Gray After Dark is a horror story about a jogger in the Frank Church Wilderness who is kidnapped by insane, Christian-y preppers. (#notallpreppers #notevenmostpreppers #actuallyprobablyjustoneortwo #notanyChristians #butstill)
The preppers are a father, Fred, (certifiable abuser) and grown son, Hamish, (brainwashed and cowed) who take advantage of female hikers to “tame” them and make them their “wives.” They don’t just prep like normal people, gardening, learning basic gun safety, having a backup generator, keeping chickens, etc. Instead, the live completely off the grid, in a shack way out in the middle of nowhere, and like the Ingalls family, they live on game and cornbread. They think they will be glad of all this when the SHTF.
But weirdly, Fred isn’t even that capable as a prepper. He will shoot a moose or deer and then just leave it. No real hunter would do that. He doesn’t bother to bathe himself, or allow the other members of his household to fulfill basic hygiene. For example, they have to sneak around behind his back in order to wash their hands before handling food supplies. Again, any capable off-gridder would know how important cleanliness is to avoid getting sick. And, of course, Fred also damages and endangers his own project by treating the two women in his household in a way that most capable hunters wouldn’t even treat their dogs. This is just part of his overall M.O. of shooting himself in the foot (metaphorically) by not having any control over his large collection of besetting sins. “He who loves his wife, loves himself” (Ephesians 5:28) is a Bible verse that Fred has apparently never come across.
The family has a shed on their property where they keep their food supplies: gobs of “white plastic gallon buckets.” (I assume Ihli means 5-gallon buckets or bigger, because gallon buckets are awfully small for storing bulk food supplies, but anyway.) In some of these buckets is flour. In others there are wheat berries. Where did these supplies come from? They must have been bought at some point, because Fred and Hamish clearly aren’t farmers. But that is never explained. Plastic food-storage buckets are designed to keep pests out, yet somehow, the flour has become infested with weevils. This is just one of a number of examples where the descriptions of the preppers’ lifestyle makes me scratch my head. To be fair, I have never survived off grid, so I don’t know enough about it to say that all this could not happen. (And bugs somehow made their way into plastic flour-storage bins when I lived in Indonesia.) But, I do get the vibe that Ihli is in the same boat as me when it comes to survival knowledge. Her conception of these particular preppers is that they live in ignorance and squalor.
As mentioned, Fred also does not appear to be a capable Christian cult leader (if that is what the book is going for). There are, indeed, horrific Christianity-adjacent cults where women are kept prisoner with a variety of brainwashing tactics, but these cults tend to use actual ceremonies, harangues, and Bible passages (though twisted). Fred is never shown reading anything (although he’s not stupid). “Mary,” the other woman in the household, reads the Bible to the new prisoner, but we are never told what passages. Again, the level of research seems to be “they’re violent and crazy, and also there’s a Bible.”
Besides being a horror/thriller, Gray After Dark is also a little bit of a love story. The chapters swing back and forth between the perspective of Miley and her ordeal with the preppers, and her dear friend, Olympics training partner, and not-quite-yet boyfriend, Brent. That’s right, in the manner of a romance novel. Brent is tracking Miley through the Frank Church Wilderness, which he compares to “looking for a lost watch in New York City.” He is really devoted to her, and his sweet strength provides a refreshing counterpoint to Fred and Hamish’s harsh weakness. The proportion is about two or three chapters of Miley to one of Brent.
And, though I’ve been somewhat hard on this book for its portrayal of the “Christian” preppers, it works really well as a thriller/love story. It isn’t really about Christian-adjacent prepping cults. Fred and Hamish are there to provide the horror and the threat. I’m willing to accept that people like this exist, albeit in small numbers (at least in the West), just as I’m willing to accept that large numbers of people become very animalistic in an EMP apocalypse or a zombie apocalypse, for the sake of the story. And that’s what Gray After Dark is … more of an “imagine this situation” type of story than an “all of society is like this” story of the kind we might expect from Margaret Atwood. It’s a page turner, and despite some minor hiccups I enjoyed it.
