The Three Pillars of X

It wasn't drinking from a garden hose that made Gen X what it is.

Okay, listen up.

As a duely appointed representative of Gen X, I think some of the people who are responding to the whole “Let’s get Gen Xers into the generation war” meme fest are in need of a reality check. And this goes to my fellow Gen-Xers piling on that bandwagon as well.

An idyllic view of being an X-er child. It’s not false. It’s just not the whole truth.

Being born on and around 1970, I have some things to clear up. As to my bonafides, I’m a bit of an odd duck even for GenX. My birthparents were boomers. Fresh into college and put me up for adoption because “We can’t give him the life he deserves” and so were involved in finding my adoptive parents who are of the Silent Generation. So I’m an X-er raised by pre-Boomers. And they were right out of central casting in so many ways. June and Ward Cleaver level with a side of Virginia Slims and latchkeys to boot. Mom is a stone second wave feminist and I have no complaints. I have zero bad things to say about my adoptive parents and my Boomer birth parents did what they thought was right. Even with their solid anchoring, and my “Greatest Generation” grandparents and even great-grandparents had only so much they could do to keep me from being consumed with the zeitgeist of X.

There are three basic attitudes an X-er has ingrained into them directly or indirectly: Rejection, Rebellion and Apathy.

Rejection: As a whole, the Boomers didn’t want children. As a generation they wanted to be forever teenagers, just with sex, money, drugs and rock and roll. Babies screwed that up. This is a broad generalization, but if you pay attention to all the entertainment they produced, it was all “me me me” which was another name for the Boomers. The “ME” generation. Nobody get in the way of their good time, and their X-er babies sure bummed out a good time.

The big exception would be those who served in Vietnam. They became a splinter of the Boomer generation that followed more the same lessons of the Silent or Greatest generation because they saw horror close up and it scarred them in many other ways that made the situation worse. They couldn’t talk about things save to those who were there, and they suffered the same rejection in a manner that we X-ers did.

People may say “but the Boomers didn’t have that many kids”. This is true. Not as many kids were born. Have you considered why? Two things happened at the start of Gen X: Birth Control and legalized abortion. How better to reject a generation than to abort it, or prevent it from being born? Subconsciously, somehow, we X-ers picked up on that. It wasn’t just in how the Boomers were quick to push us off on the newly created daycare system, grandparents or other family members to pursue their career priorities on their way to transforming from Hippies to Yuppies. Nowadays, all the generations suffer through this abomination of daycare, but as it started to become normalized, this was a severe generational trauma. We very much got the idea “Mommie and Daddy don’t want us”. This started that much vaunted “feral” streak so many focus on without understanding why.

Furthermore, Boomers, as the X-ers grew up, started being ashamed of their children and had been trying to statistically write us out of existence. Nothing like retrenching the rejection trauma. It’s an attitude that was picked up by the Millennials and only just now is starting to back down because Boomers who resented their children’s existence, and STILL see themselves as the eternal teenage Wonder Years kids are losing control thanks to the Grim Reaper. (And the millennials aren’t competent or too interested in keeping it up. X-ers are exhausting).

The above meme also proves why I call BS on any modern way of determining generations. Everyone’s got a friggen agenda to pimp.

All this leads us into our next pillar:

Rebellion: Some may claim the rebellion came first. I say no. Rebellion has to have a cause. Already wounded from being rejected by our parents and their society (which BTW was in no great shape thanks the the Boomers own rebellion against their conformist Silent Generation parents, and calling BS on their socially conformist construct and superiority complex after winning WW2 (Nah, there are no innocents here. Just comparatively better or worse generations than others. To an X-er nobody’s deliberately worse than their Boomer parents. Not even their halfwitted snowflake Millennial children who never met an experience that didn’t traumatize them. A sin for which we X-ers are gonna have to answer for soon enough.)

