Bucket Definition: Generation Gap

This post is a comment I offered to Anne of Carversville on one of her posts, but the thought is universal and might be of value beyond the audience originally written for, so I'm reposting it here as well.

Dear Anne…

This is a very pertinent post concerning a dynamic of life that will repeat both in the personal and in the socio-political, there's a key thought here that feminism must address if ceFeminist is to remain a viable force.  As a feminist you speak for the women of the world, which includes the mothers of the world.  As a consequence of speaking for the mothers of the world feminism must acknowledge the art of parenting, the nurture and education of the young into functioning adults of self will and self determination.  Parenting is an art of deep subtlety and nuance that applies every bit as much within social movements as it does between the literal mother and child.

To understand the attitude the younger women bring to the subject of being a woman one must address the question from the perspective of how those younger women were (socially) parented.  I'm not speaking just of how they were parented by the women who gave birth to their body but equally what they acquired from the women who parented the evolution of their attitudes and assumptions.  To deal with the things in your post what’s needed is an empirical understanding concerning the bucket definition "generation gap," because bottom line is that's what your post is dealing with.

Consider the child.  The child does not understand the world it lives in.   The child does not have the depth of experience to provide the lines of causal connection for the intellect to ponder, all the child has are disconnected and seemingly random events.  The child is capable of observation, but totally dependent on the parent for understanding.  The child is more than capable of observation, the child is compelled to observation, and what does the child observe the most?  The parent, of course. 

As the child ages events begin to fall into patterns, the child begins assigning causes to events building the framework of a rational existence.  In many if not most cases the events crossing the child's perception are a consequence of the parent's focus on the event.  The events associated to the parents’ focus are the largest single source of the unexplained, the behavior of the parent in regards to such events the first understanding the child will seek.  But the events are not the only unexplained thing crossing the child’s perception, the emotions inspired by those events are equally on the stage.  This is a most important fact to hold in focus, for this is where a great deal more than simply the "generation gap" begins.   

The child is busy assigning reasons to things, granted working with an immature and incomplete understanding, but totally engrossed in the task.  Errors are to be expected.  Errors concerning matters of fact have a way of self correcting, the evidence of reality doesn’t support the error, sooner or later it is revealed to the intellect.  But the errors in assigning emotions as the result of events are much more enduring and play a much, much larger role than the intellect in driving both the attitudes and the actions of a life. 

Once again consider the child, but this time focus on how those emotional associations are formed.  Consider how the spectrum of the parent’s focus impacts on the child.  Obviously the wider the parent’s spectrum the more choices become available to the child, and with the increase in choices the greater the child’s chances of making correct, or nearly correct, associations between the emotion and the event occupying the same point in time.  When the parent presents a limited, or singular, focus on life the child is all but compelled to assume whatever that focus might be is playing a major role in every event and every emotion tagged to the same time as that event.  The error count is going to go sky high, so high the child come into adulthood is very likely to recognize the commonality and reject everything associated as an error in the attempt to bring their own life to balance. 

Is it any wonder that the daughters of the most dedicated of the feminists have the attitudes they do?  Their mothers totally dedicated their lives to breaking over the momentum of an entire culture’s attitudes about womanhood, how could those daughters have grown into anything else?  The lesson ceFeminist must understand to complete her work is the concept of balance between the passion of her calling and the diversity of the emotional needs of her children as they grow, the balance her children will need if they are to mature into individuals who will support her calling into the future.