What do you think? Do you like thrillers? Love stories? Apocalyptic? Wilderness survival? Have you ever gotten bugs in your flour?
During the month of October, I like to post about scary things. I guess this book qualifies.
Through a comical series of events, I found myself drafting a contemporary romance novel. I don’t read much in the genre, but I thought it might be a smart idea to try. And where better to start than here, a romance that features a pair of young writers, working on a romance novel together, and every time they write a trope into their novel, it happens in their lives?
I mean, that’s kind of clever.
Also, like a suspiciously large number of contemporary novels out there, this one offers an inside glimpse of the publishing industry. That’s a double-edged sword, of course. I can’t help but be interested in what the industry is like (at least in Okie’s experience), just as I can’t help but be intimidated and repelled by it when I find out.
Anyway.
Tropes, in case you didn’t know, are also known as cliches, things that frequently happen in any given genre. There are so many tropes that, if you have written any fiction at all, I guarantee you have used a few, with or without meaning to. This is not a bad thing. Some tropes, like “not enough beds,” are super contrived, but others have become tropes because they represent common and powerful human experiences. For example, the fact that Absent Father is a trope doesn’t make the experience any less painful for the person experiencing it.
The strength of this book is that the premise allows the author to use a great many common tropes without flinching.
My feelings about this book are deeply mixed, and I’m going to express them in the manner of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof: “On the one hand … but on the other hand …” There will be some spoilers here.
A pro is that the book takes place in and around New York City.
A con is that this means both the main characters are New Yorkers.
A pro is that both MCs are sweet, likeable people.
A con is that they are both hoes.
A pro is that the story is truly emotional.
A con is that several of the emotional turning points are expressed in pages-long sex scenes.
Another con is that these scenes take place before the characters are truly in love.
Con: not to mention married.
A pro is that the tragic backstory is revealed, little by little, in flashbacks.
A con is that, after a ton of foreshadowing and minimal revelation, there are a bunch of this-changes-everything twists packed into the last few pages. (Wait … is that a trope, too?)
(Spoiler): a pro is the truly unexpected appearance of the Meddlesome Ghost trope right near the end.
Con: (at least, it’s a con to me): Though in retrospect, there were clues about the ghost thing, the atmosphere of the story in no way prepared me for it. I feel this was a missed opportunity to get some chills out of this story. But perhaps this is how ghosts are handled in romances.
I must rant a little bit more about the hoe problem. Katie, the heroine, is presented as sweet, someone who “loves big” even when she has been hurt. She is “bright,” in the sense that her virtue causes a glow that is perceptible to the senses. (She also wears face and body glitter.) She has suffered, but she is not hardened and bitter. And yet, when we first meet her, she is sleeping with a guy she does not even consider her boyfriend, simply because she is a young, successful writer living in NYC and she wants to “have a fun summer.” I’m sorry, but this is really clunky psychology. If you are sleeping around just for fun, you are doing serious mental damage to yourself and to everyone around you.
In fact, both the main characters are presented like this. They are Broken in Some Way (as per the trope), but their brokenness is neither the cause of, nor exacerbated by, their promiscuous behavior. This seems to be a blind spot on the author’s part. It’s not true to life, and it throws off the emotional tone of the book. Rant over.
About nine months ago, I decided I was going to read all the fiction I could that was set in or based upon ancient Greece. This does not mean I would or could read everything that was out there. In fact, my local library had some new books in the genre that I picked up, glanced through, and decided weren’t worth my time. It’s a very popular genre, and it has given rise to some incredible classics and some incredible stinkers.
