All I can say about this is that I am a Gen X'er.  

kelly 

   Taking Stock of Gen X: It's Fallen Sharply
   
   By Stephen Lynch
   Orange County Register
   Wednesday, April 25, 2001; Page C08
   
   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.
   
   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.
   
   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.
   
   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.
   
   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.
   
   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.
   
   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.
   
   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.
   
   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.
   
   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.
   
                               Generation Hexed
                                       
   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.
   
   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.
   
   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.
   
   "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."
   
   Somewhere, if there is any justice, Paul Hurd is digging into a big
   bowl of shredded "Nation at Risk" reports for breakfast.
   
   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"?
   
   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.
   
   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?"
   
   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.
   
   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.
   
   "Their decade should have been the '80s, but it wasn't," Strauss says.
   "The boomers held on."
   
                                   Cybersunk
                                       
   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.
   
   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.
   
   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?
   
   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.
   
   This would all be easier to take if it weren't partly true.
   
   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.
   
   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.
   
   "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."
   
   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 . . .
   
   " . . . we have to grow up," Egger concedes.
   
                                Generation Next
                                       
   So why the rant?
   
   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.
   
   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.
   
   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.
   
   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.
   
                     © 2001 The Washington Post Company


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