in general is something they have in common, but that's kind of like saying Gen X had television in common... it was so ubiquitous the fact that we were the first generation to all have television as kids doesn't really cross our minds. But that ties us together... we're the Saturday morning cartoon generation. And Gen Z is the "we all play video games" generation, with few people telling them video games are bad for them because their parents play and are the ones who bought them games. There are so many different video games (and platforms with exclusives) they may have very few games in common (Minecraft).

(Keeping in mind for myself that the things that "unite" a generation aren't necessarily the things they consciously think and talk about.)

Movies you are probably right about... there are still relatively few blockbuster movies, and Gen Z does seem to engage heavily in that popular culture. I'm kind of surprised that most Gen Z still go to movie theaters at least a couple times a year. I thought they'd be all about streaming.

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Sumeriandawn@reddit

"4 in 10 Americans follow sports closely"

That's still a huge amount. Over 100 million people. There are still big sports stars. Floyd Mayweather, Serena Williams, Lebron, Steph Curry, Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, Patrick Mahomes, Shohei Ohtani

Very popular videogames: Minecraft, Call of Duty, Fortnite, Grand Theft Auto, Elden Ring, Legend of Zelda, Pokemon,

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ravenx99@reddit

Yet less than half is not near a "common experience" for a generation.

Very popular video games... Of which my Gen Z kid, who lives in video games, has played 2. Again, not a common experience. That they almost all play video games, yes. That they play the same video games, no.

They'll remember Fortnite, but they'll remember it as the game that helped make in-game purchases a nightmare.

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Normal-Philosopher-8@reddit

But to go back to TV as GenX popular culture, I think we forget that while we had our generation defining television, that does not mean that all GenXers or even most, were able to watch those shows in real time. Television was ubiquitous, but until satellite dishes and more importantly, the VCR, millions of Xers may only have had access to ABC or NBC but not both because of antenna strength. Add into this even more who didn’t have access to cable (my parents did not have it until I went away to college in the late 80’s) and even more defining moments such as MTV become blurred. Throw in that many of us knew kids who didn’t have TV at all - some parents were religious/controlling, or others might be hippie types who scorned mass media - and I’m betting the number of kids who remember their television childhood IN REAL TIME breaks down pretty quickly in less than half.

You don’t have your play Minecraft or Roblox to have them pulled into your pop culture orbit, just as you didn’t have to watch Brady Bunch reruns after school or Superfriends on Saturday morning to know who everyone is.

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middlingachiever@reddit

We had an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate 2 months ago.

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Subvet98@reddit

And people cheer so I don’t think that counts.

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middlingachiever@reddit

It’s an interesting social commentary. The OP mentions a presidential assassination attempt as something that happened in GenX time, yet one just happened weeks ago. Regardless of anyone’s opinion about the candidate, our society has become incredibly desensitized to gun violence.

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Subvet98@reddit

I think I has less to do with desensitization and more to do who the target was.

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middlingachiever@reddit

I think that. if you told us in the 80s that we’d have school shootings every year and a NBD assassination attempt at a campaign stop in the 20s, we’d think it’s a Ray Bradbury plotline.

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Subvet98@reddit

Oh we definitely live in a dystopia but I think the assassination attempt would have been a bigger deal if it had been Biden

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tawandagames2@reddit

The Covid pandemic.

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Armthedillos5@reddit

We had AIDS, and it brought most of the country together, all the music stars were making collab songs for charity, and there was a huge quilt.

Covid brought Im not wearing no mask, Fauci needs to be hanged, and other cultural and political divides. :( I guess that will be something to remember too.

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middlingachiever@reddit

That’s a rose-glasses memory of the AIDS epidemic. Watch And the Band Played On.

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Subvet98@reddit

That was a great movie.

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WhiplashMotorbreath@reddit

You seem to have selective memory of the AIDS epidemic.

Masks did not work, You wanna know how I can state that and be 100% certain?

I worked through the whole thing, because my job was essential. I went in after the customers were gone, and left before they came in. We all worked alone, and never closer than 20 feet with mask on. Didn't go anywhere at all, other than work and the fuel station to get gas at the pump, near no one.

I tested + for it and was downright sick as hell 4 times. How we end up getting it, covid got past through the skin and transfered onto product everytime someone touched it.

100% of the time, masked up, never near anyone unless you call 20 feet or more apart close. and no human contact , and only one to use my vehicle. So, ya.

As for Fauci, he was invested in the lab this came out of, and the pattern for the jab had already been filed a few years earlier, and IS how they could get the jab out so damn fast, it was already years in the works.

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styxfloat@reddit (OP)

Point and counterpoint

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Sumeriandawn@reddit

In the past 100 years, how many events truly united the country?

World War 2, JFK and RFK assassinations, Moon landing, 9-11

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Major_Bear3982@reddit

Covid, Influencers, Stanley Cups, and Lululemon

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Purple_Pansy_Orange@reddit

It’s too much all the time. Even big events are watered down after a week, if not days. There are too many diversions to unite over entertainment like Michael Jackson doing the moonwalk for the first time in our day. Historical events like Trump being shot at are quickly made divisive and unpalatable. Cultural events like the astronauts stuck in space are smoothed over to a non-event. Taylor swift doing everything she’s done on tour is mocked .

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digdugnate@reddit

Probably some kind of nuclear event.

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Lopsided_Mycologist7@reddit

School shootings. Pandemics. Attempted Government coupes by former presidents. Oh and the PS5! Great games!!!

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Neither-Price-1963@reddit

Depends on how old your kids are but 9/11, School Shootings, BLM, Insurrections,

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OlderNerd@reddit

Um, their humanity and common decency?

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styxfloat@reddit (OP)

I don’t think our kids ever experienced either. If they were they had social media in high school.

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naamingebruik@reddit

Gen z and millennials before them are a lot better behaved. And a lot less hedonistic than we were

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gofargogo@reddit

Covid and memes.

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tuftedear@reddit

The one thing that would almost certainly unite a generation and the world is an invasion by a hostile life form not of this earth.

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tvieno@reddit

COVID

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Ihaveaboot@reddit

This. For most of us, I'd say 9/11.

I took a poetry course in college around 1990 and had an assignment to write about a generation-defining moment. I don't remember my whole submission, but part of it was

Without a Woodstock or World War We have Bible cliff notes and HIV Without a cure

I wouldn't have written that post 9/11, but it's how I felt at the time.

Covid qualifies as a pearl harbor, 9/11 generational event - not just for the next gens, for me as well.

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AddisonDeWitt333@reddit

TOTALLY. My 14yo is all about Roblox, Minecraft and the world according to YouTube gamers (these people hold a status for him akin to the rock musos we loved in our era).

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