Here’s what I did read:
Date read
Title & author
My reaction
January 2026
Circe, Madeline Miller
heartbreaking in the best way
February 2026
Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis
(a re-read) in my opinion, far & away his best novel
Feb – March 2026
The King Must Die, Mary Renault
(a re-read) insanely good research, poetic literary writing
March – May 2026
Christianity and the Hellenistic World, Ronald H. Nash
nonfiction; explores whether Christian ideas were borrowed from Greek culture
May 2026
No Friend to This House, Natalie Haynes
perhaps the best you could do with a Jason and Medea re-telling, which isn’t saying much, as they are both royal stinkers who deserve each other
June 2026
The Sea of Monsters, Rick Riordan
a Percy Jackson book: fun, woke-ish, O.K.
July 2026
The Siren Song, Anne Ursu
a better Rick Riordan
in process
The Letters to the Corinthians: Revised ed., William Barclay
What better time to read a commentary on Paul’s letters to the new church in Corinth?
yet to read
The Bull from the Sea, Mary Renault
sure to be demanding but good
yet to read
The Curse of King Midas, Colleen M. Story
I started this, but it just was not the time for it.
I remembered that, when I was a kid or a tween, my family got ahold of this series, the Spirit Flyer series. This is the first one. It was published by InterVarsity Press, in 1983. You can see that the cover art style is very 80s. It’s reminiscent of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, which I also loved. The kid’s hair is late 70s/early 80s American hair. The art style is realistic, not exaggerated to make the characters look like elves or superheroes or something. The elements in the scene sort of float randomly around in it, a barrage of impressions, like of the old school pictures they used to sell our parents where there was an in-focus view of the kid smiling at the camera, and in the background, a large, soft-focus view of the kid staring wistfully off into the middle distance.
This is not me, but it might as well be.
Anyway.
I remembered that this series was really good. It was written from a Christian perspective, but not nicey-nice Christian. There was a sense of menace that grew from book to book, as a town was taken over by some kind of evil organization. I remembered it being almost like That Hideous Strength for kids.
Recently, whilst at my parents’ house looking for a different book, I saw this and decided to give it a re-read. Long story short, it’s as good as I remembered. It is an earnest book. The action unfolds slowly at first. In the first few chapters, John (the main character’s name — this book doesn’t shy away from cliches) trash-picks an old bicycle at the dump and fixes it up. He’s an 80s kid, which means he seems very independent and capable to us today. The process of fixing up the old bike over a period of about two days is described methodically. Meanwhile, John is dealing with a best friend; neighborhood bullies; and a stepfamily with whom he lives after his parents died in a car wreck: a strict, no-nonsense uncle, a self-effacing aunt, and three girl cousins, the oldest of whom is very kind.
When bad things start happening, the symbolism is super obvious, but the narrative is unapologetic. There is a huge black snake apparition with red eyes. There is a human villain, seemingly nice but possessed of a creepy grin, who later shows up with “the face of someone dead–a pale shriveled mask of a face with its teeth bared, snarling like a rabid dog.” (131) A strong smell of something dead often accompanies them.
As you can see from the quote above, the writing is earnest too. The Magic Bicycle is written simply, as appropriate for middle grade, but not fatuously. Bibee isn’t afraid to use time-worn phrases (“like a rabid dog”), but they do not come off as lazy because he has something to say and his story is going somewhere. His book reminds me of C.S. Lewis pointing out to young writers that “if you just say what you want to say, without caring twopence about how often it has been said before, nine times of ten you will find yourself becoming original without really trying.”
Cyberpunkgirl recommended Anne Ursu’s Greek-mythology-inspired middle-grade books, after I gave a tepid review of a Percy Jackson book. Not too long afterwards, I found myself at the bookstore, remembered Ursu’s name, and looked her up. Sure enough, they had all the Cronus Chronicles except for the first one. (Why do bookstores do this?) So I got #2, The Siren Song.
I really enjoyed it. While clever and funny, it is somehow more sweet and sincere than the Percy Jackson books. Charlotte is very believable as a spunky, stubborn, impulsive 13-year-old girl. I also liked that it is written in the third person limited (usually from Charlotte’s perspective but occasionally from the perspective of one of the villains, or of her cousin Zee), and in the past tense. Books written in the first person, especially in the present tense, are the bane of my existence most of the time.
