I watched an old documentary yesterday a couple weeks back and had the deeply irritating experience of hearing someone from nearly sixty years ago come to almost exactly the same generational realization I’d had while writing It’s Your Fault (Mine, Too): Breaking the Wheel.

It’s maybe midway through the film when one of the women starts talking about how surprised she was to hear people her own age spouting the same kinds of prejudice she’d associated with the older generation. She’d apparently gone into the experience believing, more or less, that the problem belonged to the people who came before them.

Her generation knew better, she thought. They would trust each other, unlike those silly old folks with all their inborn prejudice. They would set a better example, showing everyone else how people of different creeds oughta live and work together. I had to laugh a little, even as the gooseflesh raised up on my arms. I knew that thought; I’ve had that thought. It was eerie.

For a long ass time, I blamed Boomers for most of our societal problems.

Not every individual Boomer, obviously, but the generation as a whole became a convenient lil reason for a lot of things I was angry about. They’d benefited from circumstances younger generations didn’t inherit, then seemed perversely confused when we struggled under different ones. They’d been in charge while plenty of problems got worse, after all. Climate change, political dysfunction, the economy, housing, whatever fresh disaster happened to be irritating me that day, all of it could fit beneath the general heading of: Look what they left us.

Some of that criticism is fair; I still think plenty of it is fair. What changed as I got older wasn’t that I suddenly decided everyone before me had done a beautiful job. I just started noticing how comforting it was to believe the mistakes belonged to them alone. (Plus, “getting older” didn’t automatically equate to “getting wiser” for me, so I doubt it worked that way for anyone else.)

That’s what made the video so strange to watch. Here were people who’d eventually become part of the older generations we talk about now, sitting there while they were young and having almost exactly the realization I’ve had in my own adulthood.

They, too, had looked backward and thought the people before them were the problem. They, too, had believed their generation understood something the others had missed. Then they got close enough to one another to discover that history had not politely removed all the ugly parts before handing society over. They were still carrying some of it with them.

There’s something mildly horrifying about realizing how unoriginal your great generational awakening is.

The temptation to keep passing fault backward is irresistible, because every generation inevitably inherits consequences it didn’t create. Never considering that they too might one day do the same to their own children.

That part still rings true blue to me. We’re all shaped by decisions made long before we’re old enough to participate in them. We inherit ways of thinking, fears, assumptions. Stories about who deserves what and why.

I used to believe social progress worked almost automatically through generations. Older people held the outdated ideas, their younger kin challenged them, and eventually the old ideas died with the people who believed in them. (It’s very clean, which probably shoulda been my first clue it wasn’t quite right.)

People aren’t born progressively enlightened just because the calendar moved forward. Every generation develops inside whatever happens to be happening around it, and all of that leaves a mark: prosperity, scarcity, war, fear, new tech, political movements, even the stories a culture repeats often enough that they eventually stop sounding like stories and start sounding more like common sense.

That means progress can happen without becoming Permanent with a capital p.

We can become more tolerant in one direction and less tolerant in another, recognizing an old prejudice while remaining completely oblivious to whatever version of it fits comfortably inside our own worldview. And if we’re too busy congratulating ourselves for seeing the failures of previous generations, we may never notice which failures we’re busy inventing for the next one. (Presently, that’s what keeps me up at night.)

I still think it may take several generations for some of the larger social divisions we’re living through to soften. There are attitudes people have to unlearn, institutions that change more slowly than people do, and wounds that don’t disappear merely because most everyone involved agrees they should. But I no longer assume that time alone will do the work for us.

That’s probably what I found most unsettling in that old footage. Those (once)young people weren’t fossils. They weren’t sitting there thinking like some alien species I could comfortably dismiss. Their frustration with old people sounded suspiciously familiar, and so did their belief that their generation could do better. Even the surprise at discovering that people their own age could reproduce the very problems they thought they’d escaped felt familiar.

Eventually somebody younger will watch footage of us. They will listen to Millennials or Gen Z talking very confidently about what’s wrong with the world, and some part of them will think: And you really thought you were different? At least, I hope they do. I’d rather they see what we missed than inherit it unquestioned. That still wouldn’t make them immune to making new mistakes of their own.

Maybe breaking the wheel was never going to mean one generation finally getting everything right. I think I understood it too literally before, as though enough awareness could eventually snap the whole thing in half and leave us with nothing ugly to inherit.

Now I think the best we may be able to do is interfere with its momentum. To notice what was handed to us. Question the parts that deserve questioning. Refuse some of them, change others, then hand the whole imperfect mess forward, knowing the people after us will always find something we missed.

And they should. Maybe that’s how the wheel changes at all.

inspo: a film first broadcast on December 11, 1967, called Where is Prejudice? // the recurring certainty that prejudice and moral blindness mostly belong to somebody else (but never lil ole me) // worrying about the future of humanity // mostly, when midway through Where is Prejudice? one of the college kids said something about being shocked that some people of her generation could feel the way they did, which… samesies, girl

Kinsey Keys

aspiring memoirist rummaging through my noggin, stubbornly clutching the past to my chest like it’s a newborn babe starved for mother's milk.

See Full Bio