Those academics and journalists who persist in relating the intensity of the events of the Turbulent Decade (1964-1974) to the size of a particular nation's baby boom must have a heck of a time contrasting English-speaking Canada with France.
English-speaking Canada had the world's greatest uptick in teenagers and young people over those turbulent ten years while France's long gentle baby boom was still 'making babies' when that decade ended.
And those babies were certainly not out on the streets protesting - certainly not during the famous events of May 1968.
And where was youth-filled English-speaking Canada's equivalent of May 1968 ?
There wasn't any.
Instead the youth of English-speaking Canada enjoyed, with their parents, Expo 67's pride of nationhood.
It was a mood aided and abetted by the fact that tens of thousands of Americans draft dodgers were suddenly fleeing their land of milk and honey for hitherto boring old Canada (!)
It is not that Canada didn't eventually experience a good deal of social turbulence led by its youth - it is just that there is no point in relating its intensity to the "boom" in Canadian babies decades earlier.
More productive, in my mind, is for us all to relate the turbulent decade to the coming of an cohort marked by their place in time, not by their size.
Because 1964 marked the coming of age of the first group in our world who did not (and in fact could not) personally share in 1945's collective mood of modernist triumphalism ...
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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