In this book, Charlotte tangles with Poseidon. He is extremely self-involved (as we would expect of a god), and has images of himself all over his magical yacht, from mosaics to murals to his face on furniture and light fixtures. Which reminded me of something …
Ahem. Anyway.
My favorite character had to be Sir Lawrence Gaumm, a true English gentleman, and no, I won’t tell you what species he was, but he was delightful.
The governor of California … was truly a strange mix–he was canny when it came to his personal options and the main chance, and he was a superb politician, and this was welded onto–in an uneasy seam–the fact that he was an economic nincompoop.
Not only was he personally shrewd with his own money, and clueless with regard to finances at whatever transition point it turns from “money” to “economics,” but he was also an ugly man. But this ugliness–of the plain kind, not the grotesque freak show kind–was combined with uncanny amounts of personal charisma. He could talk virtually anybody into virtually anything, and this was a function of that charisma sloshing out of him whenever he made any sudden moves whatever.
He knew how to add and subtract. But, to underline it again, when it came to money on the loose, money in the pockets of others, and particularly when it came to money that corporations had mysteriously obtained, or the smaller reserves of the upper-middle-class taxpayer, he hadn’t a clue. He thought of public money as coming from a limitless aquifer of funds deep beneath their feet. Those who opposed him were obstinate and stiff-necked people who inexplicably did not want to pay a modest amount to install a new well and pump.
The ventures that remained in California kept going bust for some reason, and this was invariably attributed to “bad luck.” His ignorance of how this kept happening to the same kind of people was sincere, although it was also culpable. He should have known better. He had gotten through college. He had also had a driver’s license for decades.
–from Ride, Sally, Ride by Douglas Wilson, taken from pp. 107 – 111
Here it is, advertising my book The Great Snake. Out of all my books, TGS is probably the best beach read, because it’s the shortest and takes place mostly in a subtropical setting. There might still be time for you to read it before the end of summer! Just saying!
Benson was not an unintelligent man, but he was a simple man. [His son] Ace was much quicker, and more widely read, and Benson had been aware of that gap for about five years now. Whenever he began his cautions against intellectualism, he knew how lame it sounded. He didn’t like it, but didn’t know what else to do, or say.
After their conversations, Ace would be unsettled too, but for different reasons. He would work through the arguments again in his mind, and could not see any alternatives to the way he had gone. And he was constantly mystified by the things his father would say and then go and do. The arguments were watertight, and his father’s thinking was not watertight.
And yet, now … an irrational desire to be irrational went over his head like a wave. He knew he had no moves. If he just surrendered, all would be well. If he continued to struggle, there would be nothing but … well, nothing but struggle. Struggle in every direction. A world of struggle.
–Ride, Sally, Ride, by Douglas Wilson, pp. 85 – 86
The gist of this book is that history moves in seasonal cycles. The authors spend a lot of time talking about how expecting seasonal cycles in history is the wisdom of the ancients, and that this has been lost to a linear conception of time that came from Christianity and got even more exaggerated during the Enlightenment. Linear time leads people to expect that things will just keep getting “more so;” that the future will look like an extrapolation of the recent past. As a result, people never expect a turn of history coming, and are always gobsmacked when it arrives.
As they urge readers to accept a cyclical view of history, the authors go slightly overboard and make it sound as if we should worship the circle. They point out circular symbolism in various myths. They say that a cycle is associated with the number four and feminine energy, whereas a line, or triangle, is associated with the number three and masculine energy. While this is not wrong, they then make it sound as if the idea of history as a line, moving in a particular direction, should be rejected and has nothing to offer us.
It’s not a big part of the book, but it is foundational and I found myself trying to integrate their view before I moved forward.
Should We Worship the Circle?
