Something I had to write for class...
After perusing my old stories and poetry, I realized that most of my work is of a highly personal nature. I’ve been a major proponent of journaling for most of my life, and I am always pushing friends and family to use writing as a tool for solving their problems, calming their fears, and when facing obstacles or moral dilemmas. However, I have been a bit lackadaisical in such practices lately. Therefore, instead of compiling a series of snippets and personal bests in an effort to present you with my thoughts and feelings regarding my generation, I decided to write something new that contains the information about which I feel most passionate. That being stated, I must add that it is impossible to disclose my feelings toward the idea of being of a species known as “Generation X” without reflecting somewhat on a variety of other aspects born from the world’s twentieth century.
I was reared in a staunchly conservative, multi-generational family. Of course, we weren’t like the Ewings of Dallas, although the previous sentence may have that tone. We never had our Miss Ellie living in the same house with our Bobby and Pam, JR and Sue Ellen (although I did have an aunt who got drunk about once a year and fell down the stairs). Instead, I was imbued with reverence and respect for the men and women who paved the way for me, and my grandparents, great aunts and uncles were all regular and repeated fixtures in my life. From birth, I was surrounded by strong personalities and people who had seen the best and the worst that the eighty years before my birth had to offer.
Given the fact that I arrived on the tail-end of the Gen X-ers coupled with my birth order status as the youngest of three children, each evenly spaced by five years, it would be most of my childhood and adolescence before I could find a zone of comfort. For most of my life, I was a dreamer, mostly because the rich fantasy land I so easily escaped to was one hundred times better than the reality of my early years. I suppose I can give my gratitude (or blame) to the media for the list of obsessive, irrational fears that would plague me well into my adulthood.
Prior to the onset of adolescence, I watched a network movie-of-the-week called The Day After, which detailed the chilling events of a nuclear attack on the United States (at the time, a very real possibility) and the disturbing results such an event had on the characters. Following the program, I remember the adults discussing the show and mentioning our close proximity to Barksdale Air Force Base and how we would be near the top of the list for such an attack were it ever to occur. I was terrified. For years following, every time a plane flew low enough for me to hear, I was sure it was a missile arriving to irradiate us all.
My childhood was also a period in which sensational television was born, and future talk-show pirate, Geraldo Rivera, was one of its sires. I remember Al Capone’s vault being unveiled, the specials about the most notorious murder sprees in history (a future trip to southern California was ruined with my speculations of certainty that Charles Manson and his followers would escape prison and come after me), and the Rivera special on the prevalence of devil worship in America. Shortly after viewing the program, Halloween arrived, and the local news broadcast that a threat had been called in that a blond-haired, blue-eyed child would be abducted that night for ritualistic purposes. I met the description, and trick-or-treating was ruined for my youth.
Finally, being in an area I would later learn was one of the first major test markets for cable television (Shreveport? Seriously?!), we were a family with thirty channels before most of the rest of the nation had much more than ABC, NBC, and CBS (Fox was not yet heard of). Along with MTV that actually showed videos and HBO that showed movies all day, we also had news that aired on multiple stations on a regular basis. It was the early 1980s and national reports were flooding the screen with footage of men and women who were being stricken with a rapidly spreading, as-yet-unnamed disease. Scenes aired of patients painfully wasting away in their hospital beds, but the aspect that stood out to me at my age was what I perceived as bruises all over their faces and their extremities (I now know these were actually lesions). Young and impressionable, ample time would dissolve into summer, and I remember the disease finally being given a name by the news networks, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, and the surgeon general telling the nation that the disease was transmitted to people via blood (the aspect of sexual relativity, IV drug use, and blood transfusions had yet to be stressed). Brief speculation aired that if it was carried in blood, then perhaps mosquitoes could infect people. I remember being sick with worry every time I came home with bug bites and saw even the hint of a bruise on my shins from rolling around in the grass outside. It was not until much later, well into my teen years, that watchdog groups would began to push for parents to talk to their children about the disturbing imagery in prime time television. However, for me, it wasn’t sexually explicit material or graphic violence that had a profound effect on my childhood. It was the news and its projections of the turbulently changing reality. I learned to worry about adult matters at far too early an age, and I believe that I was robbed of many aspects of the innocence of childhood, the childhood I’d heard stories about from my sister (the oldest of the three of us), my parents’ childhoods, and their parents before them. I could see that life was clearly different, and I was a bit jealous.
