![]() Ginsberg said that this insult was propagated by the media to portray his generation as “a vulgarity”, and he refused to subscribe to that definition. In an interview with Margaret Mead, poet and beatnik legend Allen Ginsberg defined the word beatnik as “a word of insult usually applied to people interested in the arts”. These two decades saw the proliferation of the beatniks and the hippies. The next notable generation who bore a great deal of disapproval from their predecessors was the youth of the 50’s and 60’s. Born in 1860, Gilman was in her sixties during the Roaring 20’s and was thus firmly a part of the older, more cynical generation. In 1995, educational historian Margaret Smith Crocco noted that “Gilman came to disparage the vices of the new feminists of the twenties who mimicked men's behavior”. Even Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a famed first-wave feminist, criticized the flapper generation. Young people's actions are considered a rejection of traditional values, and a deterioration of the American moral compass which their generation had helped to build, and now their generation must work to rebuild. This idea of “the old-fashioned girl” exemplifies the mindset of adults who criticize their successors. In 1922, a mother was quoted in the New York Times saying “Middle-aged people, who remember the old-fashioned girl, must interfere in the young people’s affairs and help to restore them to wholesome standards”. Parents were beginning to feel a loss of control over their seemingly wild children. This behavior often included drinking (during Prohibition), and what was then considered radical sexual activity. A Wall Street Journal article from 2007 notes that the mass-production of cars revolutionized the adolescent experience by giving teens and young adults the independence and the agency to behave as they wished. This friction first reared its head during the 1920s with the rise of the flappers. This phenomenon typically coincides with the emergence of an adolescent group whose ideologies and behaviors shock their parents. Generational conflict, also known as generational gaps, arises when two different demographics collide because one (the younger) has established a value system that is fundamentally different than the other (the older). This animosity, though very pervasive in today’s media, is merely the current iteration of a pattern of thought and behavior that occured throughout the 20th century. This clip demonstrates the all-too-familiar conflict between the Baby Boomer generation (Hannity was born in 1961) and millennials. On Fox News this past August, Sean Hannity bemoaned the apparent decline in patriotism among millennials: “That’s what young people think?”, as if all young people share a singular ideology. ![]()
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