Generation X

They told us we were special, but not as special as they were.

This was after our parents told us we could have the world, but forgot to mention we'd have to first delouse it from the 60's.

This time of year brings a fresh crop of interns in at work.  Along with these gogetters, some major work reorganization means there is some evaluation of what new work spaces will look like.  In their infinite wisdom, the people leading this effort took it on themselves to ask younger Gen Y how they thought they would work and what their careers would be like.  If someone had done that to me in the 80's, I would have been very wrong, and thankfully.
What the generation that gave us Justin Bieber thinks is not only self-serving, but simple-minded and contains a lack of awareness of what 10 years of a less-than-ideal economy has created; a generation that has not had a real job.  I say that with full acknowledgement of the horrors of Tiffany and New Kids on the Block and yes, we can always blame Bieber on the Canadians.

I don't really believe that generations exist.  Since children are born every year, there is a broad continuum, not discrete groups.  But, I'm smack dab in the middle of Generation X and fit more of the stereotype than I care to admit.  The Lost Generation.

My parents were divorced and I came home with my siblings to an empty house.  We were the latch-key kids.  Actually, I rarely came home as I was usually working; a fat kid washing dishes at a bakery.  The jokes are too easy.

Our parents gave us Ronald Reagan.  We liked him if our parents did.  He broke communism.  He bankrupt communism first, and almost ourselves in the process.  The terrible side effects to the end of Gorbachev was the loss of a common enemy.  No longer was the Soviet Union the acceptable enemy in every movie.  We had to search for new enemies, but none worked as well.  While the actual end of the Soviet Union didn't happen until I was in College, prescient people saw that walloping an aging dog with a piece of an iron curtain wasn't going to work for much longer.  Red Dawn tried to use the Cubans and Nicaraguans as the enemy - it didn't matter that it didn't work.  We were raised on the threat of nuclear annihilation and we needed an enemy.  If education didn't save us, our desks would as we drilled on the art of Duck and Cover.
In 1986 Rutger Hauer went head to head against Gene Simmons using Arabs as the enemy.  An enemy without a state isn't quite as easy to rally behind - or without a state that political sensitivities will allow.
Thankfully Indiana Jones continued to chase the Nazis.

Our parents gave us the internet, but only after they couldn't figure out what to do with it.  We weren't sure either, but were not saddled with the thought of the internet only being a different form of print.  Smart people thought to create web pages devoted to scientific experiments with Twinkies.  Our parents tried to take that away.
We all started mass emailing jokes and sometimes pornography - the first social network.  This was while Mark Zuckerberg was still just another dorky middle school kid.
We used Usenet to do inappropriate things (and sometimes learn stuff too).  Even long after Usenet has been supplanted by more advanced web-based features, school and corporate filters never stopped it since they didn't understand it.  Like holding on to a cherished childhood memento, I still have the .exe file to install Forte Free Agent.

We were the last generation to have real winners or losers.  All trophies were not almost the same.  Even the person who was judged to have played best at the piano recital got a larger cheap metal head of Beethoven; the rest of us got cheap plastic heads of some guy named Brahms.  The winners of the soccer tournament got a trophy, the rest of us got soggy orange slices from reused plastic bags out of a cooler.

We were the first kids who were taught that cigarettes would kill us from day one, but lots of us tried them.  We second-hand smoked packs of cigarettes anyway, before anybody knew what that was.  Our teachers obviously didn't think that much of our intelligence as they snuck down to the boiler room to smoke during recess.

We were all moved behind the barricades for the fireworks.  What our parents refused to believe was that it was boring back there and the Crystal Flash gas station sold fireworks to anyone.  Even better fireworks could be bought from the older son of the junior high art teacher.  Never, has the rare tip from delivering newspapers been so important as when roman candles or enormous strings of lady finger fire crackers can be purchased singly.

We went to arcades because they were so much better than the Intellivision or Atari that some of our friends had.  For a few quarters, we could entertain ourselves on Spy Hunter or a vector-based Star Wars.  If anybody was there with money to burn, we could watch them play Dragon's Lair; but the two dollars in quarters was too much for most of us to pay for three quick deaths.  "Drink Me" was the only level that was passable to a neophyte.

Riding bikes without a helmet is now taboo.  Kids in a car without car seats (not to mention seat belts) is illegal; very few kids born today will know the joy or riding cross-country in the back of a station wagon or sleeping on the floor of a blue VW microbus (yeah - that was us).  On second thought, that would only have been joy if the people in charge could have been a little more civil.  Sun-tan oil probably still exists, but SPF5 is seen as risky now as opposed to being 80's overcautious.

Parachute pants are long gone (are they?) and the last Space Shuttle flight is grounded long after Challenger killed Christa McAuliffe.  Crockett and Tubbs are vague memories while Sonny (the Congressman) is dead.

The hangover form the 80s is about over now, although I'm not sure I'll ever be able to smell peach schnapps again without shuddering a little.  The Brat Pack are nearing the half-century mark.  The black white guy that gave us Thriller turned into a nut-job, a drug addict, and is now dead.

I guess the crowd that grew up not knowing a world without email addresses, and not knowing a "portable" phone that weighed several pounds and costs dollars per minute to use might have something important to say.  Maybe.  But for a while, Generation X, raised independent to a fault will continue to do what needs to be done.

You talk like a Rosicrucian, who will love nothing but a sylph, who does not believe in the existence of a sylph, and who yet quarrels with the whole universe for not containing a sylph. - Peacock, Nightmare Abbey