I believe that much of the symbolism they describe is correct. (Not all of it is, since the authors tend to cast a really wide net throughout history and literature, and then throw into the book anything they drag in that looks superficially similar to their thesis. But much of it is.) Seeing history as inescapably circular is an ancient, pagan way to view the world. And it does reflect something about the nature of humans and of creation. However, uncorrected, it tends to leave people fatalistic and trapped in the cycle. Exhibit A would be Hinduism. Christianity did indeed break people out of this endless treadmill by presenting a picture of history where the end is not like the beginning, where history moves in a definite arc or story from creation to fall to redemption to glorification. Of the many things that Christ did on the Cross, He broke us out of the endless cycle. That is why history fundamentally changed after His death and resurrection. You get different types of people, who think in different types of ways, and you get cultures that are Christianized developing in very different ways than any culture before them. Of course, one downstream effect of all this was that it made possible the Enlightenment, materialism, and what C.S. Lewis calls “the fatal serialism of the modern imagination.” These things aren’t good, but to put this in perspective, blaming them on Christianity is sort of like blaming your parents because you scraped your knee while you were on a trip that they took you on to Disneyworld.
Here’s how G.K. Chesterton put it:
As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and of health. Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it breaks out. For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but is fixed forever in size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms forever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox at its centre it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travelers.
–Orthodoxy, p. 32
So, yeah. Although in the big picture, history is linear, cycles of development do still exist, both in human lives and in human societies, and we would do well to remember that and work within our nature.
The Seasons of a Saeculum
Briefly, they assert that history moves in cycles of just over or just under 100 years. These, they call a saeculum, following the Roman word for it. The seasons are:
Spring / A High: A time of building, strong families, and strong social cohesion
Summer / An Awakening: A time of spiritual revolution led by idealistic young people
Autumn / An Unraveling: A time when the values of the Awakening are applied to changing society, and things start to fragment
Winter / A Crisis: A time when the society is threatened by a series of shocks that often include war
(Fun fact, if you are into personality typologies, you can also make these seasons match the Four Humors: Sanguine, Choleric, Phlegmatic, Melancholic.)
Each season takes roughly 20 to 25 years. Each one causes the next.
The authors also identify four generational “personalities.” The personality of each generation is determined based upon their experiences in childhood and young adulthood. In what conditions did they grow up, and when did they come of age?
If you came of age during a Crisis, your generation is the Hero type: the can-do ones, prone to hubris.
If you came of age during a High, your generation is the Artist type: passive and conformist.
If you came of age during an Awakening, your generation is the Prophet type: fiery and moralistic.
If you came of age during an Unraveling, your generation is the Nomad type: neglected and cynical survivors.
Armed with these thought tools, you can now make applications.
The Applications
I appreciate the authors for not claiming too much for their rubric. First of all, they point out that these cycles are not precise in the time they arrive. This is an organic cycle, like the seasons. Some years, you might have a cool summer or a mild winter. Sometimes, seasons are delayed beyond what is usual. For example, the authors have a series of detailed charts in which they apply this rubric to American history. They say that during the Civil War, the Crisis came fast and didn’t last the usual 20 years. As a result, the cycle was shorter. That saeculum skipped the Hero generation. It went straight to the Artist generation of traumatized conformists.
Another helpful thing they say is that this year-like cycle in human history does not cause random events. There is still such a thing as chance, and as human will. However, a society’s reaction to events is heavily influenced by what season they are in. The United States did not immediately enter WWI after the sinking of the Lusitania, because we were in an Unraveling period. But we did immediately mobilize for war after the attack on Pearl Harbor, because we were now in a Crisis.
Finally, this cycle of history is not equally prominent in all societies. Because it has to do with changes in public attitudes, fashions, values, and child-rearing practices, in very traditional societies the cycle is muted. One generation is much like the last. When a society throws off tradition and allows its citizens a lot of social mobility and freedom to make their own choices, ironically that is when the cycle becomes a large factor in that nation’s history. It is for this reason, say the authors, that these seasons are particularly easy to spot in the United States.
