Four years difference really matter : when you're four and eight

On August 15th 1945, the two children (ages four and eight) of a young American serviceman in the Pacific preparing to invade Japan probably responded quite differently from the united way their two grandmothers (aged 59 and 63) reacted to the news that the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had caused the Japanese to sue for peace.

The two grandmothers were both united in giving comparatively little thought to all the grandmothers and grandchildren killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki , so glad were they that their son/son-in-law wasn't going to be killed during the Allied invasion effort.

The eight year old child agreed - very glad that Daddy wasn't going to die overseas and would be coming home soon unharmed.

But the four year old child probably hadn't even been told that Daddy was facing imminent death overseas or that two bombs that killed thousands of children would now bring Daddy home safe.

This child's reaction was no reaction.

Because when you are very young, even only being four years apart in age makes a huge difference - though four years difference means nothing when you are two grandparents nearing retirement.

Writin' 'bout my generation - This is my generation baby !

Janus Manhattan's Children : writin' 'bout my generation baby !

Truth be told, I don't actually know when my generation , the postwar's first (transitional) generation of children, really ended.

But I am certain it all began in 1941.

Conflicting Images of Fifties Science - as recalled by a child

As a little kid back then, I have only two memories of Fifties Science --- two images only.

Boomers - at age (50-75) of highest voter turnout - now will dominate elections

Boomers - born after 1941 and before 1966 - will all be 50 to 75 in presidential election year 2016 - and those are precisely the peak years for highest voter turnout.

Forget what the marketing gurus are saying about the numbers of customers in each age cohort - be it The Greatest Generation or The Millennials.

Only 'votes in the ballot box' count on election night - and the very young and very old might buy a lot of drugs ---- but neither tends to vote very much.

Boomers most likely to vote in 2016 : trouble for conservatives

The 2016 presidential election will be a massive watershed in terms of generational change among voters - one few pundits yet recognize.

"Transitional Generation" : too young to remember WWII, old enough to remember the Sixties - but above all, a child of the Fifties

In most of the world that had a baby boom, it began after 1941 and it began tailing off after 1959.

My postwar "Transitional Generation" - by sheer coincidence - shares that time period with the actual baby boomers - because we find the Transitional Generation effect even in countries where there was in fact no noticeable baby boom.

But consider this : all these boomers and transitionalists share at least one thing - maybe even only one thing - in common.

Today's Conflicted Boomers : typical of any Transitional Generation

The main reason why the long dead Adorno and Horkheimer still get the big bucks in intellectual currency, while you and I pal pick about for chicken feed, all comes down to a mimeographed collection of turgid speculative essays the pair circulated among a few friends at the end of WWII.

Plenitude always thickest at transitional points

My age cohort of Canadians (those born between 1941 and 1956) have had to deal with its own sort of transitional plentitude.

We still tend to mentally translate temperature in Centigrade back into Fahrenheit, food prices in kilos back into pounds, struggle to remember to call Nova Scotian aboriginals Mi'kmaq not Micmacs, that Arctic natives are Inuits not Eskimos and on and on.

My young nieces and nephews, not ever knowing the older terms, do not have to struggle to un-learn them.

So it was in the early days of Modernity when this eternal and universal pain of knowing two or more conflicting terms or facts about something suddenly became an overwhelming flood.

To give but one example, for decades now most of us know only one thing about the age of the present known universe : that it is about 13 billion years old.

We never have had to write on a high school science exam that it is hundreds of thousands of years old, only then re-learn as young adults that it is in fact hundreds of millions year old, then finally in middle age to learn that it is an ever-expanding number of billions years old.

All this over one normal lifetime.

the TWO plenitudes

So there were actually two plentitudes thrown up by early modernization.

One was an intellectual flood - starting in the 1870s -  producing for the general public a sudden and vast increase in the size, number, and complexity of the known components of reality.

The other plentitude was for adults of that time struggling to separate the old facts of the known world from all the new conflicting facts about that now better known world.

Not just a plentitude then of one billion new facts - but a combined plentitude of two billion facts - half now true , half now false.

Eventually - by about the 1940s - this flood of new scientific evidence about the world slowed down, just as most people were also coming to accept that there would always be new evidence emerging to refute older beliefs.

Getting use to both sorts of plentitude wasn't the only reason why Modernity began dying in the 1940s, but it was one of the most important factors....

the "Transitional Cohort" : those born after the Fall of France but before the rise of Elvis ...

A cohort ("generation" in lay-speak) is forever defined by the significant external events happening during its key formative ('coming of age') years.

For my cohort - born roughly between 1940 and 1956 and usually defined simply as "first wave Baby Boomers" -  its key characteristic is its 'neither nor' transitional aspect : neither fully and comfortably Modern nor fully and a comfortably post Modern.

Modernity's values were instilled into us by our teachers and elites but before those values had time to harden and to feel natural and inevitable they were assailed by post Modern doubters.

In turn, those doubts about Modernity never properly hardened into feelings that seemed as natural and inevitable to us as they did to our younger siblings.

We have eaten and enjoyed both white Wonder Bread and artisan whole grain loaves but are not now totally at ease with either.

More seriously, the Transitional Generation is quite uncomfortable with young people dismissing vaccines.

We too share their distrust of big drug company profit mantras but we also remember some of our parents and grandparents' fears before most life-threatening childhood infections had preventative vaccines.

But we are not a short, sharp, sharply defined cohort like the WWII cohort - we can't point to six years of war to forever define us.

Nothing really dramatic ever happened with us : modernity just went out with a long long slow gentle sigh and post modernity equally slowly seeped in , almost invisibly, day by day.

There was nothing Super-Hero-like about it : it wasn't a quick clean clear dramatic break between Eras , but rather more 'slow and messy' , contested and plodding : characteristically un-superhero-like in fact .....