“Even tho you are my daughter you are my hero!! Your MOM”

If you were wondering, the title of this entry is straight from a facebook post that my boomer aunt wrote on her daughter’s wall. My cousin just turned down an acceptance into NYUs grad program in journalism for a job at Gawker media. That must be saying something about the future of journalism. My cousin, a quintessential Gen Y, is convicted, independent, has just defined a prime time direction for her new career, signed the lease on her first Brooklyn loft (with four other young professional friends), and basically proved to the rents that her future was bright. Instantly, immediately, and publicly she then became their hero. Here you go, now that you’re 22, and making your own 50K you can help lead me back to prosperity, I’ll follow you.

Is the new role of Gen Y to become a living beacon of hope for their boomer parents? A faint notion of a potential safety net, when a drained retirement fund doesn’t hold up to a medical emergency? It seems like a pretty dramatic move for baby boomers to throw the reins over to their children so quickly. The only hero that most Gen Ys have become at this point in their lives are guitar heros, and that only seems to take time, repetition, and Bud Light. Maybe part of the problem is the definition of hero. Merriam Webster talks about illustrious warriors and legendary figures, where as urban dictionary is obsessed with submarine sandwiches and even mentions the idea that a hero might be “mom.”

• Merriam Webster says…
  1. a mythological or legendary figure often of divine descent endowed with great strength or ability, an illustrious warrior, a man admired for his achievements and noble qualities, one that shows great courage
  2. the principal male character in a literary or dramatic work, the central figure in an event, period, or movement
  3. plurally used heros: submarine
  4. an object of extreme admiration and devotion : idol

• Urban Dictionary says…
  1. A hero is someone who gets a lot of OTHER people killed.
  2. Someone who helps without anything expected in return. Their gesture may be big or small, profound or not, it doesn’t make im’ any less of a hero. E.g. Dr. King, Ghandi, Mom
  3. One who lays down his own life so that others can live.
  4. A Submarine Sandwich. The long sandwich featuring layers of meat and cheese on a crusty Italian roll goes by a variety of names. Submarine, sub, and hero are widespread. Localized terms are bomber (upstate New York), wedge (downstate New York), hoagie (Delaware Valley, including Philadelphia and southern New Jersey), grinder (New England), Cuban sandwich (Miami), Italian sandwich (Maine), Italian (southern Midwest), and poor boy (New Orleans, before Katrina) now goes by soggy boy.

The conclusion I walked away with was that Boomers are dramatic. They’re using big words and big ideas to scare away the fact that they may have just been screwed. In the end, I or my cousin won’t be able to help out with a triple by pass (and neither will medicare), but we are becoming accustomed to the idea of buying smaller houses and paying for our own weddings. Gen Y may have been disproportionately hit by the contraction of the job market but in terms of net worth they’ve skirted the devastation, and probably learned some second hand lessons. In reaction to their parents folly, they might also (consciously or not), re-scale the size of a dream house, family car, grocery store, and shoe collection. Their new dreams of a “quaint” 2 bedroom and Nissan-Cube-as-family-hauler excite their parents, “how heroic” of them. Their parents become fascinated with their ability to calibrate and prepare. What was once pegged as “lazy and ungrateful” becomes “stress-free and calm,” a demeanor that requires less maintenance and better weathers long storms.

As Strauss & Howe wrote in 1991 “Boomers are starting to show a fascination for apocalyptic solutions. Unlike their GI fathers, who excelled at overcoming crisis, Boomers are attracted to the possibility of fomenting crisis….The ‘sky will first need to fall’ before the world wakes up to its environmental folly, insisted Boomer columnist Christopher Winner just before Earth Day 1990.” They had a lot to rebel against, beginning with their parents and the upbringing that they provided. In a study Pew Research did on generational disconnects Gen Y and their Boomer parents showed fewer disconnects than previous generations. “Just as people don’t see much generational conflict today in society at large, they don’t see much generational conflict in their own families — at least not as much as there had been a generation ago. Only 10% of parents of older children say they often have major disagreements with a teenage or young adult child. By contrast, nearly twice as many adult respondents (19%) say that when they themselves were in their late teens and early 20s, they often had major disagreements with their parents.”

Guitar heros are what we need. Lazy, calm, unphased, ungrateful, but less dramatic and materialistic children who love the crap out of their parents. Guitar heros who would rather buy a small house and live with four friends so they can play video games all day are heros precisely because… they don’t migrate to San Francisco on a whim of becoming a musician, fall to years of living on the street, and then make self-celebrating, creepy documentaries about parrots. Guitar heros with their small salaries and virtual dreams give their parents hope that bigger is no longer better.

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