So in a societal game of “Monkey See, Monkey Do”, X-ers took up the flag of rebellion and turned the speartip on top of the flagpole on their parents (just like every generation does to some degree or another) and charged. The difference was, we already believed in our generational hearts that our parents hated us, and even went so far as to kill us before birth as to keep the delusion of being forever young in their brains. (Kids, what a drag.) We went even farther into rebellion, not only at large like the Boomers did toward the Silent Gen’s social convetion, but sometimes personally at our own parents. We trashed what they called beautiful. Criticized in song and word what they considered art. Called their truths lies. Turned everything upside down on them, just as they had done to the Silent Generation, but we didn’t pull back. We made sure the hatred they hid in their hearts was open in ours right back at them, verbally

We made the Boomers crazy with what to do about us. Because they rejected and abandoned their spawn, forcing the feral children learned to survive without safe and controlled structures. The same structures that Boomers didn’t want constraining them and now were demanding their children obey. Stiff little fingers in the air was all they got as we often times willingly left the home because if they couldn’t find you, they couldn’t boss you around. Staying out till the streetlights came on was a blessing in disguise.

We had to create for ourselves a new society where kids enforced their own laws on how to behave with one another. That’s why snitches got stitches. Loyalty was a high virtue. The fastest way to stop a problem was through violence. And if you did get beat up, you didn’t run to your parents, because then they’d make it worse. So check your mouth before you started popping off and meaning it. You might get yourself in a “bike accident”. At least that’s what you’d tell your parents when you came home bloody and bruised.

An oustanding explanation of feral 80’s conflict and hiding the truth from Boomer parents

By the time we became teens in the 80’s the X-er youth culture had mellowed some. The high adventure of the 70’s for pre-teen kids had mellowed out and many of us discovered the mall. With our latchkey freedom, we learned more subtle ways to fight and have fun. We’d developed many of our cliques and “gangs”. The Mall offered us the perfect hangout. Some of us had money, a very few of us had cars we bought from our after-school jobs, and we went there to hang out with our friends in a place where we could pretend to play grownups. Among the stores and the neon signs of the mall, we’d hang, play videogames at the arcade, our new shiny gladiatorial pits, instead of dirt fights at the sandpile, back alleys or vacant field. (You threw dirt clods because you really didn’t want to hurt someone bad, most times and it looked cooler) But there the rebellion got tempered into low key hijinks with actual adults. Hassling store clerks and security guards was fun for many of us, and they were boomers who were limited in the public space on what they could do to retaliate.

But when overtures of “social responsibility” and getting involved came around because it was the mature and morally right thing to do, our rebellion showed fangs. The Boomers who crapped all over moral and social responsibility of their Silent Gen parents demanded we do what they refused. Our response was venomous. Their hypocrisy may as well have been lit up like the Las Vegas strip. They criticized our work ethic, which I must agree at that time was pretty garbage, but let’s face it, nowadays, you Millennials and Zoomers put us to SHAME in how little work ethic you have. Most of us grew out of it. We had to because the safety nets of today didn’t exist then. You took that shitty job because it was that or be homeless. Nowadays…geez… you kids are in a bad spot because Boomers and our X-er apathy took away the FAFO life consequences to make you grow up, and filled those places with worthless participation trophies.

So yes, just like the Boomers hated the hypocrisy of their parents, we’d tell them to their face just the same way, or we’d fall into the third pillar:

Apathy: Not all X-ers could rebel and walk away from the snares of our Boomer parents. Many of us had lots of Silent Generation backing, doing the parenting our parents were too incompetent or disinterested in giving. And there was no backtalking Gramma and Grampa who refined the FAFO principles of life in us. They were the ones who often made life bearable for many X-er kids. They had already gone through this with their Boomer children and our hatred was not pointed at them. But they also took no crap from us if we dared cork it out. They won WW2 for a reason and weren’t gonna lose to us. They’d help, but they were gonna teach us lessons on how to be better and refine our feral self teaching into something better. That is, if you had good grandparents. Not all of us got them. (I’m one of the lucky ones).

When you had no ability, failed at, or lacked the mentality to fight, you went dead inside. You became the epitome of passive resistence. No one could motivate you. Not pain, not deprivation, nothing. You took it like a dying horse, and you kept taking it till your afflictor you suffered got tired, bored and finally gave up. That is the last rung of rebellion, and Xers got good at that, too. Those who fought and kept losing resorted to this in the end. They’d live in a squallor of their own making to prove a point. They let themselves get thrown out of the house before they’d obey the rules their Boomers laid down on them. Friends became their family, and they’d crash with whomever would let them. And this submissive rebellion became their existence.

The apathetic X-er also was the most savage in their verbal attacks. After all they were in pain and so it was time to share the wealth. They’d say the most hurtful things, driving people away with just their voice. Through guilt, truth, expressed hatred, often filled to the brim with cussing, they would make you question your choice to interacting with them. These apathetic X-ers were rattlesnakes, and their warning was also not without a real thread behind it.

