As a man just entering his four score  years on earth, it was fascinating
listening to this long, long, long diatribe about ????  As a child I remember
the boom and bust proceeding 1929.  The long era of recovery, dust bowls.
college grads pumping gas, ostrich like isolation thinking preceding WW II,
Pearl Harbor, (the ending of the great depression), my vain glory as a
military pilot saving the world for ???, Big Bands, swing music and jitter
bugging, the "Big Bang for the Buck" etc. etc. etc.  You have read all about
it in your history books, and from your elders (those over and under 80).
Now, thank God, I cam look back with nostalgia, remembering the best and
dropping the rest.  I am glad I was resilient enough to survive into the 21st
Century.  Hey, I love life, I rejoice in today's marvels, and I salute the
generations to come.  If I had written this in my 20's, on a portable
typewriter, dictionary at hand, (no spell check them), and best of all, who
would have published it.  . Gordon Wahl

Kelly Pierce wrote:

> All I can say about this is that I am a Gen X'er. =20
>
> kelly=20
>
>    Taking Stock of Gen X: It's Fallen Sharply
>   =20
>    By Stephen Lynch
>    Orange County Register
>    Wednesday, April 25, 2001; Page C08
>   =20
>    One recent evening, as I flipped between screaming teens on MTV and a
>    dot-com wake on CNBC, reality smacked me across the face so hard I
>    dropped my latte. My generation, I realized, is so over.
>   =20
>    The death of every e-commerce this and i-content that may signal a
>    recession. But its effect on those of a certain age -- I speak of the
>    quaintly named Generation X -- is a great depression. We already ceded
>    popular culture to the virgin hordes in midriffs. Now that our Net
>    fortunes have a zero gross, never again will anyone pay attention to
>    us. This was our shot, and we blew it.
>   =20
>    Some background: At 28, I am part of a demographic hiccup, 50 million
>    souls born in 1963-81. It was our ill fortune to arrive after the
>    largest testament to American virility on record, the baby boom.
>    Following us are the boomers' kids, who are, if it's possible, even
>    more self-righteous than their parents. Check out a birthrate chart
>    for the 20th century, and we're the trough, trapped between mountains
>    of Debbies and Madisons.
>   =20
>    But it's more than just numbers. To hear the boomers tell it, they
>    invented social reform, rock-and-roll, women's rights, abstract art,
>    the miniseries, leveraged buyouts, yoga, drug use and sex. They're so
>    big and self-centered that every social and political issue orbits
>    around their needs: The boomers are having a midlife crisis, they need
>    a new BMW. The boomers are getting old, they need a new pill for
>    erectile dysfunction. The boomers are feeling nostalgic, let's have
>    another special on the '60s.
>   =20
>    When boomers were soccer moms, soccer moms were the voters politicians
>    wanted. Now that boomers are aging, Social Security is the thing to
>    protect. Looking for easy cash? Try releasing another compilation of
>    the most important band ever -- if you ask boomers, that is -- the
>    Beatles.
>   =20
>    Recently, the boomers invented parenting, and suddenly all those
>    abstract problems like youth crime and teenage pregnancy that we
>    feared in the 1980s, well, they need addressing. After all, it's their
>    kids we're talking about. The only person boomers will give up the
>    cover of Time magazine for is one of their children. Simply put: No
>    other generation matters.
>   =20
>    For one brief, shining moment, however, the trough rose up. In 1991, a
>    man named Douglas Coupland wrote a book called "Generation X: Tales
>    for an Accelerated Culture," and even the boomer editors at Time
>    couldn't ignore it. Then a musician named Kurt Cobain captured the
>    imagination of people my age. He kind of reminded boomers of Hendrix
>    or Morrison -- not as good, of course -- so they gave him some
>    coverage, too. America "discovered" this generation in its midst, like
>    a lost Stone Age tribe.
