I'm the youngest of eight, and we span the baby boom. I think us eight kids are three culturally distinct generations. We share a dad who came home from a war, literally creating the boom, but had different life experiences.

My eldest sister was born in 1946 when my dad got home from the war. Her formative years had young Elvis, Korea, Vietnam, assassinations, civil rights, hobos around the RR tracks, Jackie Robinson. She was H.S. valedictorian, full ride scholarship, dropped out after two years of college because she couldn't afford to live on campus. I was five at the time. Our dad wouldn't lift a finger to help her, because he didn't think girls should go to college and he probably had his own post war problems. Her H.S. friends went off to war, or avoided it if they had the means. That was the theme for H.S. grads for a while. Eventually she married a Vietnam vet with debilitating undiagnosed PTSD, and lived a hard life, living in the boonies on pennies because he couldn't handle people. Her experience, to me, defines a generation. It was not coddled.

My middle siblings and their friends watched their draft numbers. Jobs were scarce, with hundreds of people showing up for a single factory job. My middle sister was H.S. salutatorian, full ride scholarship. Her childhood, aside from have a screwed up and by then abusive dad, was more civil rights action. She also made it through two years before reality set college aside. This was i think the true hippie generation. They felt (gasp) screwed by their elders, who were still sending them off to kill and die at war. The tension in our house and others' was thick, with a WW II veteran dad and rebelliousness among the youth. We had one interracial marriage, which split the family along generational lines. The national guard shootings in Ohio were a generation defining moment. This is another generation.

My generation saw the tail end of Vietnam on the television with the daily body count, Watergate, the Apollo landings, out gay people, racist backlash against civil rights. I was bussed to the inner city to mingle with black kids. Funny thing, we kids were all fine, and figured racism would die with our parents; that didn't work out so well. After seeing my smarter elder siblings fail at college, I went straight to factory job life. An idyllic white picket fence two car family experience it was not. Who makes that crap up? I lived in the garage behind my parent's house, drove a POS car I put together from two wrecks, and saved gas by riding a bicycle where I could. That was a hard life, and alcohol was how my colleagues coped. The bright light was affordable regional college, something out out of reach for poor kids today. I spent seven years living in a hole with no social life, going to school with a generation of lower income kids trying to escape. Most didn't make it, but I did. I think we're the Watergate generation - that event was divisive and defining.

On a purely personal level, what i benefited from that my elder siblings did not have, that mattered more than any of the generation crap we hear so much about, was having elder siblings to protect me from my father. They didn't have that, and in that regard I was relatively coddled.