Hey, wait, I got a new complaint

Gen X, what are we even doing here?

So the midterms happened and it wasn’t the merciless ass beating Democrats were warned for months was going to happen. It wasn’t a sweeping victory on our part either, but I’ll certainly take any crumb of hope that sanity still prevails in this country. Beyond how it’s possible that (a) Marjorie Taylor-Greene managed to retain her spot in Congress, and (b) the race between Raphael Warnock and Herschel “Father of the Year” Walker requires a recount, much of the post-election discussion has been focused on younger voters turning out in record numbers and voting predominantly for Democratic candidates.

In fact, it’s safe to say that if it weren’t for the young folks, we’d be facing a Congressional majority of lunatics, traitors and people who want to see to it that Grammy and Grampy have to live on cat food. Boomers came out for the “I got mine, fuck you” party as they always do, but this time so did Gen X, in overwhelming numbers. It’s disappointing, and yet unsurprising, not just because a lot of people get more conservative and unbending as they age, but because Gen X has been doomed from the start to repeat the mistakes of our elders, as much as we swore we wouldn’t.

For one thing, there’s the obvious issue of being the first generation to be less financially secure than our parents. Many of us have reached our 40s and beyond without being any closer to affording a house than we were in our 20s. Few of us will ever really be able to “retire,” and that’s even if Republicans don’t gut Social Security and Medicare, like they’ve been threatening to for years. The bill of goods we were sold as children that if you work hard you’ll never struggle for money turned out to be horseshit, and because of that we’ve grown bitter and cynical. Too many, however, have taken that bitterness and cynicism, and rather than direct it at those who are really responsible, use it as a cudgel against younger people. It’s not enough that life has been hard for us, it has to be hard for the next generations too.

You can see this mindset at work in debates over eliminating student loan debt – there literally is no real reason to be against it, except the belief that if you spent decades of your life paying down massive interest rates, so should everyone else. You shouldn’t have gone to college if you weren’t ready to pay out the ass for it for five times as long as you actually went there. Oh, but don’t not go to college either, because then how are you supposed to find a job? You don’t want to be a worthless bum, do you? 

You can see that cynicism on social media, when Gen X’ers engage in that same “in my day, we walked five miles to school uphill in three feet of snow” nonsense for which we used to make fun of Boomers. It’s there when middle-aged women claim that they too have been sexually harassed or even assaulted, but they just sucked it up and dealt with it, because life is supposed to be hard. We were the last generation in which it was expected without question that women would take their husbands’ last names, and it was unheard of to say out loud that you didn’t want to have children¹. But, rather, than being glad that such notions are being relegated to the dustbin of history, we’re envious and resentful. We never got a break, why should anyone else? If we managed to survive growing up with parents who clearly never wanted us, why can’t you?

To be fair, not all of this was our fault. We were also told by adults (who had already done more than their fair share of partying in the 60s and 70s) that everything that seemed cool and fun, like casual sex, drinking, drug use, and even listening to certain kinds of music, was bad. The 80s in particular were a long, dreary decade of constant finger waving, public service messages, and after school specials warning us that a single puff on a joint would immediately lead us down a path of destruction. As I’m fond of reminding people, D.A.R.E., founded in 1983, actively encouraged children to turn in their parents to the police if they used drugs, like good little brownshirts. 

This meant we had to deal with emotional issues straight, and with almost no support, because it wasn’t until well into the nineties that it was even acknowledged that teenagers often struggled with adult levels of depression and anxiety (let alone ADHD, which still isn’t really understood today). To say that you were feeling sad was to risk a lecture from yet another bitter, resentful adult about how these were the best years of your life, and wait until you grow up and have real problems.

So, to recap: no casual sex, no drugs, no therapy, and then on top of all that, Gen X developed a reputation for indifference (probably because a lot of us were depressed!), and supposedly viewed caring about things as a mug’s game, something only dumb, naive people did. I never played into that, and nobody else I knew did either, and yet we all became synonymous with “ironic detachment.” So the things that were marketed towards us played into that, and for those of you who weren’t there I can tell you it was as corny and irritating as you can imagine.

Take for instance OK Cola, a soda advertised exclusively at Gen X’ers, with cans designed by Ghost World artist Daniel Clowes, and a telephone hotline in which you could call and listen to someone recite such meaningless but it sounded cool (I guess) phrases like “What’s the point of OK? Well, what’s the point of anything?” Thankfully we saw right through that nonsense, and OK Cola flopped. Gen X’s weird brand of faux nihilism (which seemed mostly driven by a small handful of painfully hip, Boomer age writers like Douglas Coupland and Mark Leyner) proved impossible to market to, and so companies skipped ahead to the next generation, Millennials, who were bigger in number, and whose parents had more money to spend.