The danger of apathy to all those around the X-er employing this tactic was they could snap and resort instantly to extreme violence including bloodshed. When someone was pushed so hard that they no longer felt they had anything left to lose, or any other outcome, including death itself, they would strike back and it very often did not recognize innocent bystanders. This extreme response didn’t happen often, but often enough. Sometimes that teen boy discovered they were stronger than the old man abusing them and let out the rage that had long been bottled inside them. Tamped down by fear.

Extreme cases you’d see in the news. There were also those kids that were in your school would suddenly vanish, only to be whispered about that they were at the local psychiatric hospital or juvie hall. I personally knew more than one that had that happen. And that oppressor might have been a parent, a relation, an older sibling even. It could also be a teacher or principle or boss.

In the end, this is what created the stereotype you see of X-ers just wanting to be left alone. They were the first thrown away generation. Unwanted by their parents, learned to navigate their own way through the world, and would rather be left the hell alone. When they started having the Millennials, a new level of conflict began that most of you fighting the “Ok Boomer” war miss. We never learned to parent. It meant you Millennials were screwed to your own devices… except for your grandparents. That’s right. More than Gen X, Millennials were willingly and happily raised by their Boomer grandparents, and they were given all the things that should have been done to the X-ers. It’s part of why we resent you little MFers. Your grandparents gave you the life we should have had, but the Boomers were too busy making money to give us the time of day. And we, being apathetic, unqualified parents… not to mention only a fraction of the size of the generation we should have been, got steamrolled by the Boomers for their grandchildren to spoil rotten. (and yes, you are spoiled, weak and rotten). This has bred a catastrophic level of resentment from us toward both you and our parents.

What’s weird is you Millennials have become a perverse hybrid of the Boomers. It’s probably why you hate on them so much and forget us X-ers most times. We got body checked into the penalty box by Boomer power, and we were so apathetic we didn’t fight back for you. We were of the mindset that the penalty box is peaceful and nobodys asking anything of us so we stayed put. The last thing you want is for us to come out now because we’re ready to go full goon on everyone. Just push us enough.

Many X-ers see their children as a lost cause and are grinning like the angel of death at the Boomers as the world of lies and corruption begins falling down. Many of us have been waiting for this day since the 1980’s when we were sure that some dumb bastard was going to push the button and wipe us out with nuclear fire. Now that the current admin is apparently all ready to do this and send the world down the nuclear toilet in order to save their old paradigm, most X-ers are quietly prepping to live like Mad Max if we need to. We’ve seen the movies and know most of us won’t survive. But those of us who do will be Immortan ‘freakin’ Joe in the remains and the last chance of humanity to survive.

Do not be mediocre

So the rebellious apathetic rejects also have a suicide pact attitude, determine to take the bullet to the head and come out on top. Do you really want that level of crazy in the mix? The ones who would happily tear down all their parents (and ingrate children’s) accomplishments and knock us back to the year 1880 just to get the last word? We’re here. We’re willing. Just try us.

On the other hand, even though we were abject failures as parents. Refusing to pass on most of our wisdom, we’ve been finding some of the later generations are seeking us out now, in a peaceful, non threatening way to learn the skills we had learned. That our grandparents had instilled in us, those of us who were fortunate enough to have them. To those we are teaching the values of in person social interaction and the rejection of the online. To value the real over the artificial. Those Millennials, Zoomers and now Alphas are being up to succeed in the coming dark age (don’t doubt me on this. The future ain’t shiny, prosperous and chrome). It’s going to be dark, cold and deadly very soon as we descend into the decaying and failing plans of what the Boomers, and their sycophants who followed them, hath wrought.

In conclusion, these are the foundational pillars that created Gen X. This is why we’re dangerous as a generation. We’re just as unhappy about it as the rest of you, but the last thing you want to do is to find us and pester us. We don’t care about your feelings. We have bigger problems to worry about, and if you decide you want to rise to that level of irritation, you will be dealt with swiftly and visciously as to restore the fragile self-created peace and order we’ve made for ourselves and small pool of like-minded loved ones. Until then, treat us like meeting a dangerous animal in the wild. Observe at a safe distance, and make no sudden movements.

So, for now, vaya con Dios.