Posted on 08/08/2020 7:18:45 AM PDT by Kaslin
Nobody ever talks about them. Having arrived roughly between 1965 and 1980, these children seem to have slipped through the cracks of popular culture, their legacy being a few dumb movies and some aging icons, none of whom any millennial today could name. Born into households averaging 1.75 children, this tiny cohort sneaked through its small temporal window like an Army Special Ops unit. They landed on the scene just in time to rescue head-scratching parents from VCRs and DVD players, and even more miraculous, they could operate those wrist watches with the tiny buttons on the side.
And they were the first generation who at a tender and formative age were plopped down in front of a computer screen. This was not a mere toy but something they would grow up side-by-side with -- microchip to monitor -- like a childhood friend with whom they would rise inch by inch and year by year. Their plastic twelve-year-old brains stretched, absorbed, adapted. They drew in this techno evolution -- from WordStar to Windows, from Pong to Super Mario Brothers, from floppy disc to Google Docs -- like breathing air. By the time they were in college they could traverse from PC to Mac and back again as deftly as any Baby Boomer changed lovers.
They were ever more fleet and effective for having inherited no political ideology. By the time they began contemplating what democracy was, Reaganomics and Margaret Thatcher were locked in, capitalism and the free market simply the way of things. They participated in no protest picket parties, no marches on Washington, they carved out no itinerant confederacies, no Woodstock Nation, no Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
To quote The Ox, “I ain’t quiet, everybody else is too loud!”
Born in January 1965, I’m one of the very first X’ers. This article rings true in many areas. Got my first taste of computers in the late 70’s, had to learn on my own in the mid eighties working in the accounting department of Union Bay Sportswear. At the time we all got Macs and had to figure it out on our own. Lotus 123, FUN TIMES!
Well. My kids have normal names. And I would kick their behinds if they took part in an asinine “protest”. Get your behind to work, and quit whining, is my general response to all my kids.
I'm a Boomer and I agree with you.
I think the article was somewhat off in talking about kids. Millennials are mostly the children of boomers. Gen Z are known as the self-reliant children of X if they haven’t been corrupted by university mafia.
Bookmarked for later viewing.
Pretty good chance a white woman that went to college is a democrat
I disagree with you. I think the “Greatest Generation” has done more to destroy this country than any other two generations combined.
Boomers are not really all Boomers. There are those at the very end with a whole different set of values (there is 10 years difference, or more) They are the late Boomers, more like Gen X, between 1954-1964.
Generation Jones (Jonesers). They have nothing in common with the hippie, Vietnam, Beatles, Ozzie & Harriet watching generation.
I like your comment here, and I’ll add that Gen-X is the last generation to know a world without The Internet. That makes for a different perspective unique among G-X, in that we created the Internet, but are not necessarily as bound to it as the future generations are.
A Gen-X’er will most likely mock today’s Millennials and Gen-Z for their security blanket type addiction to their smartphone, which basically starts right out of the crib. While Gen-X will use the Net for all the same manor of things everyone else does, it’s not a permanent attachment to our very being. I can come on here, read some news, buy something online later, but still shut the computer off, and get my Adult duties done maintaining the house, going to work etc...
The modern Millennial and Gen-Z, when they actually get a job, has real trouble putting the phone/internet down and getting to work. I’ve seen this at my job, the young ones we hire are all but useless and frustrating to watch as they just will not put the phone away, constantly using it to surf social media or play games. And you’re not allowed to just go off on somebody shirking their duties like you use to either, Millennials have to be dealt with so delicately. The snowflake meme is real and a problem.
X mostly got hammered by the great recession in their prime earning years and the boomer generation that would not get out of their way.
Boomers just raised hell in the 60s and 70s but it was the Silent and Greatest Generations in charge that were running the show at the time that set the scene for the mess we are in now. Boomers have simply followed the plan of wreck and ruin of traditions and fiscal responsibility and big gooberment that was established starting with Roosevelt, enhanced by LBJ, a Greatest Generation, and simply continued by others. Now though the aging boomers have introduced undisguised communism or flat socialism and racism to sustain power and grow it. Boomers didn’t actually make the mess we are in but the egged it on and watched it happen and then are willing participants.
