Appearing at my door a little while back, on a hot day, an enthusiastic young woman who turned out to be soliciting support for a political candidate, the first one to declare for a seat on Palo Alto’s City Council. As sometimes happens in this little city (of about 50,000 residents), she wasn’t a campaign worker, but the candidate, Katie Causey, working door to door in the neighborhood (which turns out to be literally where she lives — just about a block and a half from my place). KC’s headshot for publicity purposes:
KC, born and raised in Palo Alto, going to local schools through Paly High; BA from George Washington Univ. in DC, in Women’s Studies (but she took a linguistics course, so she was actually impressed by my being a linguistics professor)
Right at the beginning, she asked about the rainbow flag hanging from my patio door; I pointed to the clothing I was wearing — a tank top with a rainbow heart on it, bold rainbow shorts — saying, “Hey it’s Pride Month!” and clearly establishing myself as proudly queer. And she countered by announcing that one of her platform planks was establishing a Palo Alto Pride celebration. Then we were off in a breathless exchange of life histories and opinions.
Well, I am constitutionally an enthusiast, like KC, and enthusiasts tend to amp each other up. Also, she was selling herself and her program — from one of her announcements: “I’m a bi, zillennial, urbanist, and former tenant organizer who believes yes in my backyard, & I’m running for Palo Alto City Council” (wow, a crunchy-granola manifesto!) — while I was a desperately lonely old guy who longs for face-to-face conversation and will go on forever if you encourage me at all. Only the heat of the day brought our exchange to an end.
Now, a bit more about KC. And her generation, Zillennial, on the cusp of Millennial and Gen Z. And her platform. And her status as a crunchy-granola person.
I warned KC that I would be writing about her on my blog; I don’t need her permission to write about her public persona, but I thought it would be a friendly gesture to warn her. If what I write helps to bring contributions and votes to her, that would be wonderful (I’m a crunchy-granola guy myself, so I’d like to see her succeed, though Palo Alto might now be way too haut bourgeois to accept people like us). In any case, I have now made a small donation to her campaign (really just a gesture; I have very little money to spend on non-essentials).
KC the Zillennial. Working from available facts, KC is very close to 30 years old, which puts her right on the cusp between between Millennial (born roughly 1980-94) and Generation Z (roughly 1995-2012); my grand-child Opal Armstrong Zwicky (born in 2003) is solidly Gen Z, but KC is a Zillennial. From Wikipedia:
Zillennials (also known as Zennials) is the demographic cohort on the cusp of the Millennial and Generation Z cohorts. Their adjacency between the two generations and limited age set has led to their characterization as a “micro-generation.” They are generally the children of younger Baby Boomers and Generation X. Estimates of the U.S. population in this cohort range from 30 million to 48 million.
In early childhood during the September 11th terrorist attacks, they were the first cohort to experience adolescence in a post-9/11 world. The majority of this cohort came of age during the 2010s, with the U.K. Brexit referendum and U.S. presidential election of 2016, COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020–2021 George Floyd protests being key formative events. Zillennials experienced the sudden global Digital Revolution of the late 2000s and 2010s, navigating mobile LTE internet, cell phones, mobile devices and smartphones.
Here you see why analysts of social life refer to birth cohorts (aka generations); people within a cohort tend to share various significant life experiences, which help to shape how they understand the world around them and act in it. You also see how enormously context-specific such cohort effects are: specific to particular cultures in particular places in particular periods of time. (Note that these effects, which vary across time, are distinct from age-grading, in which certain behaviors are considered appropriate for people at particular stages in their life.) Finally, you will appreciate that a cohort embraces an enormous variety of individuals; cohort is a high-level variable (like race / ethnicity, sex / gender, social class, region, and a number of others).
More on KC’s platform. From a flyer of hers:
Fighting for climate, housing, & Palo Alto’s first Pride celebration!
And from a local newspaper:
Causey, who serves on the city’s Human Relations Commission, is known for her roles at various local nonprofits, including the Palo Alto Renters’ Association, a group that was formed to assist local tenants and that was recently absorbed into the broader pro-housing nonprofit, Palo Alto Forward. Her full-time job is as a community organizer for the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition.
Plus, she does volunteer work for gun violence prevention.
crunchy-granola. Put all this together, and you get what I — with an earnestly activist and protest-inclined young adulthood in the late 1950s and the 1960s — would have called a crunchy-granola person in the 1970s. (I can use this term freely because I was such a person myself, even made my own granola.)
When KC came along, I very quickly recognized a kindred soul, but I had no idea whether folks like us were still referred to as crunchy-granola people (I’m not really plugged into what’s happening). So I sought out the opinions of my daughter and grand-child, who assured me that, yes, crunchy-granola was still going strong.
And then the OED entry (in revision):
noun and adj. crunchy-granola: North American. a. n. (Also with capital initial), a breakfast cereal popularized in health food stores and cooperatives in the early 1970s; b. adj. (in extended use) relating to or characterized by ecological awareness, liberal political views, and an interest in ‘natural’ products and health foods, esp. in a manner seen as conforming to a social stereotype; see granola n. [1st noun cite 1970; 1st adj. cite 1984: The hippies, with their crunchy-granola back-to-earth healthiness and blue-jean uniforms, were an American invention (NYT); 1999 predicative cite from Toronto: He was crunchy-granola and gruff and tough]
So Palo Alto gets a crunchy-granola candidate for City Council. Neither back-to-earth hippie nor gruff and tough, but urbane and charming, crunchy-granola for the 21st century.