A call to my generation

This past weekend was my birthday. I was born in 1969, the early cohort of Generation X. 

Until a few years ago—specifically ten years ago—I gloried in my generation. The culture in which we live was created by us. Hip hop. Electronica. The internet. We popularized them and made them conquer the world. Forget the Baby Boom: we were the generation of the future. We created the future. We watched Star Trek and imagined a future in the stars. 

My generation had a freedom which earlier generations, and the succeeding ones, could not have imagined. We were the latch-key generation. Our parents were working, and we were on our own. We were so feral that at 10pm, local TV stations would come on with announcements asking our parents if they knew where we were. 

When I turned 14, my parents let me loose. Within limits, of course; we were an immigrant family, not an American family, so I was more cosseted than Americans. But summer days I would spend all day outside of the house, either with my friends on the block, or on my own, exploring the city, visiting book stores, museums, or just walking down streets, soaking up New York.

We were a skeptical generation. We knew that what our parents had was not what we would have. Well, some of us. I was fortunate; as a child of immigrants, family was everything. I never knew anything but love. Too many of my generation didn't, if the memoirs and polling are to be believed. But still, it was a glorious time to be alive. We were knew, we were street smart, we knew what was what, and we lived in those contradictions. Skepticism, healthy skepticism, is the mark of a developed mind. Don't take anything at face value. Question everything, demand proof, demand answers, draw your own conclusions. But don't lose that wonder of the world. Don't lose the wonder of walking across the George Washington Bridge, suspended over the Hudson River, marveling at this construction, marveling at creation and what humanity can do. Again, we grew up with Star Trek and Star Wars. Our eyes were aimed at the future. We knew it would be beautiful.

But there was always a darkness.

We grew up in the last, fitful irruption of the Cold War. We grew up with Ronald Reagan, the ultimate Cold Warrior, pushing the contest with the Soviet Union to its breaking point. We grew up with books and movies and television programs about nuclear annihilation. We grew up with a sick feeling that we might not see adulthood due to the choices of those older than us. That we would never get to see that glorious future of our science fiction dreams. That the missiles would fly, and we would be incinerated. Those who came after us cannot at all imagine the existential dread with which we lived. In 8th grade, we spent two days discussing The Day After, the ABC miniseries depicting a nuclear war. This was no joke. While we lived our lives, we had the knowledge that we would never get to live those lives.

It was inevitable that this would engender pathology. How can you grow up under a nuclear cloud and not be affected? Again, those of you younger than me didn't experience this. Even climate change doesn't measure up to the nuclear dread, especially since human ingenuity and technology promise to attenuate the worst possibilities of the climate crisis. We had no such salve. We had to hope that the old men in Washington and Moscow wouldn't push the button. We had a senile president—sound familiar?—who in a hot mic before his weekly radio address joked: "I have just signed legislation outlawing Russia. The bombing begins in five minutes." Har har. Human extinction as a political jape.

It was a constant tension between the fun we experienced in our lives, and the suspicion that we would not live much longer. I honestly thought I wouldn't live past thirty. Everything was fragile, balanced on the edge of a chasm.

Now Gen-X is the Trumpiest generation. We have devolved from healthy skepticism to a jaundiced cynicism. We have gone from laughing in the face of annihilation to quivering in fear and putting our fates in the hands of tyrants. We were the first generation of the internet, and we have turned it into a means of surveillance and dystopia. Remember that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are of our generation. 

I have no explanation for this. I have no idea why we went so far astray. But it hurts my soul. We were supposed to be the chosen ones. The ones who would take up from Boomers and reject their pieties. (Remember, Boomers went from Yippies to Yuppies and Reagan.) We were supposed to reject that trajectory and abjure all oppressive hierarchies. Instead we have embraced those hierarchies, giving power to the absolutely worst right-wing elements, not only in the US but all over the West. 

I am Gen-X. For me that means that I look at everything through the lens of skepticism. But I don't reject anything until I've examined it. I don't give in to that cheap cynicism which masquerades as wisdom. Cynicism isn't wisdom. It is a surrender to hopelessness. And my life history rejects hopelessness. I have overcome a stutter to work with the public. I have overcome selfishness to embrace a blessed life with my wife. I am the master of my own fate, not beholden to the fears which have been aimed at me.

This is a call to my generation. This is a call to remember our skeptical optimism. This is a call to reject our jaundiced cynicism. We have helped turn this world into the state in which we find it: pathological, lacking in empathy, a world of all against all. Now it is our work to rectify that crime. To save a world which too many of us have rejected. To turn that original skepticism back to the troubles of today: Not with an eye to cast anathema, but to find solutions. We have to reclaim what we once were: happy in the face of adversity, self-reliant but helping those around us. We simply have to be better than we are now. We still have much to offer this world, if we rouse ourselves out of our despond.