>   =20
>    Journalists were quick to label this strange species. The "X" in
>    Coupland's book constituted an enigma, an unknown quantity in a
>    demographic equation. Yet movies and magazines knew exactly how to
>    define us: slackers, overgrown adolescents whose impressive intake of
>    caffeine did little to spur our ambition.
>   =20
>    Funny, but no one rushed to correct that stereotype when, four years
>    later, companies founded mainly by people in their twenties and early
>    thirties jump-started the economy and developed a whole new system for
>    communication, education and commerce. We moved from the feature
>    section to the financial pages. Generation X, so long dismissed and
>    dissed, had something to crow about, and not even boomers could deny
>    it -- especially if they bought Yahoo early.
>   =20
>    Which brings me back to the Nasdaq. To you, the dashed hopes of
>    dot-coms means shifting around your 401(k) or losing a favorite Web
>    site. To me, it means the brief decade of Generation X is over
>    (1991-2001, rest in peace). After CNBC leaves us, there's nothing
>    left.
>   =20
>                                Generation Hexed
>                                       =20
>    Sure I'm bitter. And with good reason. Boomers will dismiss this as
>    self-indulgent claptrap, but for its entire history Generation X has
>    gotten the shaft.
>   =20
>    We are latchkey kids, children of divorce, a generation raised in a
>    time of rising crime and a widening gap between rich and poor. Far
>    worse is the belittling we've endured along the way.
>   =20
>    In 1983, when everyone thought Japan was going to buy up America and
>    ship it, in tiny boxes, across the Pacific, the Department of
>    Education published a report called "A Nation at Risk." This was no
>    stale bureaucratic missive -- it was a manifesto. It said, basically,
>    that the children of the '80s were idiots.
>   =20
>    "The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded
>    by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a
>    nation and a people," the report said. Later in the report,
>    educational researcher Paul Hurd concluded that within the context of
>    the modern scientific revolution, "we are raising a new generation of
>    Americans that is scientifically and technologically illiterate."
>   =20
>    Somewhere, if there is any justice, Paul Hurd is digging into a big
>    bowl of shredded "Nation at Risk" reports for breakfast.
>   =20
>    Think things have changed? Right. In 1998, American 12th-graders still
>    ranked 19th out of 21 industrialized countries in mathematics. That's
>    the same position they were in 1983, but would anyone be taken
>    seriously by claiming that the Pokemon preteens are "scientifically
>    and technologically illiterate"?
>   =20
>    No one says kids are stupid anymore. Try telling boomer parents that
>    their children are stricken by a "rising tide of mediocrity." They'll
>    run you over with an SUV.
>   =20
>    And I don't believe it's too great a leap to speculate that, had
>    Columbine happened in 1985, the nation would moan: "What's wrong with
>    kids today, and how can we lock them up?" Now it's: "What's wrong with
>    kids today, and how can we help them?"
>   =20
>    Generation X "grew up during a time of negativism toward children,"
>    says William Strauss, co-author of "13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore,
>    Fail?" He adds that the depiction of kids in popular culture was
>    either as evil ("Rosemary's Baby") or inconvenient ("Kramer vs.
>    Kramer"). As violent crime and drug use skyrocketed (fueled,
>    incidentally, by adults, not teens), the nation kept telling youth
>    that they were the problem.
>   =20
>    Look at it this way: Most generations come of age, culturally at
>    least, in their youth. Yet while Generation X was watching films such
>    as "The Breakfast Club" and listening to Madonna in the '80s, the
>    boomers elbowed them out of the way with "thirtysomething" and "Wall
>    Street." We didn't even get good cartoons.
>   =20
>    "Their decade should have been the '80s, but it wasn't," Strauss says.
>    "The boomers held on."
>   =20
>                                    Cybersunk
>                                       =20
>    The boomers tried holding on during the '90s, too, mostly by brushing
>    off my generation's icons and accomplishments. Cobain was derivative
>    and whiny, they said. The protests in Seattle, against the very real
>    global threats against workers and the environment, didn't matter. We
>    weren't fighting Vietnam or Nixon, after all.
