Retrospective Takes On The No Kings Demographic
[O]nce we got so busy that I needed to jump on a register to help move the lines along, I was able to speak with a 60-something lady with a yellow cap (covering the proverbial “Karen” haircut) about the meaning of all the yellow. She shared with me that yellow was the color of “resistance” . . . . she was a walking stereotype of the retired Boomers that made up a large portion of the people who were participating in these protests. Boomers who like Bruce Springsteen [want] to relive their “glory days” when they protested the Vietnam War or marched for civil rights.
Let's recall that the civil rights demonstrations, like the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches, took place in the mid-1960s. The 1967 March on the Pentagon was a bit later, while the Kent State shootings took place in 1970, the same year as the first Earth Day celebrations. People who turned 18 in 1965 would have been born in 1947, which means that this year, they are 78. People who turned 18 in 1970 would have been born in 1952, making them 73 now. So the essayist was a bit off when he surmised that a 60-something lady wanted to relive her glory days, if those glory days were between 1965 and 1970. Someone 60-something now would have been born past the end of the baby boom in the early 1960s. The actuarial fact is that the baby boomers are already dying off. But let's look at another take on the No Kings demographic:
A psychotherapist has explained why many attendees of last week's No Kings protests were educated white women in their forties.
Jonathan Alpert, a New York City-based mental health counselor, told Fox News that '40-something women are probably the biggest demographic of consumers of mental health services. Probably twenties to forties'.
People in their twenties to forties aren't baby boomers, they're the children and grandchildren of baby boomers, but I'm not sure if there's an actual conflict here if these are the same people but just in different age cohorts. When I look back on the women I dated in the 1970s, after I got out of college, I see trends that align with the New York psychotherapist, even though these ladies are now in their late 70s if they're still around.First, they definitely were consumers of mental health services. They would talk extensively on dates about their visits to their therapists. One in particular was proud of the fact that her therapist talked with her about his own problems, and he apparently told her she was helping him more than he was halping her. Another talked about her struggles to find the right therapist, but it was essential that whatever else, the therapist be a feminist.
It's worth pointing out that by the 1970s, when I dated these women and others, political rallies had changed, at least in California. In the 1960s, the demonstrators posed as outsiders. By the 1970s, those inclined to demonstrate were in fact joining mainstream political campaigns, the McGovern presidrential campagin in 1972 and Chicago Seven radical Tom Hayden's primary campaign for the US Senate in 1976. Both of these women attended those campaign rallies, but other than expressing general sympathy for the overall goals of the campaigns, they never seriously engaged with the issues.
Instead, they were completely open about seeing campaign events just as hookup venues, opportunities to connect with men whose perspectives on life matched their own. There can be no question that this was a formula that could only reault in unhappy outcomes, but these were unhappy ladies, which was why they were going to therapy. Let's go back to the insights of Jonathan Alpert, the New York psychotherapist:
'The No Kings protests, from what I've seen in person and on TV, it seems to me like a big venting session. It's almost like a big group therapy. So, people get stuff off their chest and they feel better in the moment, but it doesn't necessarily bring about any sort of positive change,' he said.
He said that rather than actually effecting change, many of them are simply craving community or validation, which he said 'can be addictive'.
'A lot of times people are unhappy in their own lives,' he told Fox. 'They may have anxiety or anger, and they project that onto others. That's partly what we're seeing play out at these rallies.'
This has the ring of truth. But Alpert recognizes that the women who attended the No Kings rallies are the children and grandchildren of the women who attended McGovern and Hayden campaign events, not boomers themselves -- or if there were in fact boomers in their late 70s and 80s, they were the ones who stayed for an hour or two and went straight home.It's also worth pointing out that the other big demographic Alpert cites, in addition to being 20-to-40 years old and major consumers of mental health services, is that they're college-educated. What does this tell us about the value of a college education? We can certainly be sure that the education the ladies at either the Hayden and McGovern rallies or the No Kings rallies received, or at least absorbed, was never any sort of exposure to principles of thinking or of life that would lead to happier outcomes.
But this is a generational problem. If a college education was dysfunctional in the 1960s, it's even more so now. The overall problem must at least be reflected in the US educational system, or at least the system as it applies to the prosperous middle class, the Starbucks target market, many of whom we may be sure attended No Kings rallies.
I started out thinking about how the women I used to date seem to have been the sort who'd now attend No Kings rallies, but now I've started to think about the professors I got to know when I was in graduate school back in the day. This may apply as well, but I need to think more about it.
