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The Bob Dole generation
So why then, given this electronic "kiddies' bouillabaisse," has the Millennial generation been earmarked by William Strauss, coauthor (with Neil Howe) of Generations, 13th-Gen, and the just-published Fourth Turning, as the next "civic" generation, modeled after—of all people—Bob Dole?

Strauss asserts that this age group has stepped into a world where, as one 16-year-old said it, "Doing corrupt and unhealthy things is just a part of everyday life." Strauss says that public cynicism and the absence of heroes has reached a "settled acceptance"; that the "dangerous sexual landscape is status quo"; and that "technology is a given." But the Millennial generation, he says, "is coming of age at a time when the adult community has determined that the conditions of childhood are unacceptable. It has become the nation's top priority."

In Generations, Strauss and Howe write: "Boomers are setting about to protect children from the social and chemical residue of the euphoric awakening they themselves had launched a quarter century earlier. … Grown-up Boomer radicals who once delighted in shocking their own moms and dads now surprise themselves with their own strictly perfectionist approach to child nurture."

Jane Pauley leaves the Today show to be with her kids; Anna Quindlan, for the same reason, leaves the New York Times; Charles Krauthammer writes "Drown the Berenstein Bears" ("a cry against youth literature that celebrates the parent as pal," says Strauss). "We, the great middle of the electorate that makes up the baby boom generation, are not raising our children as well as our parents raised us," decries U.S. News (Sept. 9, 1996), encapsulating the theme for the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last summer.

This parental concern of the repentant boomers, coupled with the clarion call of national concern, will imbue the Millennials, Strauss asserts, with a team spirit and collective sense of purpose and civic resolve. "The problems are still severe, but they are also considered unacceptable," he says. "This restrengthening of parental protection is forging a sense of community and allowing the opportunity for peer pressure to become positive." The environment of public cynicism and the absence of heroes that this generation has inherited will produce in them a yearning for real heroes. But not only in them—in society as a whole, Strauss says. "They will be the heroes. You watch. At the turn of the millennium magazine covers will be proclaiming that they are a wonderful generation [like Bob Dole's World War II generation]—not so much for who they are but for who the nation wants them to be."

Strauss's optimistic speculations are supported somewhat by a recent survey of adolescents conducted by the Horatio Alger Association. This study reflects that "today's teens are neither as rebellious as adolescents in the 1970s nor as materialistic as those of the 1980s." Among their greatest concerns is the "decline in moral and social values." Teens in the nineties, the survey says, are "troubled by crime and violence, AIDS, drugs and environmental problems." Seven in ten say "religion is important in their lives."

So these are the converging, if somewhat contradictory, forces defining this new breed: They have been suckled on Sesame Street and Disney, spoon-fed Snoop Doggy Dog and Madonna, and are "mainlining" the Internet. But this same generation is coming of age when society is putting the brakes on the boomers' revolution and trying to forge a new path. If Strauss's demographic speculations play out, it is the Millennials who will lead the way, carrying the mantle bequeathed to them by a soul-sick society: Be our heroes!

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February 3 1997, Vol. 41, No. 2