It can be difficult to spot seasons of history in past societies (beyond speculation) when we know relatively little about them. Sometimes it’s pretty clear, as when we look at the cycle of idolatry-oppression by enemies-repentance-deliverance found in the book of Judges. We can also find many historic diatribes (probably written during an Unraveling) lamenting the loss of civic virtues.
O.K., so, with those caveats, if you are an American, you have probably been applying this rubric to the last hundred years in our country, which is super easy to do. Here we go:
Crisis: Wall Street Crash of Oct. 1929 through the end of WWII. Coming of age: the Great Generation, or what the authors call the G.I. Generation.
High: Late 1940s to early 1960s. Coming of age: the Silent generation. Beatniks.
Awakening: the “Consciousness Revolution,” late 1960s to early 1980s. Coming of age: the now-much-maligned Boomers. Hippies.
Unraveling: late 1980s to early 2000s. Coming of age: Generation X, or what the authors calls 13ers. Slackers.
The Great Generation are Heroes, the Silent are Artists, the Boomers are Prophets, and the Xers are Nomads. Tag yourself. I’m an Xer.
When It Doesn’t Fit Exactly
Now, how do we define a “generation”? It usually works out that once every 20 to 25 years, there is an identifiable new crop of young people. Hero and Prophet generations tend to be bigger, because of what’s going on around the time they are born. Hence, the Baby Boomers are Prophets. Artist and Nomad generations tend to be smaller, because they were born during a time when adults had other things on their minds (the Crisis or the Awakening).
Also, of course, the generations in a nation don’t necessarily fit with the generations in a given family. The authors point out that, often, it takes one big generation more than 20 to 25 years to reproduce, so that, for example, the children of Heroes are Prophets. The Prophets react against what their parents’ generation valued, but they get along better with their grandparents (also Prophets).
Here’s another example. My parents are Boomers. Now, the Boomer culture was rather anti-baby, anti-family, anti-settling down. However, my folks were not typical Boomers. They swam against the tide. They had six children, and my mom stayed home with us when we were small. They tried to raise us in a very pro-family way. So I was shielded from many of the things that my fellow Gen Xers had to deal with, growing up in an environment where kids were considered to “trap” their mothers, or with parents who divorced or went off to “find themselves.” However, I did pick up on the Gen Xer vibe of living in an unravelling society, being blamed for everything from racism to pollution to the hole in the ozone layer. When I read this line,
[O]ne student mockingly tells his friends in River’s Edge: “You young people are a disgrace to all living things, to plants even. You shouldn’t even be seen in the same room as a cactus.”
-p. 195
… I laughed. The fact that I found this funny, tells me that I am a true Gen Xer.
So anyway, I am a younger Xer. But because my parents had a large family, I have younger siblings who are Millennials (supposed to be the Hero generation; more on this later). Meanwhile, my husband’s parents are Silent generation (Artists). My husband has older siblings who are Boomers, and he is an older Xer. And because we waited a while to have children, our own children are … I guess … Zoomers? Who are supposed to be Artists? Or maybe Alphas? Who … I’m not sure what they should be, because this Crisis seems to be extending. Again, more on this later.
The Predictions, Accurate and Otherwise
The Fourth Turning, published in 1997, predicted that beginning around or shortly before 2005, America would enter a Crisis. There were a variety of things they thought could happen:
States secede or try to secede over federal taxes, causing a Constitutional crisis
“A global terrorist group blows up an aircraft and announces it possesses portable nuclear weapons.”
A government budget crisis leads to a government shutdown and a Wall Street crash.
A “new communicable virus” leads to quarantine, which local areas resist, leading to martial law.
War with Russia and Iran.
All these are taken from pages 272 – 273 of the book.
So where are we at now? Something that takes 25 years of your life might be too big to see, but I suggest the following. America’s Crisis era started on Sept. 11, 2001, with an unprecedented kind of terrorist attack, which led to big curtailments of freedom like the Patriot Act and the creation of the TSA, and to a number of wars. Then we had a housing market crash and financial crisis in 2008. Meanwhile, there were a series of incidents that, helped by agitators, caused riots in our cities. Police departments responded by being less active, and crime soared. People started to get freaked out, which led to the election of 2016 (nations tend to turn to a “strongman” in a crisis), which caused more people to freak out. The Crisis reached its climax in 2020 – 2022, with you-know-what.