>   =20
>    That the dope-smoking, give-peace-a-chance generation turned into
>    "just say no" preaching suburbanites who are shocked, shocked that
>    anyone would clash with the police is the height of hypocrisy.
>   =20
>    In the April 16 issue of Newsweek, George Will takes aim at the
>    Internet. Oil, he writes, "that was something new, and it led to a lot
>    of new things, including . . . petroleum and vulcanized rubber." The
>    online world hardly stacks up. Yeah, and what about the wheel and
>    fire, Will? You were around for those, too, right?
>   =20
>    The only reason this boomer backlash didn't come sooner is that
>    e-commerce IPOs seemed like a good excuse to cut taxes. With the
>    dot-com crash, boomers are rushing to rewrite the last five years of
>    history as a speculative bubble inflated by arrogant layabouts. We
>    went from slackers to saviors to charlatans.
>   =20
>    This would all be easier to take if it weren't partly true.
>   =20
>    As I mentioned before, we blew it. Perhaps because we were sick of
>    being called "slackers," we overhyped the Internet "revolution." Not
>    only were we founding companies, we were making "old media" obsolete
>    -- and creating new economic models. Baloney. Web sites devoted to
>    Matchbox cars and the ability to buy talking fish online does not a
>    revolution make. This isn't Marx or "The Wealth of Nations." The
>    promise of the age was buried under exaggeration.
>   =20
>    Dan Egger, 27, writes about video games and popular culture for a Web
>    site called Daily Radar. He says one of the main problems is that many
>    Internet sites were developed by Gen X-ers for Gen X-ers. It was a
>    self-referential medium.
>   =20
>    "The Internet is ours -- it's dedicated to all the geeky, weird, goofy
>    stuff that we like," Egger says. "When we're gone, all that will be
>    left is the Internet, to our eternal embarrassment."
>   =20
>    Will fails to note how the Internet fueled the greatest dissemination
>    of knowledge and information since the invention of the printing
>    press. But in his defense, that's easy to miss, when most of the
>    attention is paid to Hot or Not or eToys. If Generation X had spent
>    its time building companies that made money, looking at this new
>    economy realistically, we might have continued as the captains of
>    industry. Instead . . .
>   =20
>    " . . . we have to grow up," Egger concedes.
>   =20
>                                 Generation Next
>                                       =20
>    So why the rant?
>   =20
>    To prevent the whitewash. The decade of Generation X was a significant
>    cultural period, and members of my generation are still relevant,
>    despite the best effort of boomers and Gen Y -- there, I said it -- to
>    write us off as a mistake. Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins were better
>    than any of that rap-rock Limp Bizkit churns out. The Beatles, to risk
>    the wrath of my elders, were not the end-all, be-all. And don't even
>    get me started on the Backstreet Boys. The best musicians out there
>    today -- from Radiohead to Moby -- are all Gen X-ers.
>   =20
>    Authors from my generation include David Foster Wallace, Michael
>    Chabon and the offbeat ramblings of the staffs of the magazines Might
>    and McSweeney's. We produced edgy entertainment such as "Pulp Fiction"
>    and "The Matrix." And I'll take the sarcastic, sardonic cynicism that
>    characterizes people my age over the sappy earnestness of either the
>    hippies or their kids any day.
>   =20
>    But the Internet, the cause of our glory and our humbling, will remain
>    our finest legacy. Despite the dismissing of commentators and our own
>    failings, the world really is shrinking -- and changing -- because of
>    these wired networks. Knowledge is truly at our fingertips. Creativity
>    has a new outlet. When it all takes off again, watch the echo boom try
>    to take all the credit.
>   =20
>    Through demographic chance, Generation X will spend most of its life
>    disenfranchised. At least now, however, it can point to a decade and
>    say, "We did that, and, no matter what you say, it was good." Not bad
>    for scientifically and technologically illiterate slackers.
>   =20
>                      =A9 2001 The Washington Post Company
>
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