Carrol is completely wrong about the generation gap. It was real, palpable, lived and fought.
All my parents were born and raised in small towns in rural America. They had almost nothing to use as parents for me, born and raised in the megapolis of Los Angeles. They did not know the feel of a child in a giant city. They did not sit in classrooms of thirty or more kids beyone the grasp of a single teacher who faded into oblivion or the freedom of anonynimity in the mass. School classes were so large teachers kept a seatting guides for each period so they could put a name to a face.
My parents didn't know so many things it's hard to name them. Neighborhoods or districts functioned something like townships embedded in larger sections of the city and set up the socio-economic and cultural geography.
For example, nobody is from Los Angeles. They are from Silver Lake, Downtown or Metro, South Central, Inglewood, Culver City, Fairfax, Watts, Hollywood, or East LA, Vernal Heights, etc.
Another example. My mother and father are buried somewhere out in the Valley, but I have no idea where, even though I was at their funerals, because I didn't drive to the cemetries. I went in a limo from churches I didn't know. It's depressing to sit at the funeral and listen to a minister, priest, or pastor who never met your parent and had no idea who the person was.
Well, the result was that we didn't know each other or understand our different struggles, so we had little in common. This became particularly clear with Vietnam. They were still thinking of WWII and Korea, something about defending the US. Vietnam had nothing to do with defending anything. It was a meaningless assault on a people and country we didn't know, understand, or care about.
Other differences. They went to small colleges or universities in a completely different period when most of the US was rural, and their grasp of what I was studying in mass production higher education had almost no resemblence to their experience.
I would call it social alienation and not a generation gap. It was the consequence of much larger developments, the urbanization, and then suburbanization of the US.
Since that process is pretty much complete further demarcations now separate masses in the suburbs from masses in the cities. And along comes genetrification to faciliate a return to cities and the transformation of cities under this more recent regime. The latter effectively re-divides cities back into districts of barrios and ghettos, by property values, etc.
So in my mind what was once called a generation gap by the media, was really a stage or spectrum of this constant ebb and flow of people in and around cities. If you move to a small rural town for example to teach, your children will grow up as small town kids. From the experience of friends, these towns tend to be rather nasty places.
CG