So counting from Sept. 11, 2001, we are almost exactly 25 years into this Crisis era. According to the authors’ rubric of how these seasons usually go, we should be coming out of our Crisis soon, into either a new High with regenerated values, prosperity, and social order, or else into the total destruction of our society.
Which one do you think is happening? For me, I’m not sure. I see elements of people building new values and communities, but I don’t see any national consensus on these things. Nor do I particularly see signs of the Crisis ending.
To prepare for the Fourth Turning, the authors in 1997 recommended that individuals and families do the following:
“Return to the classic virtues.”
“Do not isolate yourself from community affairs.”
“Build personal relationships of all kinds. Face-to-face contacts … will become newly important.”
“Prepare yourself and your children for teamwork.”
“Maintain relationships of trust with your extended family … your household will function best if it is multigenerational.”
“Gird for the weakening collapse of public support mechanisms.”
“Generalists with survival know-how will have the edge over specialists who skills are useful only in an undamaged environment.”
These are all taken from pp. 318 – 321 of The Fourth Turning.
These are steps that are being, and have been, taken by many who think of themselves as preppers. and by people who are working and hoping for a cultural renaissance. I’m most familiar with those who are doing this within Christian circles.
The only blind spot that the authors seem to have is that they incurably think of the “teamwork” and “coming together” that must take place during a Crisis, as a national affair. They say “we” while thinking primarily of the national government. In the section on “preparing your children for teamwork,” they suggest not pulling your children out of government schools “if the schools are working.” While I have seen many people doing community building throughout this crisis, one thing I have not seen is a newfound trust in, or willingness to comply with, the federal or even in most cases the local governments. People have been coming together in “teams” to found and maintain private schools and other things like that, but not to join federal programs.
O.K., now for the predictions that didn’t prove to be so prescient.
Any book that makes this many predictions (even in general terms) is going to result in some howlers. For example, here’s the authors’ prediction about how the Silent generation would handle Social Security entitlements:
… America’s rising familiarity with the Silent elder persona will erode today’s support for across-the-board senior benefits. Unlike G.I.s, the Silent will not feel entitled. Their prior public deeds will not inspire them (or others) to lobby for a vast elder reward. … [The Silent’s] sense of guilt and instinct for compromise will compel them to give in some, relax their claims on young workers, and drain the electricity out of the third rail of Social Security politics.
— ibid, pp. 220 – 221
This — how to put it?– emphatically did not happen. I have heard with my own ears Silent generation members say, “We paid into the system for a lot of years. Now we need to get out of it.” When you set up a Ponzi scheme, no one wants to be left holding even a little bit of the bag.
They make a similar prediction about Boomers:
When the market hits bottom, millions of Boomers … will immediately have to make do with steeply diminished material consumption. Many will have no choice but to live communally or with their adult children… public spending on elder benefits will necessarily decline. … Congresses will debate massive cuts. To maintain G.I.-style elder dependence on the young, Boomers would have to wage political war on their coming-of-age Millennial children. It is a war they will not wage–and would not win if they did.
ibid, p. 284
Now, the retirement age has been raised, but other than that, I have not noticed any “massive cuts.” And from my observation, Boomers as a group have been perfectly happy to wage political war on Millennials. And they have won it, by convincing Millennials that the solution to their financial woes is more taxes and entitlements, not just for older people but for everyone.
I have not noticed a trend of Boomers moving in with their adult children, either. In the first place, they, not their children, are usually the ones who own homes, a situation brought about by entitlement policy applied to housing. In the second place, their children are often alienated Xers, and relationship isn’t the greatest (present company excepted). Finally, some Boomers I know are effectively the caregivers for their grandchildren.