I think the only thing Boomers have done is be self-absorbed, raise the Millennials and X, make software and internet commerce, make money and get all woke or something. Not sure since I lived in a near conservative insular bastion of the oilfield so it is hard for me to even see the rest of the Boomer Generation let alone understand them. For 40 years we were too busy either head down and butt up in a boom cycle or head down and butt up trying to survive a bust cycle. I didn’t look up a lot and survived it all.
If Strauss and Howell are correct the Millennials are the “hero” generation that are supposed to save us from whatever crisis is to befall us in this Fourth Turning. I remain to be convinced Millennials are any kind of hero generation or what exactly they will save us from.
If you read Strauss and Howell the pegs in their thesis fall into place pretty well so I am standing by anxiously to find out if the crisis has hit and we missed it or what is to come. My son is a Millennial. I think he is able to be a “hero” certainly smart enough, has work ethic enough but I wonder how motivated he is since he does not use all he has and seems uninterested in anything but getting by.
Karl Marx was a boomer? FDR? LBJ? Saul Alinsky? Who knew!
Kristi Noem. :-)
They are the “too old to be young and too young to be old” generation. Fried Green Tomatoes is on and that is Evelyn’s problem. The Menopause Generation.
I know exactly who Tom Bombadil is and I was absolutely DELIGHTED they left him out of the Lord of the Rings. I had to skip whole pages of the book every time he would obnoxiously sing all of his dialogue.
A big thing he left out....we are the last generation who grew up before political correctness. We remember when America was a happier, funnier, more relaxed and less divided place. We grew up with the Dukes of Hazard. Nobody found the Confederate flag “offensive” nor the fact that the General Lee had its name nor that its horn gloriously blared out Dixie. It was the most popular show on TV - network TV - for years. It was popular. Yes, even my Black friends liked it and didn’t see anything “hateful” about it...because there wasn’t anything hateful about it. Symbols of the South and its culture, history and heritage did not supposedly become “offensive” until some PC Revisionists in Academia started claiming it was...and started claiming the war was “all about slavery” - never mind that there was no new information to draw this conclusion from or that this was at odds with what most historians had thought for generations.
We laughed at the Naked Gun, Airplane, Bugs Bunny, Vacation, Trading Places, Caddyshack, Police Academy, History of the World Part I, Spaceballs, etc. We could laugh at stereotypes for various groups and the humor around them. Nobody felt picked on because everybody got made fun of. Anybody who cried about it would not be taken seriously and would be made fun of themselves.
We saw Reagan come along and lift the country out of the doldrums, depression and feeling of decline it was in when Jimmy Crater was president. We saw the economy boom, the military be rebuilt and pride in our country restored. We saw the Commies DEFEATED by the “stupid cowboy” and all of his so-called “sophisticated” critics be proven to be buffoons.
We rejoiced when the democratic revolutionaries of Eastern Europe - many of them our age - took to the streets and threw off the socialist shackles their countries had been suffering under for 44 years. We saw how much poorer and more polluted those countries were than the free market/democratic West.
We’re also the last generation to learn to drive a stick shift, know what the dewey decimal system is, learn how to write cursive, enjoy college and pro football before the pussification rules, grow up with rock n’ roll, listen to the radio, etc.
Things stayed OK through the 90s but the culture has really gone to crap in this century.
Saying Gen X got 'plopped down in front of a computer screen' is BS. The implication is like we were handed ipads full of games or something to pacify us. Wrong. In the '80s we had to learn how to program it to get it to do anything. Yes, we had a small number of games available on floppy drives (Zork ruled!) but nothing like even a cell phone can do today. And no internet. I bought a book on how to write simulation games that had code and I manually typed it in to get a rudimentary stock market sim, a submarine sim, all text based. It was hardly a time soaking screen babysitter.
I was a lot more long winded but basically this. We are the last generation to grow up when America was still America.
X Rules
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.