7/2/2019 Dana Milbank: Generation X — the weakest generation?

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Dana Milbank: Generation X — the weakest generation?

By Dana Milbank
August 23, 2013

In my mother’s telling, I exist because of the March on Washington.

Her account went something like this: In 1963, she was a student at Goddard College, an experimental
school in Vermont that attracted the forerunners of the hippies. My father had come to Goddard the
previous year, and though my mom first noticed him throwing peas in the dining hall (this seems to be an
inherited trait), she didn’t meet him, she said, until that day on the Mall 50 years ago this week, when
Goddard students who had arrived separately executed a daft plan to meet near the Washington Monument.

Alas, my father, when I asked him about it this week, had no such recollection. My mother died five years
ago, so I’ll never know whether her account — my founding narrative — is apocryphal, or whether memory
of it has been clouded by things people did to their minds in the ’60s. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Whether
they first met that day or not, my future parents, 20 years old at the time, were both there for the signal
event of their generation.

“I can still see the scene,” my father told me, recalling his spot along the south side of the reflecting pool,
from which he could see the speakers at the Lincoln Memorial and hear the speeches clearly. “When people
talk about Martin Luther King, that’s my connection. It’s a small connection — no handshake or anything —
but I’m proud to have been there.”

I envy him that connection, to a cause that stirred so many Americans and defined a generation. My
generation, Generation X, has no equivalent.

I was born five years after the March on Washington and three weeks after King’s assassination. My mother
told me that in those grim days of April 1968, she wondered whether she had done the right thing in
bringing a child into the world. I grew up on Joan Baez and the Kingston Trio. A poster hung in my bedroom
informed me: “War is not healthy for children and other living things.” My first political memories were of
the George McGovern campaign and of a boycott of Nestle for pushing infant formula on kids in poor
countries.

But this culture was my parents’, not mine. There have been many noble causes in my time — the fight
against apartheid, for gay rights and for environmentalism — but none captured my generation or required
the sort of sacrifice the civil rights movement did.

John McCain, in his campaigns for the presidency, spoke of the importance of “a cause greater than self-
interest.” The one-time prisoner of war, who refused his Vietnamese captors’ offer of release to avoid giving
them propaganda value, knows something about that.

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 7/2/2019 Dana Milbank: Generation X — the weakest generation? - The Washington Post
But what about those born after 1955, who turned 18 after the Vietnam War draft had been suspended? For
the first time in decades — perhaps for the first time in history — Americans came of age without an
existential threat to the nation and without massive social upheaval at home. For us, the waning Cold War
was just a theoretical threat, and the vestigial air-raid drills at school a curiosity. When we were prepared to
sacrifice for the country after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush told us to go shopping. We grew up
soft: unthreatened, unchallenged and uninspired. We lacked a cause greater than self.

The effects on our politics has been profound. Without any concept of actual combat or crisis, a new crop of
leaders — Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, Sarah Palin — treats governing as a fight to the death, with no
possibility of a negotiated peace. Without a transcendent social struggle calling us to seek justice as
Americans, they substitute factional causes — Repeal Obamacare! Taxed Enough Already! — or
manufactured crises over debt limits and government shutdowns. Though the problem is more pronounced
on the right today, the generational drift is nonpartisan. President Obama has extraordinary talents but
shows no ability to unify the nation in common purpose or to devote sustained energy to a cause greater
than his own.

Certainly, there are young leaders serving in the capital who are as enlightened as those of any previous
generation, just as there are volunteer warriors fighting for America as bravely as any conscript ever did. But
as a whole, my generation, untested by trial, is squandering American greatness by turning routine give-
and-take into warfare.

Tom Brokaw justifiably called the cohort that survived the Great Depression and fought the World War II
the greatest generation. I’m afraid that my generation will someday be called the weakest.

Twitter: @Milbank

Read more about this issue in Opinions:

Peter Drier: What would King march for now?

E.J. Dionne Jr.: King’s dream still echoes

Eugene Robinson: A dream out of reach

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Dana Milbank
Dana Milbank is an op-ed columnist. He sketches the foolish, the fallacious and the felonious in politics. Follow 

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