I think every generation has myths it tells about itself. This is why older people are often upset that "Boomer" is now so frequently used a pejorative; it was the generation that famously said never to trust anyone over 30, and now they're the people folks under 30 definitively do not trust.
As someone coming right at the end of it, I do feel like Gen X has a lot of myths about itself that it tells and I am never entirely sure if it believes them or not.
As someone born "smack in the middle" of the Generation X cohort, we can't even admit to ourselves how terrible we are as a group. Like how at least half of us were die hard Reaganites before we could even vote.
Where the US (and the world) is today is as much on us as it is on Baby Boomers.
Everyone rebels. If your role models are hippies, you rebel by being conservative.
A weird number of people didn't understand that being a Republican was how poor Alex rebelled against Steven and Elyse. They just saw him as "odd man out" in the Keatons.
I always mention Alex in this GenX context. I had a cohort in HS who were Milton Friedman cultists. Punks goth etc rebelled against hippies in different ways, but we all rebelled against the hippie legacy and a LOT was Jocko Homo
Ferris Bueller, Cameron, and possibly every character in the Breakfast Club (except maybe one) were all likely future Trump voters. And all the straight white characters in every John Hughes movie.
Hughes was pretty notoriously Republican. I guess the question that can't really be answered because he died in '09 is whether he would've drunk the Trump Kool-Aid like his buddy Ben Stein or gone "What the hell is all this Trump shit?!" like his buddy P.J. O'Rourke.
Respectfully, the problem isn't Gen-x. It's the white people in Gen-x (myself included).
The women and people of color were out protesting the first Iraq War while the rest of us were trying to figure shit out.
True. I didn't want to state how racist the white Generation X cohort is AS A GROUP.
If anyone feels personally attacked by this statement, thank you for proving my point.
I grew up in suburban Memphis, TN. Do not even try to tell me that white GenXers aren't racist as hell AS A GROUP.
It's not particularly easy to talk about, to be honest. And I don't see many people talking about us in general?
(Besides that one meme)
I also think there's a division in our generation: some of us are boomer-adjacent, some of us are millennial-adjacent.
No numbers to justify that, to be honest.
Happy to have split from my family's traditional Republican leanings when Reagan was president (thanks, Dead Kennedys, et al). Now 40 some years later, my oldest brother refuses to vote Trump. Thankfully!
Reagan imprinted so hard on gen x baby birds that to overcome it you had to have parents who *hated* him and also watch imports of Spitting Image on HBO or whatever.
Being aware of his nuclear weapons policies also didn't make one a fan.
For a "great" President, Reagan sure spent a lot of time allowing people to die and then threatening to murder the rest of us by accident.
That was the Evangelical Christians. The (Im)moral Majorityed by snake oil salesman Billy Graham convinced him that the queers had it coming.
The people who call in a genocide aren't far off.
It was the Reagans themselves who turned their back on Nancy’s friend Rock Hudson when he called begging them for help
It was very much the administration with Ronald Reagan as figurehead that laughed at the idea of a “gay disease”
Yeah and the Christians were the ones who told them they could score points that way. Sure they chose to believe it but let's not underestimate the extreme damage Christianity has done to the country here.
Never liked him at all, and my opinion was reinforced when I read "The President's Speech" in Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985).
He describes patients in the aphasia ward laughing uproariously at Reagan's delivery and mannerisms because the import of his words was lost...
"There he was, the old Charmer, the Actor, with his practised rhetoric, his histrionisms, his emotional appeal…The President ... was moving them, apparently, mainly to laughter. What could they be thinking? Were they failing to understand him? Or did they, perhaps, understand him all too well?”
Aphasic patients are better able to tell when someone is lying, fearful, or hiding something.
“it was the grimaces, the histrionisms, the false gestures and, above all, the false tones and cadences of the voice, which rang false for these wordless but immensely sensitive patients."
I actively urge non-xers to vote against us regardless of party. the kindest thing that every other generation could do for us is make sure Paul Ryan and Brett Kavanaugh make the high water marks of our generational influence. Please.
People tend to forget that the now lauded great music and art, were written by a fringe of outcasts who were mercilessly mocked. Until they started making money from it, surprising us all. I still remember going to high school with the bullies, none of the absolute shit they do now surprises me.
I recently came across an "underground paper" put out by a group of Republicans in 1991 at my hs; one of the people involved is now an editor for National Review. They all took pseudonyms from Atlas Shrugged and in this particular issue, they advocated for privatizing education. No new ideas ever!
I was born at the very end but was a yr younger than my classmates. My Dad was Rep, everyone I knew was Rep, so knowing nothing, I figured I was too. Idk why but at 17 I picked up “Rogue States” @ B&N. Then Vidal. Then everything I could find from left to right. Books are why I knew better.
reagan v carter was my first election.
Back then, we had ~300,000 MILLIONAIRES in the country, which now number over 22,000,000.
Not to mention the 700 people who own +60% of the wealth today.
*Trickle down* certainly worked the way republicans intended.
I admit to being a conservative in my youth, and a lefty in middle age.
And not a "we need to help people, but let's not go overboard" lefty, a "this industry should be nationalized" lefty.
You're last statement is spot-on. Boomer here. Daughter Gen-X. We get along great. Mostly.
Historical responses fill my head. None of them really matter.
Gen-X isn't as finished as Boomers are. You still have much to contribute. To quote a famous Boomer... "It ain't over till it's over."
I hear boomers blamed for a lot of stuff. Some is valid, some not so much. That particular complaint -- well, when I was a 60's hippie we said the same about our parents (before they gave names to generations).
In my observation, every generations made mistakes. It's kind of odd that I've (cont)
I think it's also because it points out their hypocrisy in blaming everything bad on Millennials like we're not ALSO above 30, have kids, and make up a large portion of the US demos.
