The Minivan Generation "Grows Up"

Those Who Can't...Complain

Credit: Detroit Free Press

I grew up as a free range kid back in Washington, DC before it devolved into swamp status. I rode my bike around town, no helmet, no bike lanes, of course, to the drugstore for baseball cards, to the record store for the latest Beatles album. I rode the city bus to and from school, ten cents a ride.

Life in the 60’s seemed free and untroubled under the Pax Americana shield, notwithstanding the long shadow of the Cold War. I shot baskets in neighbors’ driveways and played pickup baseball in a vacant lot up the street. The two films that helped shape me as I came of age and could prowl the city after dark were Zorba the Greek and Blow Up. Both shot in grainy black and white, they spoke to me in a revelatory fashion. Anthony Quinn as the earthy and raw Zorba, sucking the marrow straight out of life; David Hemmings the enigmatic photographer lost in the riddle of illusion dancing with reality.

The good times inevitably play a siren song, seducing us into the belief that they will never end. In fact, they often contain the seeds of the fall to come. Just as the Belle Epoque begat The Great War - 1913 was acclaimed by many as a marvelous year - and the Roaring Twenties fell off a cliff into the abyss of The Great Depression, the freewheeling 60’s descended into plenty of heartache, anomie, and outright tragedy. We may have reveled in Woodstock, but we also had to reckon with Altamont.

New Dawn

When my first child was born in the early 1980’s life was looking back up. It was morning again in America, with the country emerging from a deep recession. Paul Volcker was turning the screws on the money supply, inflicting plenty of pain, but also dropping interest rates nearly as fast as they had skyrocketed under Carter. That was when I landed my first real, grown-up job, which enabled my wife and I to buy a house. Life was good under Reagan and stayed steady through the Clinton years, affording a couple decades of relatively carefree living right on up to that diamond-bright morning of September 11, 2001, when the worm in the apple surfaced once again.

What was the message? Had life gotten just a bit too comfy, too normal, breeding in us an indifference to the fates. Unending war abroad, as with Vietnam, and economic jolts at home, would again become our due. In time, Covid, Woke, Censorship, and Gendermania would deepen the wound.

The ease of the 80’s, one might argue, began rather innocently enough with the introduction of MTV in 1981, the matrix establishing a beachhead in its assault on the national attention span - to be followed by full scale invasion via Smartphone a generation later. MTV’s arrival was followed in 1983 in equally innocuous fashion with the appearance of the first Minivan, an overfed station wagon, designed to transport small children like livestock from one staged suburban event to another. Lee Iacocca may have been saving Chrysler with the minivan, but he was dooming the American family to penned-up blobish conformity.

From the relatively halcyonic era of the 80’s and 90’s, we have since devolved into our currently fevered politico-cultural sphere - rife with skirmishes by all against all.

How did we get from there to here?

Fewer Eggs in the Basket

Starting in the 1980’s, fewer children were being produced per family. Investment in them became more concentrated, and parents became more willing - both financially and psychically - to protect/ insure the investment. Thus began The Era of the Soccer Mom.

Free ranging (masculinized) childhood went out in favor of a more (feminized) collectivist push, putting greater emphasis on the group, which conferred a greater sense of safety. Fairness and equally nebulous notions, such as inclusivity became more prominent values. This resulted in more adult supervision of - and interference in - children’s lives. Children were less free (trusted) to settle their own disputes - to work things out. They were instructed to “use your words,” while pretty much every possible sticking point could be construed as a “teachable moment.” And of course, there would be “zero tolerance” of “bullying,” an ill-defined term which at times loomed more in the adult imagination than the child’s reality.

The net effect on the Minivan Generation - more formally known as Millennials - was the establishment of safetyism as a cultural ethic, and the consequent de-risking of everyday experience. This promoted herd behavior, a leveling of outcomes, and an emphasis on consensus, e.g. there was an agreed upon right way and a wrong way to do things. When this population came of age during the Obama years they were open to a consensual sort of sentiment cloaked in Newspeak, as in “doing the right thing.” And that would lead us on to “the greater good.”

Seeing each child as special and deserving of as much attention and investment (both financial and emotional) as could be mustered and afforded ended up producing a customized product, a luxury good. Since every child was special then no one could fail; it was time for trophies all around. Entitlement crept in with the millennial set, but the dark side of that lurked down the road in the form of fragility and failure to launch. The worm in that apple was resentment, if not narcissism.

An increasingly competitive, digitally-driven economy upped the stakes. The future was decidedly white collar. Ergo, everyone had to go to college, and then some. The Ivies or bust - and then on to grad school. There was a premium to be had in raising a child who could rule the world. On the other hand, there was little upside in teaching your kid how to fix a flat.

The marketing machine duly cranked up on the supply side, as colleges threw open their doors and began catering to prospective entrants, by boasting not of an all star lineup of profs, but climbing walls and gluten free dining. Of course, what was also being ratcheted up was the cost of the so-called college “experience.”