In short, the collapse of the Social Security/Medicare system has come about more slowly than Strauss & Howe (or, frankly, I) expected. As an Xer, I did not expect to be able to retire, and maybe I still won’t, but my husband is approaching the age when he can start withdrawals to give us some breathing room, and there has not yet been a nationwide apocalypse. Color me surprised.
One more howler:
As they break into their twenties, Millennials will already be accustomed to meeting and beating adult expectations. Basking in praise… they will seek out [their elders’] advice … Every youth domain will become more mannerly, civic-spirited, and emotionally placid. In college, Millennials will lead a renaissance in student decorum and appearance, making profanity as out of date as the backward cap. … On the job, Millennials will be seekers of order and harmony. They will delight employers with their skills, work habits, and institutional loyalties. … Millennials will respond [to economic hard times] with a cheerful patience reminiscent of Depression-era G.I.s.
ibid, pp. 293 – 294
Look, I’m not here to slam on Millennials. I actually have a lot of sympathy for your generation. But there is no way this general picture describes the way things have gone with the Millennial generation.
Strauss & Howe are predicting that the Millennials will emerge as a Hero generation, because that’s what his historical scheme calls for. But this requires a lot more strength and resilience than Millennials, as a group, entered young adulthood possessing.
The authors did not foresee that Millennials would have been intentionally weakened by a number of cultural trends which were pushed on them by earlier generations. These include behavioral meds, and overpraising/participation trophy culture combined with identity politics culture, which gave complimentary messages that, on the one hand, you are so amazing and talented and don’t need to work to improve yourself, and on the other hand, you are a victim of history and society. Each of these messages is weakening; in combination, they are devastating. There is also the horrible sexual confusion that has been foisted upon the Millennial and Zoomer generations. This draws on the power of identity politics (being a sexual minority is an easy way to obtain an oppressed identity), and on the behavioral meds culture (giving powerful new medications in response to emotional distress).
What generation could emerge from such a gauntlet unscathed? It is no exaggeration to compare all these horrors to WWI, which wiped out a generation of young people and traumatized the survivors. These are not conditions that cause young people to “meet and beat adult expectations” in the positive sense, nor to “delight their employers.”
Perhaps Millennials are a Hero Generation in a new sense. If they are functional at all, it’s because they have won through an intense spiritual war. Perhaps we should think of them as veterans. Like veterans, they certainly bear mental and physical scars. But instead of coming back from a physical war and plugging into an existing social structure, they are having to re-invent the wheel in all the most basic domains of life: schedules, self-care, family.
And quite a few Millennials are a “Hero Generation,” itching for action, in the sense that they are committed Marxists who want to see the violent overthrow of society.
Others, like my younger siblings, are more like the G.I. generation after WWII, eager to get married, raise children, contribute to their communities, and build a wholesome cultural high.
The fact that we have Millennials going in these two very different directions makes me rather uncertain about how this Crisis is going to go.
I wonder whether what we have seen is what the author predicted on page 302:
If [the Crisis] ends badly, Millennials would bear the full burden of its consequence throughout their adult lives. If they come of age traumatized, like the Progressive youths of the Civil War, Millennials will thereafter attend to the details of suffering and healing as heirs to the Artist archetype.
It seems to me that our Millennials are behaving more like a “sensitive Artist” generation than like a “hubristic Hero” generation. This would mean that, as with the Civil War, America had once again skipped the Hero generation and gone straight to Artist.
The Prophet, born in the High, seeks vision; the Nomad, born in the Awakening, seeks realism; the Hero, born in the Unraveling, seeks power; and the Artist, born in the (prior or current) Crisis, seeks empathy.
p. 322
Reader, I Read-ed It
So, that’s the outlines of the book plus a few of my thoughts on it. Obviously, there is a lot more material in there. Some of it is really interesting (the parts that apply the seasonal rubric to the past). Other parts feel dated (ironically, the parts written in the future tense). Read it if you’re curious and want to know more. Meanwhile, what do you think? What generation are you? What do you want to do in the coming High?
