Most of us were small children in the 1970s. Hence, we did not really become socially aware until the 80s. The Cold War was still going strong then, and we grew up under a cloud of fear -- fear of nuclear war. Some of us learned from our parents about the probable effects of nuclear war -- mass destruction, lasting radiation -- and the images of horror and death haunted us for years, even though the bomb never actually fell. We were, after all, only children. In was a dangerous world, we already knew, for our parents warned us about kidnappers and child molesters (bogeymen who were all too real), and we had begun to hear about drugs and urban violence, even those of us who did not live in the city. The atomic bomb was one more fear among many, but one we were powerless to avoid.
This, I suppose, explains why today's fears of terrorism are such a mystery to me. I remember the threat of the Cold War -- one strategic nuclear exchange, and civilization would be finished. Whereas in the post-9/11 world, terrorist attacks happen in defined places, and do limited damage within those places. My odds of being in the wrong place at the wrong time are vanishingly small. One atomic bomb in Hiroshima killed 90,000 people; one more in Nagasaki killed 73,000 more. The 9/11 attacks killed a total of 3,000. Do the math: it would take 30 9/11s to equal Hiroshima, and 24 more to equal Nagasaki. The defining moment in the life of Generation Y looks pretty paltry to this Gen-Xer. So please forgive me if I fail to see what you young folks are so scared of.
Yet inside this cloud was an illusory refuge. The 80s were an age of materialism and self-indulgence, and those of us whose parents could afford it, passed the wealth down to us. For us, a TV was not enough; we had to have video games and personal computers. Cartoon drawings and television programs showed children with computers in their bedrooms, and no one thought that odd -- many of our parents did not know how to use such machines anyway. Even when we turned off our computers and video game systems, there were any number of elaborate toys and gizmos for us. And even kids recieving government assistance, still managed to wear designer labels to school.
For awhile, we bought into it, those of us in more prosperous families accumulating as much of this stuff as we could, those in less prosperous families burning with jealousy because we wanted those things, too. But as the 80s gave way to the 90s, and one by one we became adults, some of us began to realize something: it was no good.
All this brings me to the reason I accept the name Generation X as appropriate for us. In school, we studied algebra. Algebraic equations differ from arithmetic problems in that they include unknown quantities designated by letters -- most commonly, the letter x. So, in an algebra assignment, one might see the equation, 2x=(4-x)+6, with the instruction to "solve for x." After working with the problem -- sometimes a short process, sometimes more lengthy -- one hopes eventually to be able to say, "x=__," with some definite number in the blank. When one can say what x equals, one has the answer.
So it is with my generation, Generation X. It has taken us time and effort to fugure out who we, the unknown quantity, are. Some of us are still working on it. It is this quest which has enabled us to take our place in the world. Most of us who grew up with fear are not crippled by it. Most of those who grew up abused are not crippled by it. Although we grew up without the Internet, we saw enough new technologies invented in our early years that we quickly grasped the Internet when it came. In solving for x, most of us find we have built lives -- we have goals, dreams, careers, values, toward which we are working and striving. Our parents' generation proved in the 60s that idealistic dreams of what the world ought to be will not come to pass -- especially if the idealists throw their energies away on drugs. The world as we see it, and hope to see it, may not match what our elders see, and hope to see; but we have come to the worldview which follows from our experiences, the same process by which our elders came to theirs. It is the only relevant worldview for us. The next generation has again grown up in a different world than we -- one marked by ever more spectacular violence, and with the technologies we saw invented already in place. They have been called Generation Y; and I leave it to them to define what that name means to them.
As for me, I wear the label of Generation X without reservation.
