stone Throwing in Glass Houses:
When Baby Boomers Met Generation X
More than once, Fve caught young people quizzing me pointedly on
the Sixties and felt the distinct unease that they were not rapt in admiration
at our sadly mixed achievements, but were scrutinizing our mistakes to
avoid repeating them. We know firsthand what trouble the young can cause
fo r the old when the old have it coming, and now we are the Establishment.
Sixties counterculturalists told us not to trust anyone over thirty. They
were right. They were talking about us.
Mike Males
What is so unique about Arlington as a national cemetery is its ability to
encompass so much history in so little space. With IPX’s grave so prominent, this
resting place on the Potomac is perfect for thinking about the idea of torches being
passed; within its gates lie the death of one generation and the birth of the next. It
is the earthly home of the generational phoenix.
The deaths of past generations abound in this cemetery. The oldest graves, up
near the Arlington House, are those marking America’s coming of age — the Civil
War. Newer graves mark the end of the Baby Boomer’s coming of age — the
spacious area and eternal flame of JFK and his wife Jackie, civil rights figures
such as Thurgood Marshall and Medgar Evers, and even a special grave for the
celebrated Joe Louis. Still the most potent marker to this generation is the simple
grave of Robert F. Kennedy. At the end of the sixties, after Malcolm, Martin, and
all the rest were assassinated, after Vietnam had stopped being the glorious battle
for American ideals, after the students at Kent State had become rotting corpses
and long-standing memorials, the event which seems to mark the end of this
generation of hope and despair seems to be the assassination of RFK, the last hope
of a generation of liberalism, not because of his brothers or who he was, but because
of who he was becoming. He left behind him a country soon to be reborn in
Watergate and a generation more like and therefore unlike anything he had ever
dreamed. A number of events have intersected here at the end of the twentieth
century and beginning of the twenty-first to produce a generation unlike any which
has gone before: the thirteenth generation of Americans, more commonly known
as Generation X.
Numerous books have been written about us; most tend to paint a very dismal
picture of my generation as aimless, cynical, unwanted, and rebellious. My
generation stands at the edge of some significant paradigm shifts in the way mankind