Generations

Age is relative. Relative to how old you are or how old you think you are. When we are eight years old, we think our 23 year old teacher is old.

Then when we are around 30 years old, we begin to see 50 year old as the ones who would receive the Over the Hill cards. It seems that the older we get, as one writer surmised, we keep moving the goal post back. In a few weeks, my mother will be 98 years old and she was dancing at her granddaughters’ wedding last month. As actress Helen Hayes once said, “Age is not important unless you are a cheese.”

Right now according to the U.S. Census, there are 76.4 million Baby Boomers. Born between the years of 1946 and 1964, that’s 28 percent of the total population. Every day 8,000 more Boomers reach the age of 65 years old. Boomers make up the largest population in the United States today.

Nipping at Boomers heels are the Generation X crowd who are now reaching the age of 50 years old. They were born between 1965 and 1980, the children of the Boomers. X’ers grew up seeing the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The Days of Camelot were not theirs to know. Gas shortages and the Vietnam War didn’t help their optimism.

Next came the Millennials, Generation Y, those who are able to say they remember when they stayed up until Midnight to welcome a new millennium, the year 2000. From nearly day one of their lives, they embraced electronics, Pac Man games, video games, cellphones, lap top computers. Born to type with their thumbs and communicate in 140 characters, they tweet all day.

Jasper County has a population of around 13,900 people, 8,661 are 18 to 64 years old and 1,764 are over 65 spread out over 368 square miles. We have all the generations around here.

What will the next Generation be called, Z? How will they see the world and how will the world see them?