The Big Ooze

The bloat, heralded by the appearance of that first minivan, now four decades in the making, has since spread - oozed, really - into most every corner of American life - not to mention the American mind.

DOGE certainly reveals that dispiriting reality at the top of the food chain in the form of a central government eager to dole out buckets of other people’s cash to its cronies, pushing agendas, dodgy at best, demonic at worst.

Our universities charge eye-watering sums to “educate” students but bear no risk for the outcomes. In fact, the reverse is the case, as students, backstopped by the taxpayer, pile up a mountain of debt. The colleges, meanwhile, hoover up money on the back end as they toady up to the administrative state for big bucks in the name of “research.” Columbia University, hardly a champion of free speech and peaceful protest these days, for example, boasts an endowment of $15 billion, is due to receive another $5 billion from the feds in the current academic year alone.

Just as the fat person labors to motivate, the country has settled into a dull-witted, institutionalized existence. As we struggle to get up off the couch - or don’t even bother - more and more aspects of life become more and more codified. Rules multiply; conditions and credentials apply. Just sit back and let the experts take charge.

Call it the triumph - and hegemony - of scientific materialism, trumpeting rationalism yet hiding cargo cult thinking behind a smokescreen of doublespeak-gobbledygook as in: “Science is real,” and “The Science is Settled.” Translation: “Let’s not have a conversation.”

Few people, meanwhile, talk about the replication crisis, not to mention the outright fraud in scientific research. And by the way, how many BTU’s have we produced per dollar spent on The Green New Deal? Not very scientific, nor economic, I would imagine.

Nor do they discuss the following science-based subjects and what they have wrought:

The Upside Down Food Pyramid: Introduced in 1992, emphasizing grains, and all but demonizing saturated fats and animal protein. Today, any clear-thinking person would tell you that the latter items are integral to sound health - and that the vaunted Food Pyramid is foundational only to the explosion in obesity and chronic disease. (Not to mention the whole con around cholesterol that has been perpetuated for more than half a century.)

The Covid Fraudemic: Perpetrated against millions, leading to the needless death and ongoing maiming of millions. Not to mention damage to business and the economy, harming of careers, reputations, and relationships, and blighting the development of children.

Transgenderinsanity: Nothing more than the mutilation of the emotionally unsuspecting by the egoic and mercenary, doing great harm in the name of virtue.

The above are debacles that in a right-thinking world would be classified - and prosecuted - as crimes against humanity.

Enter Elon, Cui Bono

This brings us to 2025, which might be seen as either the end of what has turned into a fraught, drawn out era - or its continuation toward entropy.

The jury is out.

Millennials, the generation born between 1981 and 1996, 72 million people, now comprise the largest cohort of the U.S. population at 22%. They’ve got muscle. And they are the principal cultural and educational groomers of the next generation Z, some 20% of the population.

Generally speaking, millennials are a conformist, “caring,” and rather self-regarding group. They are at home on social media, and comfortable with the social justice trope. They are the first generation raised in safe spaces and armed with trigger warnings.

DOGE, to take one example, is the polar opposite. It is the chainsaw, and the man wielding it is seen by many as an offender of sensibilities - if not more. His actions risk rousing emotions pushed into the shadows - envy and resentment, to name a couple.

Think of Musk as the guy standing at your elbow as you struggle to complete a task. He says in a perfectly neutral, matter-of-fact manner: “You know, have you thought about maybe doing it this way?”

You pause as you feel your blood pressure begins to rise and your mind to race. “How does he know that?... Maybe he’s right?... Why don’t I know this?... Who does he think he is?...So, he thinks he’s better than me?” It doesn’t take you very long to convince yourself that you really don’t like this guy.

Musk is the outlier who sees things that others do not. In fact, they’re quite obvious to him. He says, “Let’s rescue those astronauts stranded in space…Let’s get cellphone coverage to those people whacked by the hurricane in North Carolina.”

When you think about Tesla, the car that one day Musk envisions as one day plugged into every abode as seamlessly as your toaster, but today some people are bent on firebombing, it, like its creator, is a statement. It’s the antithesis of the minivan, which amounted to little more than a repackaged and fattened up station wagon for the Age of Affluenza. The Minivan screams safety. The Tesla, like the free range kid with no helmet riding his bike through traffic, brings risk and unknowns. But also adventure and freedom.

As the generation raised on equal outcomes and prey to learned helplessness enters its prime years it has strength in numbers, but perhaps not in problem solving. It may well represent the immovable object now meeting the irresistible force in the form of an administration looking to repurpose our institutions to meet a rapidly changing world.

The question becomes: Will the adult tantrums continue in defense of the status quo, or will bold actions take us in search of higher ground? The next three years - which promise to be a whirlwind - will tell the tale.

Buckle up.