After high school, I was determined to write. Up to that point, I had taken all the necessary and required paths, played along by the rules that had been set, made the grades, joined the clubs, excelled, but all I really ever wanted to do with my life was to be a writer. Being the baby in a long line of conservatives, my wish was not to be granted – at least, not in the way I had always envisioned.
I went to college. I majored in Public Relations, then Psychology, then English. I began taking upper level classes in which I read Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Kate Chopin, and I continued to pester my father with my dreams of working as a novelist. At the turn of the century, I turned twenty-one, bugged my dad one more time, and I was suddenly riddled with shock. He gave in. I had the spring and the summer to leave school. I was told that I could write, see how things worked, and if I hadn’t published or at least completed a substantial amount by fall, I was to be back in school. The next two months were blissful. Then, the unthinkable. An early morning phone call. An urgent message to come home. My father died ten days later.
The loss of a parent is a major stressor to anyone. Suddenly, at age twenty-one, just as I had begun to realize my dreams and achieve my goals, I was told that it was time to grow up, go back to school, get a job, marry, have 2.5 children, and build up a 401K. I decided to do the opposite.
A discussion of all that occurred throughout the ensuing five years is something that could occupy a work the size of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Suffice to say that I tasted every forbidden fruit from the tree (and some that had already fallen to the ground and begun to rot) in the garden of nocturnal delights. It wasn’t until the age of twenty-six that I finally took my family’s advice. I decided to grow up, get a job, go back to school, eventually settle down to marry, maybe adopt some kids, and build up that 401K (the latter three items on the list, beginning with the whole marriage deal, have yet to come to fruition). Despite my determination and dedicated work ethics, each and every step felt like five miles up a steep hill with six feet of snow (barefoot, of course). However, when my ten year high school reunion arrived, I saw for the first time that I was not the only one who had spent several years lost, but I was one of the few who had come to the other side. Many times, I speculate that I was structured for my struggles by the unintentional efforts of my parents and grandparents and great aunts and uncles. In trying to make my future easier, they had raised me without the necessary wings to soar.
My parents were baby boomers, members of the biggest population explosion we know from modern times. My grandparents were the patriots of our world’s most massive wars. My great uncles and aunts were children of the depression. Just as my grandfather encouraged my father to enlist and serve in the Vietnam Conflict because that was his “duty to his country,” my grandfather had been taught by his parents to “use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.” My parents eventually met and settled down, had a family, lost their idealistic notions of flower power, and struggled to raise us, their children, so that we would never face the struggles of their youth, nor of their parents’ youths, nor of anyone who had come before.
We were sent to the best schools, sheltered from the horrors that aired on the nightly news, urged to play fair, study hard, make good grades, go to college, and do things the way that they had done them. Unfortunately, the world in the days of the Generation X childhood and adolescence was different. It was suddenly a world of mass shootings in public schools that required security guards and metal detectors at the doors of our schools. It was a world of over-the-counter medications tainted with poison, which led to tamper-proof packaging and childproof caps. It was a world of danger and bewilderment, a world our parents had never known. In their efforts to make our lives as simple as possible, they had forgotten to teach us the basic survival and life skills that they had known, the skills they were taught by the people who had been taught by the people who had needed to use them on a daily basis. I don’t blame my parents. In fact, I’m grateful to have experienced everything that has shaped me into the man I am today.
However, I often look around at my generational cohorts, my equivalents, the bad apples that spoil our bunch, and I am disgusted. I have associates who are currently working on their second divorce and others who are working on their second jail sentence. I see an ocean of their children who are now being raised to call their grandparents “Mom” and “Dad” because they refuse to render responsible care. I see apathy and disdain, hands out demanding more, and a million lost souls with whom I once played He-Man and watched Scooby-Doo and rode bikes and spent the night and shared my dreams and hopes for such a bright future. It reminds me of something I heard in high school, we were the first generation had been told that we would not do as well as our parents. Instead of fighting to prove that idea wrong, here we are meeting and surpassing that prediction in record-setting time.
Maybe I see sides of my generation that are specific only to my life and my world, but I bet a lot of other 1979-ers see things the same way. Maybe I’m able to write this and see this and analyze this and, ultimately, accept this because I woke up from the possibility of a similar fate. Regardless, maybe because of the way the world turns, but more likely maybe because of my own perception of it, I choose to take my parents’ advice and to take things even further. I believe I can have the job and the spouse and the kids and the money and still realize every other dream I dreamt, every wish I wished, every hope I hoped.
In a way, I had to X myself from the suppositions and predictions for the fate of Generation X in order to be a bigger and better part of what will be the generation of next…
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