Another Gen X Post? Whatever.

"Raised On Hose Water And Neglect" turned out to be a pretty lame rallying cry.

Just kids living in the moment, thinking about nuclear war and their Atari 2600s.

So maybe aren’t one of the few, the [un]happy few, who belongs to Generation X: meaning you were born between the years 1965 and 1980*. Even so, you’ve probably seen the memes. Going by those, Gen X were the last Americans lucky enough to experience life without helicopter parenting, constant government surveillance, and unironic hair metal.

To clarify, a lot of what they say — at least in a direct object sense — is true. My fellow malcontents and I did, by and large, drink from garden hoses. We also roamed our neighborhoods like the Feral Kid between dawn and dusk. We had rotary phones, banana seat bikes, and we found porn in the woods.

Aside: when I was around 11. A pickup truck went down my street trailing a plume of nudie magazines. To this day, I don’t know if it was the result of an inattentive driver, or someone chucking them out in protest of my town’s ban on adult establishments. Then again, it’s akin to my way of thinking when I hear breathless news stories about somebody lacing kids’ Halloween candy with fentanyl: who gives away pornography?

ANYWAY, my ill-gotten acquisition of several early ‘80s issues of Playboy** shouldn’t distract from the reality that my generation has gotten really smug in our perceived superiority. And that self-satisfaction isn’t confined to our side of the Atlantic:

We are the generation that grew up with Margaret Thatcher and 3 million unemployed, interest rates shooting up to 17 per cent, the Yorkshire Ripper, the IRA mainland bombing campaign and Jimmy Savile as the ideal go-to for making children’s dreams come true.

Substitute Ronald Reagan for Thatcher, Adam Walsh’s disappearance for the Yorkshire guy, and Bill Cosby for Savile, and you’ve got a disaffected 40 and 50-something American stew going. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that this has the same kind of smug delivery I could see myself using if I logged in to r/GenX and haughtily declared American kids didn’t need participation trophies or therapy or parental supervision. Am I being sarcastic?

You know who doesn’t do this kind of shit? Baby Boomers. Granted, that may be because the generation that famously couldn’t program a VCR clock isn’t generally adept at social media. And if that feels like a cheap shot, it similarly feels wrong somehow that Gen X has taken up the mantel of self-righteousness from our finger-wagging elders.

Why? Because the fact that we’ve been consistently and hilariously ignored was something we simply accepted. We’re a demographic speedbump whose frequent omission in statistical analyses mirrors the historical neglect we’re so otherwise apparently proud of. To wit:

Et tu, Columbia Broadcasting System?

This lack of regard used to be one of those things we mostly shrugged off. It went hand in hand with our innate disregard for so-called authority figures and opinion havers. This “reflexive hostility,” as Sam Adams (not that one) calls it, marked one of the first real tectonic breaks in generational consistency:

And we were rewarded with multiple economic crises, climate catastrophes, and reality television. That’s gratitude for you.

Then again, maybe we aren’t better than this. I’ve seen the depressing regularity with which my cohort seems to be embracing Trump (or at least shrugging off his abuses) and late-stage capitalist brain. Quite the pivot from not believing in “isms.” Meanwhile, Gen Z has already figured out the game is rigged, and is checking out*** of the American Dream once and for all. Maybe all those cliches about turning into our parents were accurate. Think Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club vs. Judd Nelson in St. Elmo’s Fire.

Or maybe we aren’t as smart as we like to believe.

I’ve been as guilty as anyone of retaining certain rose-colored memories the ‘80s. A lot of my favorite movies and music came from that decade, and the friends I made during that period are (mostly) still in my life today. But I try to be careful not to let nostalgia cloud the fact that, as a middle-class white teenager, I was largely (at the time) untouched by Reagan’s promotion of supply-side economics, gutting social welfare, and ignoring the AIDS crisis. Generation X may have “survived” drinking from hoses and not wearing bike helmets, but we have a whole new set of problems that T-shirt slogans and self-satisfaction aren’t going to solve.

*There are entire academic treatises arguing about those boundaries, by the way.
**I still remember that Victoria Cooke was Miss August, 1980.
***Guess who -isn’t- mentioned in this article?