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Find out more about Paul: Baby Boomers are being dragged kicking and screaming through middle age. Some are even, gulp, into their 60s. Paul Briand is a Baby Boomer who has been writing about their fun, foibles and flab for more than 20 years. E-mail him at pbriand@broadcovemedia.com. |
Forget about trailing edge Baby Boomers. Forget about Generation Jones. Now it's Generation O.
Culturalists and columnists are putting a new tag on President-Elect Barack Obama and the legions of his supporters. Though technically born within the demographic swath of the Baby Boomers, Obama, 47, sees himself as anything but a Boomer. His election as president, the way he was elected and how he'll likely conduct himself in office have given popular rise to the term Generation Obama ... Generation O.
The term goes back fairly early in the campaign. CNN's Anderson Cooper, in his 360 Blog in February, talks of being invited to a Generation O event: “ 'Generation O' was the name of a series of fundraising and networking events hosted nationwide in support of Sen. Barack Obama" he said. "These fundraisers targeted a younger audience, relying on what the Obama camp termed 'friendraising' as opposed to fundraising."
The New York Times, in writing about Generation O last week, said Baby Boomers might be skeptical:
"Many baby boomers are unlikely to be comfortable with this generation’s technological boosterism and ease with blurred identities and mixed ethnicities. Peter Wolson, a psychoanalyst and former dean of the Los Angeles of Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies, said the crucible of the 1960s helped give baby boomers a deep suspicion of 'the other.' Their world was bifurcated: pro-war versus antiwar; communist versus capitalist."
Las Vegas Review Journal columnist Geoff Schumacher sees three tenets of Generation O: tolerance, teamwork and technology. He said:
It is likely to be a generation identified as much by a new attitude than necessarily by age.
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