We can also see the eventual heel turn that Generation X would make in the pop culture we hold dear to our hearts. Grunge and alternative rock, while certainly a damn sight better than the aggressive nu-metal that would replace it by the end of the 90s, was still dominated by white men, so much so that an entire subgroup had to be created just for women. Besides the fact that non-white characters were virtually non-existent in most of the movies and television shows we gobbled up as teenagers, it’s a little startling to see how much of it was just gleefully marinating in a broth of casual racism, sexism and homophobia.

In Revenge of the Nerds, a movie the average Gen X’er probably watched a good half-dozen times during the 80s (mostly because it was always on), one of the titular nerds, unequivocally meant to be viewed as a hero, exacts said revenge by disguising himself and having sex with one of his tormentors’ girlfriends. That’s rape, if you’re not clear, and yet there’s no question that this is a great thing this character does (particularly since, naturally, the girl likes it), and meant to be seen as a win for the little guy. You can picture a young Ted Cruz being a big fan of Revenge of the Nerds².

Another example of a beloved film that is almost shocking in how much it plays into repugnant stereotypes is Sixteen Candles. Besides the obvious issue of Long Duk Dong, an entire subplot based in racism³, there’s Samantha’s best friend showing open-mouthed shock that Samantha might be interested in dating Black boys (thank goodness it’s only a misunderstanding!!!!), and the fact that romantic “hero” Jake passes off his falling down drunk girlfriend to the nerdy Ted to be driven home, during which Ted has sex with her. Again, this is rape, but passed off as okay, because, again, she liked it (or thinks she did, she doesn't actually remember for sure). Despite all that, it’s still a favorite of women my age, who once dreamed that they’d find their own Jake, and it’s very likely that it’s screening at a movie theater somewhere in the U.S. as you read this.

Not even movies made for a slightly younger audience escaped, as seen in 1987’s The Monster Squad, which is a veritable minefield of gay slurs (and no small amount of slut shaming). Now, there are two ways to address all this as adults: the first is to acknowledge that, from a modern perspective, they’re reprehensible, and it’s good that those kinds of things are frowned upon now. The second is to immediately go on the defensive, claim that people used to say stuff like that all the time (which is true, no one is denying that), and insist that the real problem is that people these days are just too sensitive. The people that react that way also tend to vote for people like Ron DeSantis, and claim they don’t have a problem with the gay lifestyle, they just don’t want it shoved down their throats, like a huge, throbbing cock they can’t stop thinking about.

So, yeah, we should have seen this coming. Our time in the spotlight was over before it had even started. Too many of us had parents who didn’t want much to do with the whole “parenting” deal. We were in a lot of pain, but chastised if we even considered trying to deal with it by any other way than running a few laps or putting on a happy face. The media we consumed poked vicious fun at anyone who wasn’t white, male and straight. We came of age when manufactured “coolness” was the only currency worth having, and then we got old and by default weren’t “cool” anymore, and now we don’t know what to do with ourselves.

It’s our Abe Simpson “Someday, it’ll happen to you!” moment, but we’re using it to vote for people who want to restrict who other people can marry, who want to force women to go through with unwanted pregnancies, and who are actively interested in making life even harder for anyone who doesn’t look or live like them. Too many of us have let that bitterness over life not turning out exactly the way we imagined curdle into something toxic and destructive: if I can’t be happy, no one else is going to be happy either.

So thank goodness for the younger generations putting a stop to it. Just as white people shouldn’t depend on Black voters to “save democracy,” nor should those of us outnumbered in our generation depend on young voters. But we can be grateful for them, and their sense of purpose and community, and their clear-eyed vision of a world that’s inclusive to everyone. We can do what we can to help achieve that vision, even if we might not be around to see it. Those of us who refuse to get with the times are, like our pop culture, better off relegated to the dustbin of history.

1. Even people who only wanted to have one child, such as myself, got a hard time. “You already have a daughter, don’t you want a son?” I’d be asked, like we were talking about getting a matching sofa for my couch.

2. I’m not saying that Ted Cruz ever put on a Darth Vader mask and raped someone. I’m just saying I can definitely imagine him doing that.

3. Beyond Long Duk Dong’s “comical” broken English, and the fact that everyone speaks to him like he’s a moron, there’s also Samantha’s younger brother expressing disgust that he has to share his bedroom with him, proclaiming “I’ll have to burn the sheets.”