After the Boomers Are Gone, the Bloodshed Begins

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Good take on things, I look back on www.familysearch.org on Mom's side of the family, for the most part there, I'm Northern European, but I see some parts who sneaked in from Italy, the Balkans, Turkey and so on and when I go back way far, I start seeing names like Flavius in my family tree and so on. If that is the case, when I go back further, I see ancestors from even Carthage, the Middle East and Ethiopia. People did get around more than we think. I've also seen in that line when I go back to the 1200's, I come from a long line of German Rabbis. I know on Dad's side, I come from Serbia, Hungary, Russia, White Russia (Belarus) and Russian Jew. I'm a mess, I often joked that "if I applied my standards, I'd kick myself out of the country and what will be left will be snakes and grass." The problem is, I'm made up of so many groups, where would I go?

/\Found places like that when I did my family tree.Wonder how much would show up on DNA.
I thought I was just plain old Scotch-Irish.

There is a theory that those who are born after 1954-1956 but before "Gen X" are a separate generation called Generation Jones

I born in 1957. For an American context, I only partially buy into that theory.

Yes it is true we were children and thus too young to participate in all the protests and riots, and serve in Vietnam, scream for Beatlemania, hippie out at Woodstock. Watergate, Jimmy Carter, disco was going on when we were in high school and college. Our whole lives we have been the shadow of the 60's generation. There has never been any escape from hearing about the 60's generation's milestones, from yuppies to Clinton's election, to turning Sr. Citizens. If you want to understand the context of the original punk/new wave resentment of that is what it was originally about. While the audience for it was Gex the musicians were disaffected boomers.

OTOH as mentioned the height of the actual baby boom was around when we were born. Even though we were children we remember and were influenced by the assassinations, protests. In the 70s it was still "Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll", dress down denim, long hair, supposedly "do anything you want to do", and "f**k authority". That is while I think we are the same generation, we are distinct sub-types. I call them "the Vietnam era boomers" and "Post-counterculture boomers". It is inconvincible that Progressive Rock and Heavy Metal could exist without Psychedelic/Acid Rock, similar to the disco hedonism and the Summer of Love and so on.

I was born in 1966, but I feel I'm a Joneser myself, a late model perhaps. Jonesers also have experienced the beginning of the loss of jobs that have been around in our grandfather's and father's time such as here in the Ohio Valley and Pittsburgh where I'm from, we saw the decline of the Steel and manufacturing industry. I remember we had Babcock and Wilcox, Koppers, J&L Steel, Mesta Machine and so on. I remember in the Pittsburgh area in the late 1970s and early 1980's, we had an activist group formed when the steel mills were going away called Denominational Ministerial Strategies (DMS) who protested the closings. DMS, a little trivia, was founded by the brother of the Actor David Soul (Starsky & Hutch), The Lutheran Reverend Daniel L. Soulberg. Maybe I'm just writing this from my limited area of perspective here, but I know many of the earlier Boomers were able to get those same jobs. In short the Jonesers are the first generation to experience a downturn in living standards and this is why many of us have a distrust of authority, the system, The Man if you will. One of my favorite films is the 1981 cartoon movie, "Heavy Metal," where I watched the making of it on the DVD and this is one of the films that was way out there and sort of going against society. Then as you go on, the X'er's followed with our cynicism.

I often said the 1970's were a fun time to be kid, teenager or young adult but if you had a family to support, it was becoming tough. I remember during the Iranian Crisis, we had odd and even days to get gas for the car and I spent a weekend at my paternal grandmother's place with my cousins. My cousins were able to go home to Columbus, OH but I was stranded for a week missing the first few days of 7th grade. The reason, Mom needed the gas in the car to go to work until she could come get me. Still, it was fun with grandma, helping in the garden, listening to shortwave a radio and the scanner as well as talking about the paranormal.