What event defined your generation.
Maxwell Frost was just being interviewed by Nicolle Wallace. He made what was perhaps a throwaway comment. He said his generation might be called the Mass Shooting generation.
While I am old enough to be his grandfather, the question is intriguing.
I would have to say my generation was defined by the Vietnam War.
Sparkly is a bit younger than me. While she has first hand memories of the impact of that war, she sees herself defined by Watergate.
What event defines your generation?
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I enlisted in the Marines in '64 so I could get the MOS I wanted, which was a Heavy Equipment Operator,
after boot camp and learning to operate just about every piece of heavy equipment, I was shipped off to Vietnam for 12 months.
What a fun time that was.
Then I volunteered for another tour, not because I liked war, far from it, but my thinking was that if I go, then some poor boot with no combat experience wouldn't have to, so off I went for another 12 months of fun in the South East Asia games.
I spent 35 years in the Marines, some of it bad, but for the most part, I actually loved being a Marine and the retirement bennies aren't bad at all.
Btw, to me the civil rights movement absolutely included the Second Wave of the ongoing women's equality movement, the biggest of all: HALF of all demographics are women. (And white women were treated as another oppressed and exploited minority in those days.) We've come a long way, baby, but not far enough.
I still laugh when remembering the reaction of black women I knew to being told to bear more black babies as their contribution to black empowerment.
Not so funny, conservative males of all colors think their time has come again... .
Assassinations of Dr. King, John and Robert Kennedy, Vietnam, Civil Rights Movement, Beatles, Hendrix, and 70's music, following The One around campus ( 
)
I notice they are very, very different than Xers like myself born in the 70's. They don't like video games nearly as much as 70's Xers do, probably because they didn't experience it as little kids like we did. You also missed out on some awesome toys. 
Back in MY day, we played LAWN DARTS. And if we got impaled, we didn’t go crying to our mommies or expect a participation trophy! (But seriously, I do remember lawn darts. They were awesome. 
).
I was a bit of a video game pioneer, in that my well-connected grandfather sent us the very first version of Pong (early-mid 70s — not sure of exact year). We played it on our turn-the-dials-manually TV. I also remember going to video arcades a few times to play Pac Man and similar games as a young teen. But, yeah, the video game thing never “took” with me. I got bored with it fairly quickly.
On the other hand, I had a great attention span for reading long, semi-boring books. Go figure.
and our little "transition" (late boomer) generation has seen a whole range of eventful stuff from the '60s to the present, and of course that is now including seeing the beginning and end of America's "longest war(s) ". The older boomers were the ones who were our older brothers and sisters or were friends in the neighborhood back when neighborhoods were just overloaded with kids.
The cohorts have actually (in general) followed the rises and falls of births and birthrates, which were often impacted by economic conditions (e.g., the Great Depression and more recently, the Great Recession) and wars (WW1/WW2/Korean War/Vietnam War/Gulf Wars). I know I have posted this elsewhere -
The boomer transition and cutoff started right after "the pill" was approved (1960), where the "realized" birth drop happened a few years after (the 1964 that is commonly used). The one group that doesn't get talked about much but who deeply influenced the boomers were who I dub the "WW2 babies". That politically includes Prez. Biden & former Spkr. Pelosi, and many others (and particularly entertainers who many know and love like Joan Baez who we just saw out there a few days ago) who are in their 80s now.
From this graph (which is strictly showing expected "number of births" per individual) going further into the years, that latest group (post-2010) has now often been dubbed "Generation Alpha" -
The interesting thing is that there was a blip within the range of those who have been dubbed "Gen Z" (or "Zoomers" ) who came just before the "Great Recession" and who ended up forming a boomlet in number of births almost matching the boomers (where the oldest boomers were or could have been their grandparents). That's the group coming of age now as teens at or near voting age. They were exposed to such a multicultural environment and access to both national and international perspectives as younger children, and are now suddenly experiencing the harsh reality of the bigots who are attempting to "take away" all that they embraced, as well as being completely drenched in the tragedies of both gun violence and the opioid issue. But it's heartening to see them react so strongly and push back against that.
I remember the term "Generation X" originally being attributed to some reactionary UK politician. The context was a term of abuse directed at the punk movement in the UK. This would have been the mid-to-late-'70s. I guess they intended the "X" in "Gen X" to be a metaphor for a lack of ambition, social climbing, etc. And then Billy Idol and company turned it around by using it as a band name.
However, "Gen X" has been attributed to so many people that it's hard to know who the real progenitor is, especially because those who popularized the term probably deserve as much credit as those who created it. So Doug Copeland arguably deserves his share of the credit just like many others. Without the popularity, it would have remained on the fringes.
Then there are those who were really late to the party. I remember Time magazine ran a cover page article (complete with a snarling Eddie Vedder) about "those crazy Gen Xers and their angry music". Time was at least a year late when it came to their coverage of various movements, including the rise of "grunge" music and the Gen Xers coming of age. I think their silly title was "All the Rage". 
Response to Stinky The Clown (Original post)
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