Some of us can see Trump’s gaslighting with “facts that aren’t facts but are facts, to him, because he calls them facts.” We can see how little critical thinking is going and how many people are accepting something as true because, well, Trump said it, or some podcast they listen to amplified the lie without fact-checking, or they saw “the fact” reposted so many times on social media that they didn’t question its veracity.
This state of the nation cannot — and will not — last forever.
So, let me show you a little something about generations, how they are formed, and why it’s all a big whopping cycle. Quick reminder: there are four –and only four — generational types, they are each about 20 years in length, they each grow up in a different era. Generational “types” occur in a specific order, which in today’s generational language looks like this: Boomer, GenX, Millennial and the “Not Named or Seen as a Generation Yet” generation born starting in 2006.
One of the major forces that shapes the Boomer-like generations (the children of the Golden Ages, the springtimes of a nation) is that they are always the children born after “the winter of our times,” which for the US — and, now, most of the world — spans the 2008 (Global Financial Crisis) through until (as predicted) about 2032.
After the “winter of our times” passes, adults (mostly those in mid-life and early elderhood) very much want to ensure children never fall prey again to such megalomaniacs and insanity, so they raise an entire generation of children with a keen eye to supporting their independent and critical thinking. They don’t want to stuff these kids’ brains with “what is” and instead encourage them to think for themselves.
This “your opinion is important” thing gets drilled into young boomer-like kids, and it shapes them the entirety of their lives. Boomer-like generations are famous for their lifelong focus on vision, values and morals.
This “think for yourself” stuff blows up in the faces of their mid-life Millennial-like parents when the Boomer-like generations start to come of age and do that whole Great American Awakening / Consciousness Revolution type of stuff again and decry elders (namely, their parents) as square, bland and morally bereft.
That “Hell no, we won’t go,” violent rejection of societal order in their teens and early 20s isn’t coming until the mid 2050s, and much has yet to happen before then.
But, yeah, we can see now the forces that will create them; it will come from the adults who bore witness to what happens when A Bunch of Someone’s get too much power, and the nation collectively knows: this can never happen again.
FWIW, the next Boomer-like children will likely start being born around 2029, but children need to reach age three before they even begin to be aware of the adult-outer world, so 2029, plus three years, is 2032. And 2032/2033 is the time predicted as the start of the “1st Turning,” the beginning of “spring” that once again warms the soil and provides a canvas for life to refresh and be bountiful once again.
