The Missing Generation

“People who fell off their bikes when they were five have a stronger group identity than I do.”

I belong to a missing generation. Maybe belong is not the right word as my generation doesn’t exist in the sense that it has no name. I’ve fallen through a huge, whopping socio-politico-psycho-babble crack and into a black demographic hole where they put all the people who don’t belong. I’m missing a lot by not being part of a named generation — or, for that matter, any recognized minority group.

When they publish polls and say accuracy is within 2%, that’s me, lost in the rounding off process. As a result, no one cares what I think, how I vote or whether I prefer stick or spray underarm deodorant. People who fell off their bikes when they were five have a stronger group identity than I do.

Being non-demographic isn’t my only issue. I was also born in the wrong year. By the time they had invented the Moonwalk bouncing arcade attraction, I was over the weight limit. Too late for the Moonwalk and too early for co-ed dorms, but don’t get me started on that.

I was also at the cusp of the dinner table mores. When I was a boy, my father carved the Thanksgiving turkey and served himself first. Now that I’m a father, the norm is for the father to be served last. To this day, I have never tasted white meat.

My father was a member of the Greatest Generation. The Finest Hour also occurred during their watch, which seems a little unfair to the rest of us. My younger sister sneaked under the wire into the Boomer or the Me Generation, my son is Gen X or the Baby Bust Generation and my grandchildren are members of the Certain-To-Be-Named-Soon Generation in this Age of the Almighty Label.

I guess falling between my father and my sister puts me in the Not-So-Great Generation. Who knows? No one ever writes about us. After all, we’re less than 2% of the population.

Being a male WASP, I’ve also never been part of any recognized minority, unless you count people who actually shook the real Howdy Dowdy’s hand. The only minority group to which I belong is the No Name Generation, as in the Sausalito bar, but not as much fun and not big enough to deserve a real name.

In this country, if you’re a minority, you’re a somebody. Today’s smart parents aspire for their children to belong to less of a group than they did. If you’re in any minority — race, religion or a group of under 40, polar bear daters — you have plenty of issues to complain or brag about. If you have no minority status, then all you have to talk about is those who do. Maybe that’s why the talk so often turns mean.

There is an urban myth that being in the majority is an advantage. It’s not; it’s a weight of responsibility hung around your neck at birth. It may be good for some “attaboys” and help open a few doors while the minorities are getting all the government checks and special privileges. In San Francisco, the homeless are provided free legal care compliments of the ACLU, many Hispanics have the option of being schooled in their native tongue and retired circus clowns get free size-22 shoes at Payless.

I once took solace in the fact that I was riding the bell-shaped curve of age, that as I got older there would be less and less of my age-peers and eventually we would become a minority, if only for a brief period. Now I discover while I was riding down the bell-shaped curve, I was being buoyed upward — and therefore staying level — by the huge population tsunami of the Baby Boomers, who are about ready to form a new group, Gen Rx.

Demographers say by 2020 my white Caucasian ancestry will no longer be in the majority in California. It would be just my luck for a group of immigrants to amass at our borders until I pass on. Then, during my funeral, all cross over and make the group I am no longer a living member of a minority at long last.

     Yet, at the very end, I will finally be a minority — of one.
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